Our Osage Hills: Toward an Osage Ecology and Tribalography of the Early Twentieth Century by John Joseph Mathews

Abstract

Reviewed by: Our Osage Hills: Toward an Osage Ecology and Tribalography of the Early Twentieth Century by John Joseph Mathews Sheldon Yeakley John Joseph Mathews. Our Osage Hills: Toward an Osage Ecology and Tribalography of the Early Twentieth Century. Edited by Michael Snyder. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UP, 2020. 344 pp. Hardcover, $126; paper, $42.99; e-book, $40.50. Originally published in 1930 and 1931, Osage luminary John Joseph Mathews authored a series of columns entitled “Our Osage Hills,” which appeared in the Pawhuska Daily Journal-Capital. These reflections, compiled and presented by editor Michael Snyder, now serve as compelling historical sources and literary precursors to Mathews’s future works, such as his seminal 1934 novel Sundown. Largely centered on the ecology of his beloved Blackjacks and Osage [End Page 77] Hills located in what is now Osage county, Oklahoma, Mathews offers a romantic vision of his nation’s lands alongside a persistent call for environmental conservation. Editor Michael Snyder supplements these primary examples of Indigenous authorship with his own scholarly reflections on the meanings of several pieces and the expansive historical context surrounding Mathews and the broader Osage Nation in the tumultuous history of the early twentieth century. Previewed with short forewords and a reflective introduction, Our Osage Hills follows a largely chronological structure mirroring the span of Mathews’s original column. Russ Tall Chief’s excellent foreword accurately summates the utility of this work as he considers “Our Osage Hills a companion to Michael Snyder’s biography” of John Joseph Mathews, which was published in 2017 (xix). Snyder’s comprehensive knowledge of his subject and the saga of the Osage percolates throughout the volume and provides necessary context for the contemporary reader. However, it is Mathews’s original writings that deliver the most compelling content. While many snippets concern the happenings of the 1930s Osage Nation, the inescapable current within Mathews’s prose was his expression of ecological romance. His love for the area’s flora and fauna captivates readers, who can lament alongside Mathews at the rapidly declining numbers of prairie chicken or marvel at a place “where the green prairie is a carpet that seems to undulate into the far horizon” (226). As an early member of the Izaak Walton League, Mathews expressed his concern for this particular slice of nature both as an official conservationist within the American national setting and as a vocal Osage citizen wishing to preserve his homeland against the influx of Euro-American settlers and rampaging oilmen. This duality of identity is, perhaps, the most astute undercurrent that Snyder hints toward within his edited commentary. Almost immediately Snyder points to the fact that Mathews was “a brilliant intermediary” (1). Educated extensively within settler society at both the University of Oklahoma and Oxford University, Mathews knowingly displayed Darwinian and Nietzschean theories, yet, as Snyder contends, Mathews always returned to his Osage-centric [End Page 78] ideology. Critically, his musings on the Osage prairies’ environment are not treated apart from this philosophizing. Rather, it is at the core of Mathews’s view of this place’s significance and meaning. Rebuking the decadence of “civilized minds,” Mathews claimed there is “personality in the woods and fields; the whole meaning of life is there” (162). While Snyder could have spent more valuable space discerning Mathews’s particular vision of Osage philosophy—or tribalography, as this volume’s title promises—it is Mathews’s own words, after all, that will provide the bedrock for future scholarship on this subject. Beyond the weekly columns authored by Mathews and the immediate contextual information rendered alongside by Snyder, this volume contains lengthier essays in which Snyder reflects on a variety of topics often directly or tangentially related to Mathews’s life as well as his political and artistic career. The most prevalent of these stretches across the entirety of part XI and pertains to the increasingly discussed series of murders within the Osage Nation from the 1910s to the early 1930s. While this chapter presents a narrative break, it is a unique opportunity for Snyder to convey original insights on lesser-known victims of this tragedy. Recent popular publications such as David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon...