Osage Nation Museum

In the 1930s John Joseph Mathews, an Osage tribal councilman and writer, set out to give the Osage a place to keep their own art, objects and records. The removals that carried the people from the Ohio Valley to this reservation had scattered much of it, the Nation writes. Mathews worked with the Tribal Council and Chief Fred Lookout, and in May 1938 Osages gathered on the campus in Pawhuska for a two-day celebration of the opening. His sister Lillian was the first curator. The museum describes itself as the oldest tribally governed museum in the United States.

The collection had started more than a decade earlier. In 1927 the Osage Council bought the collection of John L. Bird, a trader who had been gathering Osage material since about 1883, and the Bird Collection is still the core of the museum's holdings. Exhibitions change through the year and run from the oldest surviving work of Osage ancestors to new work by artists such as the textile designer Wendy Ponca.

The museum's best-known project is 2229, named for the 2,229 Osages on the final roll under the Allotment Act of 1906. Kathryn Red Corn, a former director, gathered more than 900 of their photographs in the early 2000s, and the museum is still collecting portraits and biographies from descendants. In the Nation's words, when oil production soared in the 1920s, outsiders who wanted Osage land and wealth would do anything to get it, including murder. The Osage call this time the Reign of Terror.