Until the mid-1930s weddings expressed community among the Osage people, indigenous North Americans whose homeland at the time of European contact lay in the southeastern Plains and Ozark Plateau. Clothing worn by the bride and her attendants, particularly military-style coats adapted from those presented to Osage diplomats when they visited Washington, DC, were an important feature. The coats used in weddings, made by Osage textile artists or purchased from companies specializing in uniforms, displayed traditional Osage adornment, especially ribbon work and finger-woven sashes used to tie the coats at the waist. Women also wore top hats enhanced with feathers and other customary decorative touches. Wedding participants donned these garments, which took some time and considerable expense to obtain, as they processed from the bride’s home to a nearby camp the groom’s family had set up for the occasion. There they removed the attire and presented it to the family, one of many exchanges that characterized marrying in traditional Osage life. Osage wedding clothes are unique in that they remained exclusively Osage even after traditional weddings ceased. Nor have they become part of Native American interethnic events such as powwows. These garments provide focus for Daniel C. Swan’s and Jim Cooley’s ethnographic and historical study of Osage values, represented not only in weddings but also in the local version of the Grass Dance, which has assumed the role of weddings as a public statement of values.
In the 1870s the Osage people were settled on a reservation (now Osage County) in Oklahoma. In 1907 the reservation was allotted in severalty with each man, woman, and child listed on the community’s rolls in July of that year (totaling 2229) receiving 640 acres and a trust account of $3000. Specific provisions of the legislation that allotted the reservation included creation of three reserves for community use and a declaration that subsurface mineral rights on allotted tracts remain communally owned. The former provision resulted in three local districts where public events highlighting community continue to be held. The latter provision meant that when oil was discovered on some allotments during the 1920s, all Osages shared in the wealth. Oil revenue gave them the reputation as the richest people in the world during the twenties and into the following decade, allowed Osages to observe weddings with considerable display of wealth, and permitted them to participate lavishly in the ethic of sharing that defines traditional lifeways. The entire wedding process involved gift-giving: horses to accompany the potential groom’s family’s proposal of marriage to an eligible young woman’s household, meals for everyone during the several days that the groom’s family camped near the bride’s home, more horses and even automobiles between families and to the newly married couple, and the wedding clothes themselves, which in addition to their material value became “heritage objects” that cemented relationships among contemporary kin groups and intergenerationally.
Swan and Cooley begin with a thorough description of the traditional Mízhin wedding, a process that customarily lasted four days but may have required years of preparation. The groom’s family offered bride wealth, primarily in the form of horses, to a family with a marriage-age daughter of suitable status and kinship. Acquiring sufficient goods for a respectable offer might have been a family project for years, and investigating the family to whom they tendered a proposal often necessitated considerable research. After the bride’s family accepted the offer, the groom’s family set up their camp and fed both themselves and the bride’s family until the actual wedding day. Then the bride walked with her attendants, garbed in the clothes that her family may have been accumulating for years, to the groom’s camp. There, as mentioned, the bridal party shed their wedding clothes and presented them to the groom’s family. A festive dinner, perhaps the first time bride and groom experienced personal contact, finalized the marriage. The newlyweds returned to the bride’s home until their own domicile was ready. This wedding protocol expressed Osage identity and values into the mid-1930s.
During the nineteenth century the Plains Grass Dance was spreading to several Plains groups, where it assumed distinctive local elements. The Osage version, called the Ilonshka, joined weddings as an important expression of ethnicity. Since the decline of traditional weddings, the Ilonshka, though challenged for a while by peyotism in the early twentieth century, has developed into the principal public expression of an Osage ethos. The continuity of its current role with that of weddings during the first third of the twentieth century became apparent through wedding clothes. The attire worn by Osage bridal parties is part of the ceremony that occurs when responsibility for the drum—the physical object as well as the primary role of organizing the Ilonshka (which now occurs at each of the three districts each June)—passes to a new drumkeeper. He and his family “buy” the drum by gifting the previous keeper’s family abundantly with, among other traditional and contemporary items, several sets of the wedding clothes previously worn at weddings.
The authors of this book are just as scrupulous in their treatment of the Ilonshka as they are with their account of traditional weddings. Their ethnographic and historical descriptions of both events are not only carefully detailed and thorough, but they are also engagingly readable. Their data on weddings come from several resources: historical and previous ethnographic sources from as early as the 1830s; oral history interviews, some conducted over fifty years ago; photographs which date from the late nineteenth century and later; and examination of wedding clothes in museum collections and that are privately owned. The culminating chapter in their book shows how specific Osage values become manifest in the traditional ceremonies. An appendix places what the authors report within anthropological analyses of gifting behavior cross-culturally.
This collaborative project began with the interviews in the late 1960s and has enjoyed input and support from the Osage people throughout its realization. Other results of this investigation of Osage wedding clothes have included museum exhibitions mounted locally as well as an exhibit that has appeared in other venues. Illustrated with plenty of photographs of wedding clothes and other examples of Osage art from museum collections, Swan’s and Cooley’s book also draws extensively on photographs of weddings and dances from institutional and private collections.
Readers whom the title might lead to expect a visually attractive presentation of a traditional form of Osage textile art will not be disappointed. But they will encounter much more: an extremely effective account, based on insiders’ perceptions for the most part, of central and recurrent expressions of ethos, which anyone interested in the Osage people must read. In fact, one need not have particular interest in this Native community to benefit not only from the manner in which the material is presented but also from the account of the collaborative process that yielded it.
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[Review length: 1134 words • Review posted on May 13, 2021]