"We are given this world and some time with friends. How time dawned on mind and was beaded into language amazes me the way an orb-spider's web or a computer-chip does. . . ."

Carter Revard, Osage Indian poet, Rhodes scholar, and professor of medieval English literature, shares both this amazement and his amazing command of language in this first retrospective collection of 40 published and unpublished pieces written from 1970 to 1991.

Traces 400 years of Osage culture from prehistoric times to the group's current status as an officially recognized tribe.

Osage traditional lands are located in mid-continental America encompassed by the present-day states of Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Major waterways through these lands and the defensible terrain of the Ozark range provided the tribe a distinct advantage in prehistoric and early historic times. A warlike people, the Osage long encroached on neighboring tribal lands, especially those of the Caddo to the southwest. Yet good natural boundaries and centuries of success in warfare afforded the tribe little advantage in attempts to forestall Euro-American westward expansion. Three major routes to the West—the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers and the Continental Trail—crossed Osage land, so conflict with the newcomers was inevitable.

Louis Burns draws on ancestral oral traditions and research in a broad body of literature to tell the story of the Osage people. He writes clearly and concisely, from the Osage perspective. First published in 1989 and for many years out of print, this revised edition is augmented by a new preface and maps. Because of its masterful compilation and synthesis of the known data, A History of the Osage People continues to be the best reference for information on an important American Indian people.

Louis F. Burns, of Osage-French-Scottish heritage, is a member of the Mottled Eagle Clan and author of six books, including Symbolic and Decorative Art of the Osage People.

Siouan peoples who migrated from the Atlantic coastal region and settled in the central portion of the North American continent long before the arrival of Europeans are now known as Osage. Because the Osage did not possess a written language, their myths and cultural traditions were handed down orally through many generations. With time, only those elements deemed vital were preserved in the stories, and many of these became highly stylized. The resulting verbal recitations of the proper life of an Osage—from genesis myths to body decoration, from star songs to child-naming rituals, from war party strategies to medicinal herbs—constitute this comprehensive volume.

Osage myths differ greatly from the myths of Western Civilization, most obviously in the absence of individual names. Instead, “younger brother,” “the messenger,” “Little Old Men,” or a clan name may serve as the allegorical embodiment of the central player. Individual heroic feats are also missing because group life took precedence over individual experience in Osage culture.

Supplementing the work of noted ethnographer Francis La Flesche who devoted most of his professional life to recording detailed descriptions of Osage rituals, Louis Burns’s unique position as a modern Osage—aware of the white culture’s expectations but steeped in the traditions himself is able to write from an insider’s perspective.
 

Corrupt lawmen, insatiable businessmen, and an oil boom on Indian land. This is the milieu in which Tom Holm sets his gritty and provocative detective novel.

Life is looking easy for J. D. Daugherty, a crusty ex-cop who has set up his own PI firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just after World War I. J. D. expects to make a straightforward living off the intrigues of the city’s wealthy socialites, but then Rose Chichester, a privileged young white woman, runs off with Tommy Ruffle, a young Indian who is heir to Osage oil. Hired by Rose’s father to track down the young pair, J. D. and his associate, a Cherokee named Hoolie Smith, find themselves caught in the cross fire of a deadly scheme. When Tommy turns up murdered and with Rose still missing, J. D. and Hoolie must navigate a twisting maze of deception, race riots, and gun battles in their unrelenting search for the truth—a search that ultimately leads to an intimate secret no one suspected.

Tom Holm writes a true private-eye mystery, yet he entwines the story’s layers of conspiracy and deceit with the realities of prejudice and hatred that existed during the early years of Oklahoma statehood. Rooted firmly in its time, Holm’s well-researched novel tells a complex and compelling story of individuals struggling to find justice at any cost in a world still caught between modernity and its Wild West legacy.

Bootleggers and bankrobbers in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Proctors and punters at Oxford. Activists and agitators of the American Indian Movement. Carter Revard has known them all, and in this book— a memoir in prose and poetry— he interweaves the many threads of his life as only a gifted writer can. Winning the Dust Bowl traces Revard's development from a poor Oklahoma farm boy during the depths of the Depression to a respected medieval scholar and outstanding Native American poet. It recounts his search for a personal and poetic voice, his struggle to keep and expand it, and his attempt to find ways of reconciling the disparate influences of his life. In these pages, readers will find poems both new and familiar: poems of family and home, of loss and survival. In linking— what he calls "cocooning"— essays, Revard shares what he has noticed about how poems come into being, how changes in style arise from changes in life, and how language can be used to deal with one's relationship to the world. He also includes stories of Poncas and Osages, powwow stories and Oxford fables, and a gallery of photographs that capture images of his past. Revard has crafted a book about poetry and authorship, about American history and culture. Lyrical in one breath and stingingly political in the next, he calls on his mastery of language to show us the undying connection between literature and life.