Osage Gender: Continuity, Change, and Colonization, 1720s-1870s

Abstract

This study demonstrates how the Osage structured their society based on gender complementarity, and although life certainly changed in the face of French, Spanish, and United States colonization, the Osage maintained this gender construction and resisted complete colonization through the nineteenth century. Osage rituals clearly demonstrate gender complementarity. Their worldview stressed duality and defined women and men as necessary pairs. Men provided and protected; women created. The Osage employed a sexual division of labor, and each gender achieved status and power in distinct ways. Gender difference did not imply hierarchical difference between the sexes. Rather men and women cooperated to ensure tribal perpetuation and success. Gender complementarity proved one of the most stable aspects of Osage society throughout colonization. In the eighteenth century, the Osage developed one of the most expansive trading systems in North America. Scholars argue that once the Osage began trading with the French, they increased their hunting to obtain more hides and furs, expanding the male role in society at the expense of the female role. This dissertation disproves such declensionist assertions about the status of Osage women in their society. During the eighteenth century, the Osage achieved regional dominance through the work of women, in agriculture and hide processing, and men, in raiding and hunting. When the United States expanded farther west during the nineteenth century, Osage regional hegemony deteriorated. Yet, federal Indian policy's contradictions facilitated Osage resistance to colonization. While missionaries attempted to change lifeways, federal support for the hide trade encouraged the Osage to maintain historic gendered work as both a spiritually relevant and economically successful social organization. Once removed to Kansas, a volatile environment and increasing settler depredations facilitated further resistance to missionization and the civilization program. Therefore the Osage spent their time hunting and processing hides, a far more successful survival strategy in this environment. Colonization initiated some changes to Osage life, but women were not increasingly subordinated to men. As long as Osage cosmology and subsistence followed the patterns developed before colonization, gender roles remained intact.