Francis La Flesche

Sayings of the Ancient Men

The Osage Tribe: Rite of the Chiefs

Alice C. Fletcher

John Comfort Fillmore

A Study of Omaha Indian Music

Alice Cunningham Fletcher

A Dictionary of the Osage Language

The Omaha Tribe is considered by some anthropologists to be the most important and comprehensive study ever written about a Native American tribe. First published in 1911 as a report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, this classic treatise is based on twenty-nine years of study and observation in the field. "Nothing has been borrowed from other observers," Alice C. Fletcher asserts. "Only original material gathered directly from the native people has been used, and the writer has striven to make so far as possible the Omaha his own interpreter." Volume I is devoted to tribal origins and early history, beliefs about the environment, rites pertaining to the individual, tribal organization and government, the sacred pole, and the quest for food. Volume II, also available as a Bison Book, considers language, social life, music, religion, warfare, treatment of disease, and death and burial customs. Alice C. Fletcher was the foremost woman anthropologist in the United States in the nineteenth century. Francis La Flesche, a member of the Omaha tribe, worked closely with Alice Fletcher for many years and in addition produced ethnological studies of his own. His autobiographical account The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe is also available as a Bison Book. In his introduction to this Bison Book edition, Robin Ridington focuses on the place of Fletcher and La Flesche's work in the history of anthropology and the history of anthropologists' relationships with the Omahas. Ridington is a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia and the author of Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthropology (1990).

The Omaha Tribe

Rite of the Chiefs; Sayings of the Ancient Men

The Osage Tribe

The Osage Tribe: the Rite of Vigil

Reproduction of the original: The Osage tribe by Francis La Flesche

The Osage Tribe, Two Versions of the Child-naming Rite

The Middle Five, first published in 1900, is an account of Francis La Flesche's life as a student in a Presbyterian mission school in northeastern Nebraska about the time of the Civil War. It is a simple, affecting tale of young Indian boys midway between two cultures, reluctant to abandon the ways of their fathers, and puzzled and uncomfortable in their new roles of "make-believe white men." The ambition of the Indian parents for their children, the struggle of the teachers to acquaint their charges with a new world of learning, and especially the problems met by both parents and teachers in controlling and directing schoolboy exuberance contribute to the authen-ticity of this portrait of the "Universal Boy," to whom La Flesche dedicated his book. Regarded by anthropologists as a classic of Native American literature, it is one of those rare books that are valued by the specialist as authentic sources of information about Indian culture and yet can be recommended wholeheartedly to the general reader, especially to young people in high school and the upper grades, as a useful corrective to the often distorted picture of Indian life seen in movies, comics, and television.

Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe

The Middle Five

Francis La Flesche (1857-1932), Omaha Indian and anthropologist with the Bureau of American Ethnology, published an enormous body of work on the religion of the Osage Indians, all gathered from the most knowledgeable Osage religious leaders of their day. Yet his writings have been largely overlooked because they were published piecemeal over the course of twenty-five years and never adequately collected or analyzed. In this book, Garrick A. Bailey brings together in a clear, understandable way La Flesche’s data for two important Osage religious ceremonies--the "Songs of Wa-xo’-be," an initiation into a clan priesthood, and the Rite of the Chiefs, an initiation into a tribal priesthood. To put La Flesche’s work into perspective, Bailey offers a short biography of this prolific Native American scholar and an overview of traditional Osage religious beliefs and practices.

From the Works of Francis la Flesche

The Osage and the Invisible World

The Osage Tribe : the Rite of Vigil

Born on the Omaha Reservation in 1857, Francis La Flesche was raised in the years when federal policy encouraged Indians to assimilate. He learned English at a mission school, acquiring a fluency that prepared him for a career that moved between tribal and national concerns. Most of the stories in Ke-ma-ha have never before been published. Written to bring public attention to the Omahas, they tell us about that culture in ways that anthropological treatises cannot. Francis La Flesche collaborated with anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher on The Omaha Tribe and A Study of Omaha Indian Music. These titles, as well as La Flesche’s autobiographical The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe, are available as Bison Books.

The Omaha Stories of Francis La Flesche

Ke-ma-ha

Francis La Flesche

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