Original composition weaves Osage history, customs, into ballet

PAWHUSKA, Okla. – Dance has always been an important part of Osage life and culture. Now it will be used to share the tribe’s history with the rest of the world.

In the Art of Motion Dance Studio in Bartlesville, Randy Tinker Smith listens to the music of Wahzhazhe, a new ballet to premiere in Tulsa Aug. 3. It’s playing over the speaker in the next room where dancers learn the choreography of a village scene.

Wahzhazhe began with music, said director and producer Randy Tinker Smith. Two years ago, she worked at the Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska. Researcher Lou Brock had written eight songs and occasionally played them at work.

“When I heard it, I thought immediately, ‘That needs to be a ballet,’” Tinker Smith said.

The ballet will be at 8 p.m. Aug. 3-4 at Holland Hall in Tulsa and 8 p.m. Aug. 10-11 at the Bartlesville Community Center.

As a researcher, Tinker Smith has seen many historical texts of the history of the Osage. The word “wahzhazhe” is what the people call themselves and it roughly means “people of the middle water.”

The tribe was known to have lived throughout an expansive portion of the Ohio River valley area before Iroquois tribes began to push the Osage westward. The tribe migrated to a region touching present-day Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

“We don’t have a lot of Osage history written by Osages,” Tinker Smith said. “This is a really good way to teach our little ones; and they can see it up there, and start learning about who we are.”

The story opens with a pre-European contact scene of village life. A boy and girl show interest in one another and the families come together to negotiate a marriage, which was mostly left to the uncles. The next scene shows Spanish and French military and settlers moving into the area and beginning to push the Osage even further west.

Successive scenes tell about Osage customs and socials, the Indian boarding schools; the oil years; the Osage Indian murders or “Reign of Terror,” to honoring veterans and the state of walking in two worlds.

In 1871, the Osage had sold their last lands in Kansas and purchased land for their own reservation – present day Osage County. The tribe lived in Indian Territory where other Native American tribes were being removed to from all over the country. Osage country, however, drastically changed after vast oil deposits were discovered. The tribe owned the land in common, although business was conducted by federally appointed agents.

Allottees of the land and families with head rights to the mineral deposits underground soon found themselves overwhelmed with outsiders bringing business, alcohol and other influences to the reservation and its center, Pawhuska.

That stage of the ballet is set to ragtime-style music at a quicker tempo.

“It’s really manic, because that’s how Pawhuska was,” Tinker Smith said.

Her father, George Tinker, the son of an original allottee, was born in 1918. He remembered seeing fine houses go up in the present-day Osage Nation capital. He also saw traditional Osage longhouses in the backyards. Everyone wanted to do business with the Osage and would talk them into buying homes, cars and other luxuries, Tinker Smith said.

Pawhuska even had a Rolls Royce dealership, one of the first in the U.S., she said.

Those years, 1921-1925, were called the “Reign of Terror” because of a series of deaths within the tribe. White men would marry into families, and through a number of sudden deaths, they would inherit head rights to the land.

Tinker Smith said an FBI investigation uncovered a plot wherein a banker in Fairfax hired nephews and other men to marry Osage women, preferably those with children with head rights. They killed the women and the children and gained them all. Osage men were also victims. Later autopsies showed the people were killed by alcohol poisoning or gun shots in the head. Houses were even blown up.

The scene is meant to make the viewer understand the fear and loss, she said.

The final scenes show resilience and the people coming back through their traditions, including the tradition of caring for soldiers before and after war.

By telling this story as a ballet, Wahzhazhe also honors the art of dance in both ritual and as a legacy of two of the most famous ballet dancers in the world. Sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief were Osage and from the Gray Horse area. They were among the five Oklahoma Indian Ballerinas, each of whom became acclaimed on the world stage. The other ballerinas were the late Rosella Hightower (Choctaw), Yvonne Chouteau (Shawnee) and Tulsa Ballet co-founder Moscelyne Larkin (Peoria-Shawnee), who died in April.

“The Osage are about ballet with Marjorie and Maria Tall Chief,” Tinker Smith said. “Little girls in Gray Horse grew up wanting to be ballerinas because that’s where Maria and Marjorie are from. It’s common in our tribe.”

Jenna Smith, another Osage ballerina, is doing the choreography and leading the mix of professional and advanced student dancers through the steps. Smith, an Oral Roberts University graduate with a degree in dance education, is Tinker Smith’s daughter. She came on board when funds were leaner and they needed to begin working on the project.

Concert and film composer Joseph Rivers, University of Tulsa Film Studies Department Chair and professor of music, worked with Brock to turn his eight songs into a symphony. Larkin’s son, Roman Jasinski, formerly of Tulsa Ballet, joins the staff as artistic director.

Tinker Smith also credits the late Leonard Maker, Osage elder, and Kathryn Red Corn of the Osage Tribal Museum for their help in researching the project. Wendy Ponca and Terry Wann, Osage clothing designers, are working on the costumes. Alexandra Ponca is the set designer.
Tinker Smith said she also spoke with some 50 Osage elders.

“I wanted (their) permission if I could tell it, and what I could tell,” she said.

Funded through a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Wahzhazhe is also supported by a group of oil and gas exploration companies.  Spyglass Energy Group, Nadel and Gussman and Michael L. Graves pooled together $50,000 toward the $300,000 production, and they offered a $50,000 match of other money contributed to the project by other oil companies. The project also receives support from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP, and from Osage, LLC, which operates the business enterprises of the Osage Nation.

The funds are crucial since Wahzhazhe is being created from scratch. Organizers receive donations through the Allied Arts and Humanities Council of Bartlesville, but thus far, Tinker Smith estimates more than 500 volunteer hours have gone into the ballet.

Some of the work has also been done by college interns working under mentors.

They’re all driven to create a production unlike anything seen before, but Tinker Smith is encouraged by something more.

“What really drove me,” she said, “one of our elders, who passed away a few months ago named Leonard Maker, said ‘Randy, there’s a little kid in California right now, and in 30 years he’s going to look in the mirror and he’s going to say, ‘What does it mean to be Osage?’ and he’s going to be able to watch this ballet and see.”

For more about Wahzhazhe, go online to www.osageballet.com or call (918) 704-4668.


Editors note: For an account of the times as told by ballerina Maria Tallchief, click here.


Dancers practice for Wahzhazhe, an original ballet that tells the history of the Osage people through dance.

NATIVE TIMES PHOTO BY KAREN SHADE