Harvey Payne

This revealing book presents a selection of lost articles from “Our Osage Hills,” a newspaper column by the renowned Osage writer, naturalist, and historian, John Joseph Mathews. Signed only with the initials “J.J.M.,” Mathews’s column featured regularly in the Pawhuska Daily Journal-Capital during the early 1930s. While Mathews is best known for his novel Sundown (1934), the pieces gathered in this volume reveal him to be a compelling essayist. Marked by wit and erudition, Mathews’s column not only evokes the unique beauty of the Osage prairie, but also takes on urgent political issues, such as ecological conservation and Osage sovereignty. In Our Osage Hills, Michael Snyder interweaves Mathews’s writings with original essays that illuminate their relevant historical and cultural contexts. The result is an Osage-centric chronicle of the Great Depression, a time of environmental and economic crisis for the Osage Nation and country as a whole. Drawing on new historical and biographical research, Snyder’s commentaries highlight the larger stakes of Mathews’s reflections on nature and culture and situate them within a fascinating story about Osage, Native American, and American life in the early twentieth century. In treating topics that range from sports, art, film, and literature to the realities and legacies of violence against the Osages, Snyder conveys the broad spectrum of Osage familial, social, and cultural history.

Our Osage Hills presents an exciting portrait of the Wahzhazhe (Osage) people and their prairie homelands in the early twentieth century and beyond, this book presents excellent lost work by the charismatic Osage author and naturalist, John Joseph Mathews, plus a wealth of contextual stories and Osage history. Dr. Michael Snyder discovered, compiled, and edited Mathews's captivating articles, and crafted researched commentaries; these articles and commentaries interweave to form an Osage-centric chronicle of the Great Depression. Using Mathews’s articles as a cue, a prompt to move through a vast memory palace, Snyder’s pieces tell a broader story of Osage cultural survivance, continuity, and the political struggle for sovereignty; the involvement of Osages in high culture performance and music; the special contributions of Osage women; the novel of the West and novelists in the West; Hollywood as a reflection, however distorted, of the Osage Nation and the surrounding nation; Indian athletics, especially baseball; and crucially, birds, animals, and the beginning of ecological understanding and the emergence of environmental protection. The essays also offer new discoveries on the Osage murders of the 1920s, and show the continued white exploitation and violence against Osages during the 1930s. Through this entertaining and wide-ranging study, the reader will gain a new and fuller understanding of the Wahzhazhe people and their homeland.