John Joseph Mathews, Francis La Flesche, and the Indigenous World of the North American Midcontinent

Abstract

A scholar of Osage history and a geologist familiar with the depths of the Earth’s timescale, John Joseph Mathews conceived his 823-page masterwork The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961) as a human history oriented not to European modernity but to the “middle waters”—the ancient rivers of the North American midcontinent that preceded and were foundational to the thousands of years of human settlement in the region. Informed by oral and written accounts of Osage history, by Mathews’ own geological consciousness, and by the work of Mathews’ predecessors including Omaha ethnologist and author Francis La Flesche, The Osages centers on the formative relationships between water, earth, sky, and people, relationships that are at once regional and global, tribally specific and planetarily aware. In this way, states of being in place and time in The Osages destabilize the singular temporality and understanding of the “world” presumed by the notion of global modernity. Mathews’ and La Flesche’s writings unsettle distinctions between global modernity and localized primitivity as they represent the Indigenous “world” of the North American midcontinent as a capacious space that transcends the constraints of European global consciousness.