Oklahoma - where the Indians were moved and stayed.

Or I should say 'some' Indians were moved and stayed. As if the tall grass prairie wasn't enough we also stopped of at the Osage Nation Museum in Pawhuska. We were an hour late arriving but these lovely people welcomed us in. The Osage is a county in Oklahoma but it's also one of the Indian American Tribes that found themselves forceably moved around what is now the USA whilst the States were still forming. They got fed up of being moved so decided to actually purchase themselves land. As it happens they were very lucky (or preternaturally perceptive) because the land they held turned out to be rich in mineral wealth. Their ownership of the land was recognized by the federal government in 1906 and the land was divided equally between over 2000 Osage tribe members - all those alive at the time (June 1906), this included babies! Many individuals sold off their land but the mineral rights were owned collectively and so couldn't be sold. Which, as can be imagined, led to a large amount of wealth for the tribe. Strangely it also means that places like the Tall Grass Prairie 'owned' by the Nature Conservancy have to allow the Osage people to extract the oil/gas from the area which leads to oil pumps around the place. The gas is extracted through fracking, and businesses in the area have invested a lot in figuring out how most efficiently and 'environmentally friendly' ways to extract the gas. I found it particularly interesting as my home village in the UK is close  (it's 'within the Parish boundries' close) to shale sites that are supposedly the right type for fracking and there are plans afoot to make use of that resource as well as protests afoot to scupper those plans.

Anyway I think we learned lots from the Osage Nation Museum, most of which I can't remember in specifics, but they have a website!

Some of the lovely voluteers at the museum who dressed up for us  and let us take their photos!