I’n-Lon-Schka Osage ceremonial dances

The I’n-Lon-Schka Osage ceremonial dances are recurring June gatherings in which ceremony, community life, and inherited memory meet. Held over several weekends in Hominy, Pawhuska, and Gray Horse, the dances preserve traditions and draw Osage people from many places back into contact with family and friends. In the book, a visit to the gathering at Gray Horse becomes more than an account of performance: the dance pavilion is also where the narrator meets Margie Burkhart, a descendant whose family history brings the continuing consequences of the Osage Reign of Terror into the present.

Annual gathering and setting

The dances take place in three areas where the Osage first settled after coming to the reservation in the 1870s: Hominy, Pawhuska, and Gray Horse. Their annual recurrence gives people scattered across the state and country a reason to return, see relatives and old friends, cook out, and reminisce. The gathering is therefore both ceremonial and social, joining the work of preserving tradition to the ordinary but consequential work of maintaining relationships across distance and time.

The Gray Horse visit makes the contrast between the place’s past and present visible. Almost nothing of the original settlement remained except rotted beams and bricks partly buried in wild grasses. Amid that landscape, the Osage had built a pavilion for the dances: an open circular space with a mushroom-shaped metal roof, an earth floor, and concentric rows of wooden benches. The gathering did not erase what had disappeared from Gray Horse. It took place within sight of that loss, with community life assembled in a structure made for the occasion.

The benches themselves carried family names. As the narrator walked around the pavilion, the name Burkhart identified the place where the family’s history would enter the scene. The marker was simple, but it made kinship legible within the larger gathering: the ceremony brought together a people while also locating particular families inside that shared space.

Music and movement

At the center of the pavilion, male musicians and singers gathered around a sacred drum used to commune with Wah’Kon-Tah. The lady singers formed a ring around them, and male dancers stood in a wider circle. Young and old dancers wore leggings, brightly colored ribbon shirts, and bands of bells below their knees. Their headdresses, typically made from an eagle feather, porcupine quills, and a deer tail, rose above them like a Mohawk.

The drumming and singing set the movement in motion. The dancers stepped counterclockwise, commemorating the rotation of the earth; their feet beat the soft ground as the bells sounded around the circle. As the music intensified, they bent slightly and moved more quickly, maintaining a precise collective rhythm. Individual gestures made the circle varied without breaking its shared pattern: one dancer nodded his head, another flapped his arms like an eagle, while others acted out scouting or hunting.

Women now danced at these events, although there had been a time when they were not allowed to join in. They formed a slower, dignified circle around the men, wearing blouses, broadcloth skirts, and handwoven belts. Their torsos and heads remained straight as they bobbed with each step. The changed participation is part of the ceremony’s present form: the gathering sustains tradition, but the account also records that participation has not remained fixed.

Around the dancers, many people watched from the benches, fanning themselves in the heat. A few glanced at their cell phones; most watched reverently. The scene held contemporary life and ceremonial practice together without making them interchangeable: phones were present at the edge of the event, while the drum, the coordinated circles, and the family-named benches organized the pavilion’s attention.

Family memory at the dance

The narrator’s visit to Gray Horse followed an earlier trip to Pawhuska in the summer of 2012, when the search for information about the nearly century-old murders led to the Osage Nation Museum and its longtime director, Kathryn Red Corn. Red Corn showed photographs of allotted Osage members, including victims and members of the Burkhart family. When the narrator later returned to the region to attend the dances and meet someone affected by the murders, Red Corn’s recommendation led to Margie Burkhart.

Margie was the granddaughter of Mollie Burkhart. She had driven from Tahlequah with her husband, Andrew Lowe, to attend the gathering, and she served on a board directing health-care services for the Osage. While watching the dancers from the Burkhart bench, she spoke about her father, James “Cowboy” Burkhart, the son of Mollie and Ernest Burkhart. Cowboy and his sister, Elizabeth, had witnessed the Osage Reign of Terror from inside their father’s house of secrets. Margie described Ernest’s actions as having taken away her father’s aunts, cousins, and trust. She also recalled the tenderness Cowboy felt for Mollie, remembering that when he was a child and suffered bad earaches, Mollie would blow into his ears to ease the pain.

The family history continued into Margie’s own childhood. Her parents told her what Ernest and William K. Hale had done when she was young. She remembered worrying, after doing something naughty, that she might be the bad seed. When The FBI Story aired on local television, she and her family watched and cried. At the dance, these memories were not detached testimony delivered elsewhere: they were shared on a family bench while the ceremony continued around them. The gathering’s public rhythms and the family’s private grief occupied the same place.

Continuity and remembrance

The dances give form to a history in which the Osage repeatedly faced pressure to surrender land, community autonomy, and cultural practices. After forced removals and the loss of Kansas lands, the Osage negotiated an allotment agreement that divided land among tribal members while reserving mineral rights to the tribe. Government pressure also extended to children: in 1894, when Mollie was seven, her parents were compelled to send her to the St. Louis School, with the threat that the family’s annuity payments would be withheld if they refused. Later allotment policy sought to replace communal life with private property and open remaining territory to settlers. The June gathering does not undo that history; its continued practice and its ability to bring people together show that cultural survival is not the same as remaining untouched by loss.

Osage historian Louis F. Burns warned against imagining that his people had survived intact. What could be salvaged, he wrote, was precious precisely because it survived; what had been lost remained treasured as part of what the Osage had been. The dances enact that distinction through repetition and assembly: people return, gather around the drum, move in circles, and meet again as families, while the absences and changes remain part of the history they carry. Their significance in the book lies not in presenting ceremony as a cure for inherited trauma, but in showing a living community gathering its past and present without pretending that the past has ended.