Over several weekends each June, the Osage hold their
ceremonial dances, I’n-Lon-Schka. These dances—which take
place, at different times, in Hominy, Pawhuska, and Gray Horse,
three areas where the Osage first settled when they came to the
reservation, in the 1870s—help preserve fading traditions and bind
the community together. The Osage come from all over to attend
the dances, which provide a chance to see old family and friends
and cook out and reminisce. The historian Burns once wrote, “To
believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a
delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been
saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone
is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past
and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We
are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”
During a subsequent visit to the region, I headed to Gray Horse
to see the dances and meet one of the people Red Corn had
suggested I find—someone who had been profoundly affected by
the murders. Almost nothing remained of the original Gray Horse
settlement but some rotted beams and bricks buried in the wild
grasses, which the wind ruffled in ghostly rhythms.
To accommodate the dances, the Osage had erected, amid the
encroaching wilderness, a pavilion, with a mushroom-shaped
metal roof and a circular earth floor surrounded by concentric
rows of wooden benches. When I arrived on a Saturday afternoon,
the pavilion was crowded with people. Gathered in the center,
around a sacred drum used to commune with Wah’Kon-Tah, were
several male musicians and singers. Ringed around them were the
“lady singers,” as they are called, and in a circle farther out were
dozens of male dancers, young and old, wearing leggings, brightly
colored ribbon shirts, and bands of bells below their knees; each of
these dancers had on a headdress—typically made of an eagle
feather, porcupine quills, and a deer tail—which stood up like a