25 THE LOST MANUSCRIPT
You must go out there and see what is happening,” Kathryn
Red Corn told me when I visited the Osage Nation again, in June
- And so following her directions, I drove through Pawhuska
and headed west across the prairie, through the tall grasses, until I
saw what she’d vividly described to me: scores of metallic towers
invading the sky. Each one stood 420 feet tall, the equivalent of a
thirty-story skyscraper, and had three whirring blades. A single
blade was as long as the wings of an airliner. The towers were part
of a windmill farm, which spanned more than eight thousand
acres and was expected to eventually supply electricity to some
forty-five thousand homes in Oklahoma.
More than a hundred years after oil was discovered in Osage
territory, a new revolutionary source of energy was transforming
the region. But this time the Osage viewed it as a threat to their
underground reservation. “Did you see them?” Red Corn said of
the turbines, when I returned. “This company came in here and
put them up without our permission.” The federal government,
representing the Osage Nation, had filed a lawsuit against Enel,
the Italian energy conglomerate that owned the wind farm. Citing
the terms of the 1906 Allotment Act, the suit alleged that because
the company had excavated limestone and other minerals while
building the foundations for the turbines, it needed the Osage’s
approval to continue operations. Otherwise, Enel was violating the
Osage’s sovereignty over their underground reservation. The
company insisted that it wasn’t in the mining business, and thus