October 11, 2022 • 47 mins
Hundreds of allotments left Osage hands, swiftly at first, and then over decades. Not long ago, the Osage Nation had just 30 days to try to get a big chunk of this land back, when a prized ranch was put on the block by billionaire Ted Turner. See archival documents, photos and more from the episode at https://bloom.bg/3fYU7Uw.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
So you were part of the government that did the
Bluesterm acquisition. That's correct. What was that process like? Fast?
Really really fast. This is Raymond Redcorn. He's retired now,
(00:22):
but until recently he was assistant Principal Chief of the
os Age Nation. That was his title in when the
rumors started, we'd only heard them for about a week
that that ranch, Ted Turner's Bluestem Ranch might come up
for sale. Ted Turner's Bluestem Ranch more than forty acres
(00:43):
of land in os Age County, owned by the billionaire
founder of CNN land he might be selling that could
be up for grabs for the first time in years.
And then a cowboy out there called Chief and told
him that it was true, and they were going to
be on a really tight timeline and successful bidders would
(01:06):
have to get pretty much everything together for a purchase
worth tens of millions of dollars in thirty days. This
was land made up of so many original os Age allotments,
a huge chunk of land that the Osage Nation had
bought more than a century ago, that the tribe had
(01:29):
held the property title too before the US government privatized it.
This ranch had been built up in the decades after allotment,
long before Ted Turner bought it in the early two thousand's,
and before Ted Turner held title to this land, another
big rancher had it, a man named Chuck Drummond. He's
the grandson of one of the Drummond brothers who started
(01:51):
the family's cattle business, Cecil Drummond. Some of the parcels
that made up Turner's ranch were deedd to Cecil along
time him ago, including a section William Hale owned before
he went to prison. That land passed to another white
man who later sold it to Cecil in other sections
(02:11):
the Drummond spot more recently, but in two thousand one,
Chuck Drummond did something his family really did. He sold
the sprawling piece of land. Ted Turner was the buyer,
and some fifteen years later Turner was putting it on
the market again. All of us who have lived here
(02:33):
our entire lives understood that this represented an opportunity to
buy one of the biggest chunks of mos Age County
that would come on the market in our lifetime. And
it was he just took a deep breath and let's go.
(02:57):
I don't know how it's going to turn out, but
we're gonna swing for the fans and see we can
see if we can get this done. Swing for the fence.
That's what the O st Age Nation had to do
if it wanted a chance to own this land again.
So they swung hard. This isn't trust. I'm Rachel Adams
(03:23):
heard Raymond Redcorn and other O Sage government leaders spent
a pretty tent several weeks trying to buy Ted Turner's
Blue Stem ranch. We'll get to that, but the story
of that moment the Osage Nations chanced to buy the
biggest piece of os Age County coming on the market
in Raymond's lifetime. It couldn't have happened without something else,
(03:45):
something that happened a decade earlier. This was when Jim
Gray was chief. You heard him in the first episode.
What I remember from that night was it, why has
it taken so long? It doesn't normally take this long, doesn't.
This is June of two thousand two, election night. Jim's
(04:06):
on the ballot, He's running for chief. He and his
family and supporters are waiting on the results. He has
it always done this point, No, no, what they're doing
a difference this year. What are they doing difference this year? Oh,
they're they're they're They're not doing it by hand, They're
running it through a machine. I said, we shouldn't. That
supposed to make it quicker. So it was after midnight,
(04:28):
probably twelve thirty or something like that, and everyone's getting tired.
A lot of people left, you know, but the die
hards are still hanging out, you know. And next thing
you know, boom, they put the final results on there
and there was a couple of my supporters were in
front of me and I was standing behind him and
I said, what is it? What is it? I think
My cousin turned around, looked at me and he goes,
(04:48):
you would And it was just like, oh my god.
I was just blown away. I mean, my whole family came.
We had a big group hug and there was just
screaming in Holleran and no one saw that coming. It
(05:10):
was I didn't see it coming. Jim didn't see it coming,
in part because he was pretty young as far as
political candidates go. He was also running on something kind
of radical. He wanted to completely reform the stage nation's government,
write a new constitution, build a new nation. Because When
(05:31):
the n Act allotted the reservation, it also dismantled the
Stage Nation's existing government appointed a whole new governing body
called the O Stage Tribal Council, But Jim says that
new government was limited in power and that left the
Stage Nation vulnerable. We didn't have the power to do
(05:52):
anything except meat once a month to prove oil leasas
go about your business. That was it. So it was
a very minimal role. But when people started getting killed,
people were looking to the Council for leadership, but by
that time they were powerless. They didn't really have any
power to do anything. This whole time, under the rules
(06:12):
of the Act, the only O s Ages who could
vote in tribal elections were oth ages who had head rates,
meaning a lot of people were disenfranchised from their own government.
They couldn't vote until an older relative passed away and
they inherited their head right share. I mean, when you
lost your ability to govern yourself, and then you see
(06:34):
what happens when you're not able to govern yourself and
you get exploited, it's easy to see why something had
to change. And it wasn't going to change from the outside,
and it was going to have to change from the
inside out. Efforts to reform the O s Age government
had gone on for decades. In the early nineties, the
group of O s Age citizens brought a lawsuit that
(06:55):
resulted in a court ordered government reform. O s Age
voters approved a new constitution, one that opened up citizenship
beyond just os Ages who had had rights. But within
a few years another court decision reversed that. So we
got a taste of what democracy was like, and then
it was taken away from us, and that government that
(07:19):
was there for just maybe a couple of years had
disappeared and it was replaced by the tribal council again.
By the time Jim ran for Chief, conversations about reforming
the os Age government, we're taking on new urgency. There
was a real concern that because of the way the
nineteen of six Act was word in, the US government
could decide the Osage nation no longer existed once the
(07:40):
last original latt died. There were some people at the
Solicitor's office in d C that felt like that was
the basis of the trust if you don't have any
original lattis. Because they closed the roles in nineteen O
six didn't make any more oth Sages in the eyes
of the law. Then do we still have a trust
relationship to the oth Age. That was a question that
(08:02):
no one really had a clear answer to. And in
two thousand two, almost a hundred years after allotment, there
weren't many original a lot teas left. A lot of
discussions were happening in oth Age country about how long
can we keep doing this? Knowing that the population of
oth Sages without a head right is starting to out
number the o Sages with head rights. How long can
(08:25):
we keep doing this? We're losing original lot tease every year.
So Jim runs for chief on reforming the government for good,
coming up with the government that served all oath Ages,
whether or not they had a head right. Mostly, he
told me he didn't think he'd went He just thought
he was forcing the issue into the spotlight again, getting
people to talk about it, to come up with a
(08:46):
path forward for the Osage Nation. But as Jim campaigned,
a sort of coalition formed, and on that night in
June of two thousand two, it wasn't just Jim who
want on the idea that the oth Age Nation did
a new constitution. Everybody who ran and won on that
council ran on that issue as well. It was the
(09:10):
biggest wipe out in a tribal council election since it started.
I think we all knew it was time. I think
we all felt it. I mean one member of the
council in particular. Really, we were at one of those
political events where everyone got a chanced to speak for
a few minutes and sit down, you know. And this
(09:31):
gentleman was probably in his late seventies and his mom
lived into her nineties and he took care of her.
She was in a nursing home and all that, you know,
and when she finally passed on, he finally got to
vote at the age of seventy seven. If there ever
was a poster child for government reform, he was it.
(09:52):
He was a living, breathing an example of what's wrong.
That should never have been the case. He should never
happen to wait that long to consider himself O Sage.
And his talk at these events was so emotional you
couldn't help but draw tier just hearing him talk about it.
Because the oth Age Nation's existing government was established under
(10:16):
the nineteen o six Act, the os Age Nation wouldn't
be able to reform its own government without the US government,
without an Act of Congress. Jim says this was the
only federally recognized tribe with this kind of arrangement. Other
tribal nations were able to determine who is the citizen themselves,
but the os Age Nation needed to get federal lawmakers
(10:38):
on board to change those rules. So that was the
first step, simple an Act of Congress. I was under
no illusion that when I campaigned in two thousand two,
I was going to get a federal law passed. I
know how sketchy politics is in Washington, and I wasn't
that naive to think that, oh, yeah, I'll do this,
(11:01):
I'll knock it out. In two years, we'll be back
in business. You know. That's that's that's crazy talk. Even
though it seemed like a long shot, Jim and other
O s Age leaders got to work. They lobbied the U.
S Congress, made their case. They brought lawmakers down to
Oklahoma to hear from O s Ages who were unable
to participate in their own government. And sure enough, in
(11:24):
two thousand four, Mr Speaker, I'm here today to bring
my strong support HR twelve to reaffirm the inherent sovereign
rights of the O Sage tribe to determine their membership
and form of government. Because of the law created in
nineteen o six by this Congress, the O Sage tribe
(11:45):
have not been afforded the same rights as every other
federally recognized tribe does. Is taped from the House floor
as U s lawmakers are about to pass the O
c Age Reform Act. The bill is simple short. They
are basically two key lines. The First Congress hereby reaffirms
the inherent sovereign right of the O s Age tribe
(12:06):
to determine its own membership, provided that the rights of
any person to O Sage mineral estate shares are not diminished.
Thereby in the Second Congress hereby reaffirms the inherent sovereign
rights of the O Sage tribe to determine its own
form of government. The question is, well the House suspend
the rules and pass HR so many as are in favor,
(12:30):
say I, those opposed No. In the opinion of the Chair,
two thirds of those present having voted in the affirmative,
the rules are suspended to the bill is passed without objection.
The bill passed the House in June two thousand four,
and a few months later it passed the Senate. It
was unanimous from both houses. You know how they do
those list of bills that are in controversial, like naming
(12:51):
a street or something, or post office, you know. So
the House did their version, the Senate did their version,
and it went to the President's desk for siting mature.
In December third, two thousand four, he signed it. The
oth Age nation could decide who its citizens were, and
it could create whatever kind of government it wanted. This
(13:12):
is also when the real work began because the oath
Age Nation it needed a new constitution. It was just,
oh gosh, it was kind of scary. This is Priscilla Iba.
She was on the commission that was in charge of
writing the new constitution of ice chair. She helped lead
listening sessions as they tried to figure out what people
wanted from this process, what they wanted from their government.
(13:35):
But I think people did say I'm ost age before,
but there was always that feeling that all, I guess,
I'm really not. I can't vote on anything, I can't
I don't have any say in what goes on. So
I think it was truly just having to say and
that just obviously makes you feel like that government is yours,
(13:55):
is tribe is yours. Priscilla told me, these meetings went
about how you'd expect them to. People have different ideas,
didn't always agree. They wanted to know what would happen
to the mineral estate, how the O s Age nation
would decide citizenship. Even establishing the process for coming up
with those answers was challenging. No one on the Commission
(14:16):
had ever written a constitution for a sovereign nation before.
Priscilla said, it was rocky. At first. We were just
glassy eyed, you know, we didn't know what we were doing,
but we were ready to be trying. We learned a
lot and talked to a lot of people, and there
were some rough moments early on because we didn't know
(14:37):
each other and we didn't trust each other. We didn't
have the same politics, we didn't have we were all
very different. A year into the process, Priscilla tells me,
the Commission was still finding its feet. The commissioners consulted
a dozen O Sage lawyers and hired a program coordinator,
a woman named Hepsy Burnett, who would later serve as
the new government's chief of staff. Was that mission that
(15:02):
that I can't stress enough that must have just held
us together truly to have a constitution that reflected what
the old Sage people wanted and what were you hearing
from people they were confused to? They were confused to.
So they had questions for us that, you know, what's
dis government going to look like. We kept telling them
(15:24):
that's going to be for you to decide. And so
we had questionnaires and we had all kinds of things
that went out in the mail. But then we still
had town meetings. The Commission worked for two years. They
held meetings in oath Age County, but also in Texas
in California. Jean Dennison, a citizen of the oath Age
Nation and an Indigenous studies scholar who wrote a book
(15:46):
about the government reform, counted more than forty meetings in all,
each about two hours. Then, in January two thousand and six,
the Commission and its staff and consultants gathered for a
three day writing retreat at a hotel and holsa. It
was time to write the oth Age Nation's new constitution.
Over the next several weeks, the constitution took shape. On
(16:10):
March eleventh, two thousand and six, there was one final
vote whether or not the O s Age people would
adopt this constitution. We were all in Pahuska and then
we had a little kind of a little party, I
guess with the commission. We were all nervous. We were
all really nervous. While we were talking, Priscilla's husband's skip
(16:35):
pulled something from a cabinet, a scrapbook Priscilla made from
that night over photos votos Jim. Alongside those photos, Priscilla
had a copy of the election results from that night.
Let's see, shall the constitution be approved? So yes? Was
(16:57):
a total of one thou and fordered in fifty four,
which was sixty six. The only thing I remember is
signing it. It was very special and I just I
have a nice handwriting, and I look at that and
(17:18):
I think that doesn't even look very good because I
was just nervous. It was a wonderful feeling and very proud.
Oh my gosh, we were so proud. All that work
(17:42):
paid off. Later that year, members of the Commission in
the Youth Age Tribal Council formally signed the constitution in
transition to the new government. This is cape from that night.
It took a lot of people to make the constitution happen,
not just Jim or Priscilla, put an entire community. In
(18:03):
the video of the ceremony, the room is packed, every
seat is filled, people are standing in rows looking over
each other. That night in two thousand and six, I've
been told, was a big celebration. Almost exactly a hundred
years after the n Act, the O s Age Nation
was creating the government it wanted on its own terms.
(18:25):
Jim Gray started off the signatures, the ceremonies, polidation, hours
and years and generations of hard work. We all had
a constitution, big heavy leather bound copies of it, and
we all signed our signature on. Each one of us
put our names a signature on there. But I didn't.
(18:49):
And so we had this big moment where all the
councilmen and me and the commissioners were all in this
one big line and we were signing these documents and
handed to each other, and it was just going back
and forth, back and forth until we got them all bed,
you know, and then I launched into my version of history.
But before we talk about moving forward, and I do
(19:11):
want to get into that a little bit today. I
want to talk about the past. Our people were never many,
but they were fierce, and they were proud, and they
were self sufficient, and they exercised their own sovereign And
(19:31):
as we look back at that period of time leading
up into t o A, when after a visit with
President Jefferson Ball, they will says nation entered its first
treaty with the United States. So I'm going through this
history of telling everyone how the treaties that the tribe
entered into resulted in a loss of huge amounts of
(19:54):
our territory and our land, but worse, a loss of
who we were. Our culture, our customs are oral traditions,
the things that we would only pass down from one
elder to a younger person. And it was during that
period of time that we we reached within ourselves to
find a new definition of Osage and it took leaders
(20:19):
at the time like the Chief Bigheart would initiated and
lead an effort to draft a constitution of the So
they started a constitutional form of government that tried its
best to capture what they could from that old way
and bring it up to a new way under a
document that was voted on by the o s Age
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people that they that governed them. You know, and we
used that to build up our tribe again, slowly but
surely start building it up. In nineteen one, we lost
that constitution the Secretary of Interior, and that's when federal
policies started hitting us, like the Allotment Act. But Congress
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went a step further. They not only decided who was
an Oth s Age, they also decided how the O
s Age government was going to be run and what
their functions were going. This was the government of the
O s Age people's design. It's not what they wanted.
They already decided what they wanted, but in the phase
(21:23):
of the political winds of the day, the O s
Ages took the congressionally created Oth Sage Tribal Council with
the Chief and Assistant Chief and tried to make this
work for the betterment of the people. It was impacted
even further by the boarding school era. They were taking
kids out of their communities and sending him to boarding
(21:44):
schools to you know, destroyed that cultural part of who
they were and tried to make them little white people
that had no knowledge of being Indian. And it devastated
a generation of O s Ages because of the policies,
But through the success of our ceremonies, the fact that
many O stage families who retained their wealth, they were
(22:08):
able to preserve our language and our culture in homes
in the villages. They were able to protect our ceremonies,
the lunch. They were able to make sure that that
drum was going to continue to beat every year in June.
They took care of that drum. They took care of
the people. They took care of those ceremonies and celebrations
that defined us who we were. All this at a
(22:30):
time when federal policy was doing everything it could to
de tribalize Indian people, to separate us from our God,
to separate us from our traditions and our language. And
at that point, I could just say, here's I say
all of this history to say this, at no point
(22:54):
since our first interaction with the United States government did
we ever stop fighting for our people or sovereignty. And
as I go on, I wanted to I want to
do something right now because it's something I think is important.
Because what I'm talking about is how the Old Station
nation has survived. Even though they had a governing document
(23:15):
that was not of their creation, they tried to make
it work as best they could. And I would like
to ask everybody in this audience who has a relative
or as descendant of a relative, who has ever served
on the Old States Tribal Council, please stand, Thank you,
(23:43):
thank you very much. You saw it in those early treaties.
You saw it in those removals. You saw it in
us buying this land here. You saw how we preserved
the mineral state in the nineteen Act. You saw it
in our commitment to Heck, we declared war on Japan
and Germany through a Tribal Council resolution after in World
(24:05):
War Two, after Pearl Harbor, a resolution, i might add,
has never been rescinded. We're stubborn folks, you know. O
Sages had never given up the notion of sovereignty. It
didn't just happen on my watch. It has been the
accumulation of generations of oh Ages. A year after the
(24:30):
new constitution was adopted, Jim sent out a survey to
oth Age citizens. He wanted to know what they wanted
from their new government, what they thought should be the
top priorities, and survey after survey came back with the
same answer. Land, or more specifically, buying back land expanding
the O s Age Nation's reservation base because finally the
(24:54):
O s Age people had a government that was theirs.
Finally they had the ability to take back what had
belonged to them a century ago. But if there's anything
that you can you hopefully learn from all this is
that host I just never gave up. They never gave
up trying to retain the things that made us who
(25:16):
we were. And I think the same attitude that drove
the O Sages to come to this land here and
buy it outright so that we would never move again,
is the same attitude that drew the O Sages to
buy the Turner ranch. It's part of who we are
(25:44):
when we come back the Blue Stemac position. After the
O s Age government reform, there was still a long
way to go to make good on O s Age
citizens desire to buy back land and expand the reservation base.
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Federal policies over the last hundred years had worked to
strip land away from the os Age Nation and its citizens.
So when those rumors made their way to Raymond when
he was Assistant Principal Chief, the rumors that Ted Turner
was selling his ranch, Raymond didn't waste any time he
started working the phone, spent his Christmas holiday talking to bankers, lawyers,
(26:29):
other stage government officials. We were simply trying to map
out a path from point A to point B, having
never done anything like this before. Ever, it's a little
bit hard for me to not get emotional at this point.
We all understood that it was and historical inflection point
(26:55):
for the os Age nation, and we all carry with
us our ideas about the future and our ideas about
the past. Mine can be summed up very easily. With
the purchase of this ranch, we would be able to
(27:17):
do something we had not done for two years if
we needed to, and that was feed ourselves. That represents,
if you think about it, even in the modern context,
(27:39):
that represents an enormous amount of sovereignty and independence. To me,
it's the ultimate safety net socially, economically, and certainly from
just the simple aspect of food, shelter and clothing. That's
how it looked at me, and that was my motivation.
(28:05):
The stakes were clear to Raymond, to the Chief to
Chief Jeffrey. Standing there, Raymond told me a lot of
people were supportive of the purchase, but others were skeptical
it was going to cost a lot of money. Land
in O s Age County is valuable. This was a huge,
contiguous ranch with prime grass for ranchers to graze cattle
(28:27):
or bison or horses. Raymond knew they'd have competition. The
Osage Nation was going to have to bid high if
they wanted to win. The Nation was in a better
financial position than before, thanks in large parts revenue from
the casino businesses it started opening in two thousand two,
but spending so much of it at once made a
(28:47):
lot of O s Age citizens nervous. My responsibility was
to work Congress because I sit with him as assistant chief,
spent eight years on the Congress prior to that, and
so I knew the rules and it was lobbying, pure
and simple. The primary goal of the lobbying was to
(29:11):
get the Congress to get the price up as high
as we could get it. Freeman told me he could
feel the pressure. They didn't want to lose the bid.
The Nation also had to secure the financing for the land,
and they had to do all this in thirty days
when the bids were due, or they'd miss out. Raymond
(29:32):
went back and forth with members of the O. S
h Congress they had emergency meetings narrative on a number.
The highest bid they'd let Raymond and Chief Standing Bears submit.
The Congress has met for the final time, they've established
the maximum number. I've been advising Chief all along on
(29:54):
general strategies related to a bidding and auctioneering. And he
always sits at one end of the conference table. Want
I always sit on the other. And that's exactly where
we were the morning after Congress gave us the number.
So he sat down and he said, you go first.
I said, okay, well, I think the number needs to
(30:17):
be this, and the way I arrived at that is
is man, you know. And I explained my rationale of
how I ended up with this number, which was blow
that of the Congress. He said, no, that's not what
we're gonna do. He said, We're just gonna bid the max.
(30:37):
And I lean back in my chair and I said really.
He said, yeah, we're just gonna big the max. I'll
be fully responsible for it. And he said, I can.
It's really easy for me to tell you why we're
gonna bid the max. I said, why is that? He said,
because there's only two outcomes, we win or we don't win.
(30:59):
And I will take the heat from Congress all day
for maximizing the bid for their maximum appropriation, but that
will fade over time. And what will never fade is
if we swing for the fence and miss because we
did not maximize our bid. And as soon as he
(31:20):
said that, the political wisdom of it occurred to me immediately,
and I said, I'm I'm, I'm good with that because
it made since it wasn't It wasn't a financial decision
or a business decision. It was a really simple thing
about how history was going to view what we did.
(31:42):
The amount. Chief Standing Bear told Raymond the oc Eage
Nation would bid the maximount with seventy four million dollars.
It was a closed bidding process. Raymond would have to
deliver the bid in person to an office in Kansas
where the land broker was. Raymond brought company a man
named r. J. Walker. R J was on the Sage
(32:03):
Congress at the time. Now he's the assistant Principal Chief.
I've talked to him about this day too. He called
it fateful. Raymond showed me a picture of that morning,
the morning they drove a seventy four million dollar bid
to Kansas. Oh wow, so yeah, it looks like it's
so it's Scott confidential and red ink all over its
(32:26):
Age Nation Executive branch. And at this point Congress doesn't
now that we put the whole number in there either.
The broker was in a town called Hutchinson, Kansas, almost
three hours away from Pahaska. They had until four thirty
that afternoon to submit their bid, but Raymond and r
J weren't taking any chances. They left Osage County first
(32:46):
thing that morning. And oh, Stage police have been notified.
We checked in from time to time and if for
any reason we were in an auto accident or anything else,
and we joked about is they would send the o
Stage Nation police up, they would pick up. They would
leave us roadside bleeding to death, and they would pick
(33:09):
up the bid and they would go on to Hudge
and deliver. Well, it wasn't quite like that, but that's
how we thought it. The main thing. Yes, so they
were like basic backup, back up to the bid to them,
regardless of what happened to us. I hope that doesn't
(33:33):
speak to how goofy we might appear. I hope it
speaks too how important we thought it was by the
time they got there, they ended up having plenty of
time to kill, so they made a stop before going
to the broker's office. Yeah, we were just in a
good will store passing time because yeah, we both bought
(33:54):
a jacket and we both still own the two dollar
jacket the suit jackets that we bought it. And I
remember that. Raymond said there was a reason they didn't
go straight to the broker's office hand in their seventy
four million dollar bid right when they got there. We
were in hutch we were new, We made the time
and everything. There's also sometimes when you're among native people
(34:18):
for a really long time and you begin to understand history,
your trust level is um It does not go all
the way to the bottom there. There's some things you
just do not trust. And our Jane I talked about it,
but we weren't going to just lay that down and
walk off. We just weren't going to do that because
(34:39):
under nefarious circumstances, which we did not think it was,
but we weren't taking any chances. Anybody could have shown
up at any time that day and delivered the bid.
The deadline was for thirty anybody could put whatever number
they wanted to do in there, so we were gonna
wait until it that was not a possibility. We just
(35:01):
sat there with ours in our hands. Four o'clock got
there and there still wasn't. There's only two bids, and
we expected three. We didn't know we had our own
grapevine going, but we we knew that there might be
as many as three bids and possibly four, but the
number that we kept hearing was three. So Raymond and
(35:24):
r J wait outside the broker's office all day bit
in hand, waiting to turn it in at the last
possible moment. So it's four o'clock. We're sitting there, still
chit chatting with with the broker, and I reached a
point where it's like, let's just go. I mean, I
was kind of bored. I mean, we've had enough talk
(35:47):
with him that and we knew what our number was.
So r J did not want to leave. R J
wanted to stay. He said, no, I think we should
stay here. I said, r J, it's gonna be like
super awkward. We're sitting here for an hour and a
half and then another bidder walks in and we've been
sitting here for this long. I mean that that that's
(36:08):
that doesn't smell good, and so it was as much
for appearances as anything else. And I was in the
executive branch and invited r J long, So r J
kind of reluctantly relented, and we said goodbye and left
our bid. At about ten ever or four, we leave
(36:29):
his office. He's on the fourth or fifth floor. We
leave his office, walked to the vestibule outside the elevators
and there's a cowboy standing there with a briefcase, and
we're getting ready to go down and he's just arriving.
And as we're going down, r J says, you think
(36:50):
that was that other guy? I said, I don't know,
r J. I'm really tired of thinking about it. I'm
just we're out. Let's just go. So we went back
to the car, we got in and we headed home.
I checked in with chief, told him we delivered the
bid successfully, et cetera. And as it turns out, the
(37:13):
gentleman was the other bidder, and we did not know
that at the time. But we're on our way back,
we figured the last bid has been submitted. We don't
know where we stand. It's two and a half hour
drive home. We are still on I we are less
(37:34):
than an hour out of hutch but we're still in Kansas.
My cell phone rings and he said, I have reviewed
the bids, I have spoken with Ted Turner, and you
are a successful bidder and at present you're the high bid.
(38:01):
Raymond knew when he got this call that it wasn't
the end of it. There were still a lot of
other details to be worked out, the financing, all the
legal stuff, everything involved in a massive land deal. But
he was the first person in the O s Age
Nation to know that their bid there are seventy four
million dollar bid was the highest, that if everything else
(38:24):
fell into place, they'd own this land again. And as
that starts to sink again, Raymond feels elated, just delated.
We pulled. We pulled over on the side of my
got out high five. I just didn't want to try
(38:48):
to drive and talk about this. At the same time.
Chief was incredulous that we I was incredulous that I
gotta call him away out. I mean that that was
like totally unanticipated. It was wonderful. Did you what did
you say to r J? Because I assume you were
you were on the phone, so he can't hear, like,
what did you tell him? I just remember we're in
(39:10):
a in that ford. We call it the Chief mobile. Uh,
we're in that ford and we pull over and he said,
he said, your ship man. I said, no, I'm not.
And um he was. He was every bit as giddy
as as I was. Giddy. Is a really good to
(39:32):
describe how he felt with that. The deal closed six
months later in June, nearly one fifty years after the
Each nation bought this land from the Cherokee Nation, they
(39:54):
owned a big piece of it again. It was just
an incredible feeling to be so close to um to
to an historical inflection point. Um. It was, I don't know,
it's it. I'll never have that feeling again, I don't
(40:17):
think um And to have it once, uh, in your
tribe's history is a lot. It's it's a really good feeling.
And I'm I'm proud of us for doing that. It
does go without saying that that this never would have
happened if not for the reformation of the government. So
(40:39):
that old saw about you know, standing on the shoulders
of those that came before you. There were sacrifices in
in visionaries in the past and in o s Age
government going all the way back to the sixties um
that we're trying to move us out of what we
were in the position we were placed in. And I
(41:00):
can know six in the years since, the Osage Nation
has brought in more bison to graze on this land,
cattle to the tribes also bought some more land, nothing
like the Blue Stem acquisition. That much land doesn't go
on the market very often. But the os Age nations
buying property in downtown Pahaska, building a new health center,
(41:20):
a food processing plant. There's still something outstanding with the
ranch the nation bought from Ted Turner. Right now, it's
held in something called the simple the most common way
to own real estate. Oth Age leaders want to change
that to make sure that land can never again lead
the os Age Nation. They want to put the land
(41:42):
in trust. One must remember at the purpose of the
land into trust process was instituted by the United States
to allow tribes to go back and re acquire lands
(42:03):
that may have been lost for any number of reasons
and taken out of out of the tribe's hands. And
so it's a level of protection that you couldn't get.
The land is not health and trust, that's correct, It's
(42:25):
it's a nine and day difference between fee and trust.
But there's a problem. When the oath Age Nation applied
to have this land put into trust, the federal government
said it couldn't do that, at least not yet. The
surface land, the government said was too damage from decades
of oil and gas drilling. They said it would need
(42:45):
millions of dollars worth of remediation work before they would
agree to accept the title on behalf of the oath
Age Nation. Raymond says it's a bit of an ironic
twist because all that oil and gas drilling it was
permitted by the US government, that was their job as
trustee of the o s Age Mineral Estate. That set
(43:06):
of facts would point to the b i A as
the responsible party for that environmental degradation. Yet the same entity,
the b i A, is the one that raises its
hand and says we can't put this into trust. Look
at this environmental degradation. I've asked the b i A
(43:28):
about this. They declined to comment and have not made
Secretary deb Holland available for an interview. I've also talked
to R. J. Walker about this, since he's the current
assistant Principal Chief. He said the os Age Nation is
working with the b i A to submit a new
application to put the land in trust. As with so
much of the history here, the os Age Nation is
(43:50):
trying to make sure it's land and its sovereignty are
secure forever, trying to take back control of what was theirs.
And Raymond told me, just like it took time for
this land to leave O s Age hands, it'll take
time to get it back. And so when you look
out at a plat map of both Age County today
(44:11):
and you see how many non O Sage landowners there are,
you see that as a design of allotment. Honestly, I
think I'm enough of an optimist that I don't look
at those maps. What I do look at is the
map of O s Age holdings and see how much
more there is that we need to do. If I
(44:34):
spend too much time as an elected official dwelling on
the past, I'm not focusing on the future. We only
all have our attention to apply to anything. If we
apply it to the future, then we're going to continue
on this path of reacquisition of lost land. If we're
looking back, all we're doing is dwelling on something that
(44:58):
we can't change. Can We should we study it and
learn from it. Absolutely, should it be what we quote
chapter and verse on a daily basis not, In my opinion,
We're going to succeed by looking forward and figuring out
how we continue to earn the resources to continue this
purchase of previously owned lands. That's where I think our
(45:22):
focus could should be always. I was there when Chief
signed the deeds and to close it and said, this
is the day we stopped going backwards. This is the
day we begin to go the other direction towards buying
all of this reservation back. And it will take us
(45:45):
long to buy it back as it did sell it,
perhaps even longer, but we have the means to do so.
If the Germans can build up small land empire, there's
no reason we can. M no no no no no
(46:19):
no no no no no no no no no no.
For maps, newspaper archives, photos and other documents related to
this episode, go to bloomberg dot com. Slash in Trust
(46:44):
In Trust is a production of Bloomberg and I Heart Media.
It's reported and hosted by me Rachel Adams, heard additional
reporting by Alison Edda special thanks to Jeane Dennison, whose
book Colonial and Tangle documented the Osage Nation's government reform.
Her upcoming book, Rebuilding Relationships of Respect Self Determination in
(47:08):
the Osage Nation, will document the Osage Nations land purchase.
Davis Land is our senior producer. Samantha Story is our
executive producer. Jeff Grocott is our senior editor. Additional editing
by Daniel Ferrara. Additional production by Victor eBay As, production
support from joelga to Carly. Sound engineering by Blake Naples.
(47:30):
The music by Laura Workman. Photography by Shane Brown. You
can email us at Podcasts at Bloomberg dot net. Find
in Trust anywhere you get your podcasts m
So you were part of the government that did the
Bluesterm acquisition. That's correct. What was that process like? Fast?
Really really fast. This is Raymond Redcorn. He's retired now,
(00:22):
but until recently he was assistant Principal Chief of the
os Age Nation. That was his title in when the
rumors started, we'd only heard them for about a week
that that ranch, Ted Turner's Bluestem Ranch might come up
for sale. Ted Turner's Bluestem Ranch more than forty acres
(00:43):
of land in os Age County, owned by the billionaire
founder of CNN land he might be selling that could
be up for grabs for the first time in years.
And then a cowboy out there called Chief and told
him that it was true, and they were going to
be on a really tight timeline and successful bidders would
(01:06):
have to get pretty much everything together for a purchase
worth tens of millions of dollars in thirty days. This
was land made up of so many original os Age allotments,
a huge chunk of land that the Osage Nation had
bought more than a century ago, that the tribe had
(01:29):
held the property title too before the US government privatized it.
This ranch had been built up in the decades after allotment,
long before Ted Turner bought it in the early two thousand's,
and before Ted Turner held title to this land, another
big rancher had it, a man named Chuck Drummond. He's
the grandson of one of the Drummond brothers who started
(01:51):
the family's cattle business, Cecil Drummond. Some of the parcels
that made up Turner's ranch were deedd to Cecil along
time him ago, including a section William Hale owned before
he went to prison. That land passed to another white
man who later sold it to Cecil in other sections
(02:11):
the Drummond spot more recently, but in two thousand one,
Chuck Drummond did something his family really did. He sold
the sprawling piece of land. Ted Turner was the buyer,
and some fifteen years later Turner was putting it on
the market again. All of us who have lived here
(02:33):
our entire lives understood that this represented an opportunity to
buy one of the biggest chunks of mos Age County
that would come on the market in our lifetime. And
it was he just took a deep breath and let's go.
(02:57):
I don't know how it's going to turn out, but
we're gonna swing for the fans and see we can
see if we can get this done. Swing for the fence.
That's what the O st Age Nation had to do
if it wanted a chance to own this land again.
So they swung hard. This isn't trust. I'm Rachel Adams
(03:23):
heard Raymond Redcorn and other O Sage government leaders spent
a pretty tent several weeks trying to buy Ted Turner's
Blue Stem ranch. We'll get to that, but the story
of that moment the Osage Nations chanced to buy the
biggest piece of os Age County coming on the market
in Raymond's lifetime. It couldn't have happened without something else,
(03:45):
something that happened a decade earlier. This was when Jim
Gray was chief. You heard him in the first episode.
What I remember from that night was it, why has
it taken so long? It doesn't normally take this long, doesn't.
This is June of two thousand two, election night. Jim's
(04:06):
on the ballot, He's running for chief. He and his
family and supporters are waiting on the results. He has
it always done this point, No, no, what they're doing
a difference this year. What are they doing difference this year? Oh,
they're they're they're They're not doing it by hand, They're
running it through a machine. I said, we shouldn't. That
supposed to make it quicker. So it was after midnight,
(04:28):
probably twelve thirty or something like that, and everyone's getting tired.
A lot of people left, you know, but the die
hards are still hanging out, you know. And next thing
you know, boom, they put the final results on there
and there was a couple of my supporters were in
front of me and I was standing behind him and
I said, what is it? What is it? I think
My cousin turned around, looked at me and he goes,
(04:48):
you would And it was just like, oh my god.
I was just blown away. I mean, my whole family came.
We had a big group hug and there was just
screaming in Holleran and no one saw that coming. It
(05:10):
was I didn't see it coming. Jim didn't see it coming,
in part because he was pretty young as far as
political candidates go. He was also running on something kind
of radical. He wanted to completely reform the stage nation's government,
write a new constitution, build a new nation. Because When
(05:31):
the n Act allotted the reservation, it also dismantled the
Stage Nation's existing government appointed a whole new governing body
called the O Stage Tribal Council, But Jim says that
new government was limited in power and that left the
Stage Nation vulnerable. We didn't have the power to do
(05:52):
anything except meat once a month to prove oil leasas
go about your business. That was it. So it was
a very minimal role. But when people started getting killed,
people were looking to the Council for leadership, but by
that time they were powerless. They didn't really have any
power to do anything. This whole time, under the rules
(06:12):
of the Act, the only O s Ages who could
vote in tribal elections were oth ages who had head rates,
meaning a lot of people were disenfranchised from their own government.
They couldn't vote until an older relative passed away and
they inherited their head right share. I mean, when you
lost your ability to govern yourself, and then you see
(06:34):
what happens when you're not able to govern yourself and
you get exploited, it's easy to see why something had
to change. And it wasn't going to change from the outside,
and it was going to have to change from the
inside out. Efforts to reform the O s Age government
had gone on for decades. In the early nineties, the
group of O s Age citizens brought a lawsuit that
(06:55):
resulted in a court ordered government reform. O s Age
voters approved a new constitution, one that opened up citizenship
beyond just os Ages who had had rights. But within
a few years another court decision reversed that. So we
got a taste of what democracy was like, and then
it was taken away from us, and that government that
(07:19):
was there for just maybe a couple of years had
disappeared and it was replaced by the tribal council again.
By the time Jim ran for Chief, conversations about reforming
the os Age government, we're taking on new urgency. There
was a real concern that because of the way the
nineteen of six Act was word in, the US government
could decide the Osage nation no longer existed once the
(07:40):
last original latt died. There were some people at the
Solicitor's office in d C that felt like that was
the basis of the trust if you don't have any
original lattis. Because they closed the roles in nineteen O
six didn't make any more oth Sages in the eyes
of the law. Then do we still have a trust
relationship to the oth Age. That was a question that
(08:02):
no one really had a clear answer to. And in
two thousand two, almost a hundred years after allotment, there
weren't many original a lot teas left. A lot of
discussions were happening in oth Age country about how long
can we keep doing this? Knowing that the population of
oth Sages without a head right is starting to out
number the o Sages with head rights. How long can
(08:25):
we keep doing this? We're losing original lot tease every year.
So Jim runs for chief on reforming the government for good,
coming up with the government that served all oath Ages,
whether or not they had a head right. Mostly, he
told me he didn't think he'd went He just thought
he was forcing the issue into the spotlight again, getting
people to talk about it, to come up with a
(08:46):
path forward for the Osage Nation. But as Jim campaigned,
a sort of coalition formed, and on that night in
June of two thousand two, it wasn't just Jim who
want on the idea that the oth Age Nation did
a new constitution. Everybody who ran and won on that
council ran on that issue as well. It was the
(09:10):
biggest wipe out in a tribal council election since it started.
I think we all knew it was time. I think
we all felt it. I mean one member of the
council in particular. Really, we were at one of those
political events where everyone got a chanced to speak for
a few minutes and sit down, you know. And this
(09:31):
gentleman was probably in his late seventies and his mom
lived into her nineties and he took care of her.
She was in a nursing home and all that, you know,
and when she finally passed on, he finally got to
vote at the age of seventy seven. If there ever
was a poster child for government reform, he was it.
(09:52):
He was a living, breathing an example of what's wrong.
That should never have been the case. He should never
happen to wait that long to consider himself O Sage.
And his talk at these events was so emotional you
couldn't help but draw tier just hearing him talk about it.
Because the oth Age Nation's existing government was established under
(10:16):
the nineteen o six Act, the os Age Nation wouldn't
be able to reform its own government without the US government,
without an Act of Congress. Jim says this was the
only federally recognized tribe with this kind of arrangement. Other
tribal nations were able to determine who is the citizen themselves,
but the os Age Nation needed to get federal lawmakers
(10:38):
on board to change those rules. So that was the
first step, simple an Act of Congress. I was under
no illusion that when I campaigned in two thousand two,
I was going to get a federal law passed. I
know how sketchy politics is in Washington, and I wasn't
that naive to think that, oh, yeah, I'll do this,
(11:01):
I'll knock it out. In two years, we'll be back
in business. You know. That's that's that's crazy talk. Even
though it seemed like a long shot, Jim and other
O s Age leaders got to work. They lobbied the U.
S Congress, made their case. They brought lawmakers down to
Oklahoma to hear from O s Ages who were unable
to participate in their own government. And sure enough, in
(11:24):
two thousand four, Mr Speaker, I'm here today to bring
my strong support HR twelve to reaffirm the inherent sovereign
rights of the O Sage tribe to determine their membership
and form of government. Because of the law created in
nineteen o six by this Congress, the O Sage tribe
(11:45):
have not been afforded the same rights as every other
federally recognized tribe does. Is taped from the House floor
as U s lawmakers are about to pass the O
c Age Reform Act. The bill is simple short. They
are basically two key lines. The First Congress hereby reaffirms
the inherent sovereign right of the O s Age tribe
(12:06):
to determine its own membership, provided that the rights of
any person to O Sage mineral estate shares are not diminished.
Thereby in the Second Congress hereby reaffirms the inherent sovereign
rights of the O Sage tribe to determine its own
form of government. The question is, well the House suspend
the rules and pass HR so many as are in favor,
(12:30):
say I, those opposed No. In the opinion of the Chair,
two thirds of those present having voted in the affirmative,
the rules are suspended to the bill is passed without objection.
The bill passed the House in June two thousand four,
and a few months later it passed the Senate. It
was unanimous from both houses. You know how they do
those list of bills that are in controversial, like naming
(12:51):
a street or something, or post office, you know. So
the House did their version, the Senate did their version,
and it went to the President's desk for siting mature.
In December third, two thousand four, he signed it. The
oth Age nation could decide who its citizens were, and
it could create whatever kind of government it wanted. This
(13:12):
is also when the real work began because the oath
Age Nation it needed a new constitution. It was just,
oh gosh, it was kind of scary. This is Priscilla Iba.
She was on the commission that was in charge of
writing the new constitution of ice chair. She helped lead
listening sessions as they tried to figure out what people
wanted from this process, what they wanted from their government.
(13:35):
But I think people did say I'm ost age before,
but there was always that feeling that all, I guess,
I'm really not. I can't vote on anything, I can't
I don't have any say in what goes on. So
I think it was truly just having to say and
that just obviously makes you feel like that government is yours,
(13:55):
is tribe is yours. Priscilla told me, these meetings went
about how you'd expect them to. People have different ideas,
didn't always agree. They wanted to know what would happen
to the mineral estate, how the O s Age nation
would decide citizenship. Even establishing the process for coming up
with those answers was challenging. No one on the Commission
(14:16):
had ever written a constitution for a sovereign nation before.
Priscilla said, it was rocky. At first. We were just
glassy eyed, you know, we didn't know what we were doing,
but we were ready to be trying. We learned a
lot and talked to a lot of people, and there
were some rough moments early on because we didn't know
(14:37):
each other and we didn't trust each other. We didn't
have the same politics, we didn't have we were all
very different. A year into the process, Priscilla tells me,
the Commission was still finding its feet. The commissioners consulted
a dozen O Sage lawyers and hired a program coordinator,
a woman named Hepsy Burnett, who would later serve as
the new government's chief of staff. Was that mission that
(15:02):
that I can't stress enough that must have just held
us together truly to have a constitution that reflected what
the old Sage people wanted and what were you hearing
from people they were confused to? They were confused to.
So they had questions for us that, you know, what's
dis government going to look like. We kept telling them
(15:24):
that's going to be for you to decide. And so
we had questionnaires and we had all kinds of things
that went out in the mail. But then we still
had town meetings. The Commission worked for two years. They
held meetings in oath Age County, but also in Texas
in California. Jean Dennison, a citizen of the oath Age
Nation and an Indigenous studies scholar who wrote a book
(15:46):
about the government reform, counted more than forty meetings in all,
each about two hours. Then, in January two thousand and six,
the Commission and its staff and consultants gathered for a
three day writing retreat at a hotel and holsa. It
was time to write the oth Age Nation's new constitution.
Over the next several weeks, the constitution took shape. On
(16:10):
March eleventh, two thousand and six, there was one final
vote whether or not the O s Age people would
adopt this constitution. We were all in Pahuska and then
we had a little kind of a little party, I
guess with the commission. We were all nervous. We were
all really nervous. While we were talking, Priscilla's husband's skip
(16:35):
pulled something from a cabinet, a scrapbook Priscilla made from
that night over photos votos Jim. Alongside those photos, Priscilla
had a copy of the election results from that night.
Let's see, shall the constitution be approved? So yes? Was
(16:57):
a total of one thou and fordered in fifty four,
which was sixty six. The only thing I remember is
signing it. It was very special and I just I
have a nice handwriting, and I look at that and
(17:18):
I think that doesn't even look very good because I
was just nervous. It was a wonderful feeling and very proud.
Oh my gosh, we were so proud. All that work
(17:42):
paid off. Later that year, members of the Commission in
the Youth Age Tribal Council formally signed the constitution in
transition to the new government. This is cape from that night.
It took a lot of people to make the constitution happen,
not just Jim or Priscilla, put an entire community. In
(18:03):
the video of the ceremony, the room is packed, every
seat is filled, people are standing in rows looking over
each other. That night in two thousand and six, I've
been told, was a big celebration. Almost exactly a hundred
years after the n Act, the O s Age Nation
was creating the government it wanted on its own terms.
(18:25):
Jim Gray started off the signatures, the ceremonies, polidation, hours
and years and generations of hard work. We all had
a constitution, big heavy leather bound copies of it, and
we all signed our signature on. Each one of us
put our names a signature on there. But I didn't.
(18:49):
And so we had this big moment where all the
councilmen and me and the commissioners were all in this
one big line and we were signing these documents and
handed to each other, and it was just going back
and forth, back and forth until we got them all bed,
you know, and then I launched into my version of history.
But before we talk about moving forward, and I do
(19:11):
want to get into that a little bit today. I
want to talk about the past. Our people were never many,
but they were fierce, and they were proud, and they
were self sufficient, and they exercised their own sovereign And
(19:31):
as we look back at that period of time leading
up into t o A, when after a visit with
President Jefferson Ball, they will says nation entered its first
treaty with the United States. So I'm going through this
history of telling everyone how the treaties that the tribe
entered into resulted in a loss of huge amounts of
(19:54):
our territory and our land, but worse, a loss of
who we were. Our culture, our customs are oral traditions,
the things that we would only pass down from one
elder to a younger person. And it was during that
period of time that we we reached within ourselves to
find a new definition of Osage and it took leaders
(20:19):
at the time like the Chief Bigheart would initiated and
lead an effort to draft a constitution of the So
they started a constitutional form of government that tried its
best to capture what they could from that old way
and bring it up to a new way under a
document that was voted on by the o s Age
(20:41):
people that they that governed them. You know, and we
used that to build up our tribe again, slowly but
surely start building it up. In nineteen one, we lost
that constitution the Secretary of Interior, and that's when federal
policies started hitting us, like the Allotment Act. But Congress
(21:03):
went a step further. They not only decided who was
an Oth s Age, they also decided how the O
s Age government was going to be run and what
their functions were going. This was the government of the
O s Age people's design. It's not what they wanted.
They already decided what they wanted, but in the phase
(21:23):
of the political winds of the day, the O s
Ages took the congressionally created Oth Sage Tribal Council with
the Chief and Assistant Chief and tried to make this
work for the betterment of the people. It was impacted
even further by the boarding school era. They were taking
kids out of their communities and sending him to boarding
(21:44):
schools to you know, destroyed that cultural part of who
they were and tried to make them little white people
that had no knowledge of being Indian. And it devastated
a generation of O s Ages because of the policies,
But through the success of our ceremonies, the fact that
many O stage families who retained their wealth, they were
(22:08):
able to preserve our language and our culture in homes
in the villages. They were able to protect our ceremonies,
the lunch. They were able to make sure that that
drum was going to continue to beat every year in June.
They took care of that drum. They took care of
the people. They took care of those ceremonies and celebrations
that defined us who we were. All this at a
(22:30):
time when federal policy was doing everything it could to
de tribalize Indian people, to separate us from our God,
to separate us from our traditions and our language. And
at that point, I could just say, here's I say
all of this history to say this, at no point
(22:54):
since our first interaction with the United States government did
we ever stop fighting for our people or sovereignty. And
as I go on, I wanted to I want to
do something right now because it's something I think is important.
Because what I'm talking about is how the Old Station
nation has survived. Even though they had a governing document
(23:15):
that was not of their creation, they tried to make
it work as best they could. And I would like
to ask everybody in this audience who has a relative
or as descendant of a relative, who has ever served
on the Old States Tribal Council, please stand, Thank you,
(23:43):
thank you very much. You saw it in those early treaties.
You saw it in those removals. You saw it in
us buying this land here. You saw how we preserved
the mineral state in the nineteen Act. You saw it
in our commitment to Heck, we declared war on Japan
and Germany through a Tribal Council resolution after in World
(24:05):
War Two, after Pearl Harbor, a resolution, i might add,
has never been rescinded. We're stubborn folks, you know. O
Sages had never given up the notion of sovereignty. It
didn't just happen on my watch. It has been the
accumulation of generations of oh Ages. A year after the
(24:30):
new constitution was adopted, Jim sent out a survey to
oth Age citizens. He wanted to know what they wanted
from their new government, what they thought should be the
top priorities, and survey after survey came back with the
same answer. Land, or more specifically, buying back land expanding
the O s Age Nation's reservation base because finally the
(24:54):
O s Age people had a government that was theirs.
Finally they had the ability to take back what had
belonged to them a century ago. But if there's anything
that you can you hopefully learn from all this is
that host I just never gave up. They never gave
up trying to retain the things that made us who
(25:16):
we were. And I think the same attitude that drove
the O Sages to come to this land here and
buy it outright so that we would never move again,
is the same attitude that drew the O Sages to
buy the Turner ranch. It's part of who we are
(25:44):
when we come back the Blue Stemac position. After the
O s Age government reform, there was still a long
way to go to make good on O s Age
citizens desire to buy back land and expand the reservation base.
(26:06):
Federal policies over the last hundred years had worked to
strip land away from the os Age Nation and its citizens.
So when those rumors made their way to Raymond when
he was Assistant Principal Chief, the rumors that Ted Turner
was selling his ranch, Raymond didn't waste any time he
started working the phone, spent his Christmas holiday talking to bankers, lawyers,
(26:29):
other stage government officials. We were simply trying to map
out a path from point A to point B, having
never done anything like this before. Ever, it's a little
bit hard for me to not get emotional at this point.
We all understood that it was and historical inflection point
(26:55):
for the os Age nation, and we all carry with
us our ideas about the future and our ideas about
the past. Mine can be summed up very easily. With
the purchase of this ranch, we would be able to
(27:17):
do something we had not done for two years if
we needed to, and that was feed ourselves. That represents,
if you think about it, even in the modern context,
(27:39):
that represents an enormous amount of sovereignty and independence. To me,
it's the ultimate safety net socially, economically, and certainly from
just the simple aspect of food, shelter and clothing. That's
how it looked at me, and that was my motivation.
(28:05):
The stakes were clear to Raymond, to the Chief to
Chief Jeffrey. Standing there, Raymond told me a lot of
people were supportive of the purchase, but others were skeptical
it was going to cost a lot of money. Land
in O s Age County is valuable. This was a huge,
contiguous ranch with prime grass for ranchers to graze cattle
(28:27):
or bison or horses. Raymond knew they'd have competition. The
Osage Nation was going to have to bid high if
they wanted to win. The Nation was in a better
financial position than before, thanks in large parts revenue from
the casino businesses it started opening in two thousand two,
but spending so much of it at once made a
(28:47):
lot of O s Age citizens nervous. My responsibility was
to work Congress because I sit with him as assistant chief,
spent eight years on the Congress prior to that, and
so I knew the rules and it was lobbying, pure
and simple. The primary goal of the lobbying was to
(29:11):
get the Congress to get the price up as high
as we could get it. Freeman told me he could
feel the pressure. They didn't want to lose the bid.
The Nation also had to secure the financing for the land,
and they had to do all this in thirty days
when the bids were due, or they'd miss out. Raymond
(29:32):
went back and forth with members of the O. S
h Congress they had emergency meetings narrative on a number.
The highest bid they'd let Raymond and Chief Standing Bears submit.
The Congress has met for the final time, they've established
the maximum number. I've been advising Chief all along on
(29:54):
general strategies related to a bidding and auctioneering. And he
always sits at one end of the conference table. Want
I always sit on the other. And that's exactly where
we were the morning after Congress gave us the number.
So he sat down and he said, you go first.
I said, okay, well, I think the number needs to
(30:17):
be this, and the way I arrived at that is
is man, you know. And I explained my rationale of
how I ended up with this number, which was blow
that of the Congress. He said, no, that's not what
we're gonna do. He said, We're just gonna bid the max.
(30:37):
And I lean back in my chair and I said really.
He said, yeah, we're just gonna big the max. I'll
be fully responsible for it. And he said, I can.
It's really easy for me to tell you why we're
gonna bid the max. I said, why is that? He said,
because there's only two outcomes, we win or we don't win.
(30:59):
And I will take the heat from Congress all day
for maximizing the bid for their maximum appropriation, but that
will fade over time. And what will never fade is
if we swing for the fence and miss because we
did not maximize our bid. And as soon as he
(31:20):
said that, the political wisdom of it occurred to me immediately,
and I said, I'm I'm, I'm good with that because
it made since it wasn't It wasn't a financial decision
or a business decision. It was a really simple thing
about how history was going to view what we did.
(31:42):
The amount. Chief Standing Bear told Raymond the oc Eage
Nation would bid the maximount with seventy four million dollars.
It was a closed bidding process. Raymond would have to
deliver the bid in person to an office in Kansas
where the land broker was. Raymond brought company a man
named r. J. Walker. R J was on the Sage
(32:03):
Congress at the time. Now he's the assistant Principal Chief.
I've talked to him about this day too. He called
it fateful. Raymond showed me a picture of that morning,
the morning they drove a seventy four million dollar bid
to Kansas. Oh wow, so yeah, it looks like it's
so it's Scott confidential and red ink all over its
(32:26):
Age Nation Executive branch. And at this point Congress doesn't
now that we put the whole number in there either.
The broker was in a town called Hutchinson, Kansas, almost
three hours away from Pahaska. They had until four thirty
that afternoon to submit their bid, but Raymond and r
J weren't taking any chances. They left Osage County first
(32:46):
thing that morning. And oh, Stage police have been notified.
We checked in from time to time and if for
any reason we were in an auto accident or anything else,
and we joked about is they would send the o
Stage Nation police up, they would pick up. They would
leave us roadside bleeding to death, and they would pick
(33:09):
up the bid and they would go on to Hudge
and deliver. Well, it wasn't quite like that, but that's
how we thought it. The main thing. Yes, so they
were like basic backup, back up to the bid to them,
regardless of what happened to us. I hope that doesn't
(33:33):
speak to how goofy we might appear. I hope it
speaks too how important we thought it was by the
time they got there, they ended up having plenty of
time to kill, so they made a stop before going
to the broker's office. Yeah, we were just in a
good will store passing time because yeah, we both bought
(33:54):
a jacket and we both still own the two dollar
jacket the suit jackets that we bought it. And I
remember that. Raymond said there was a reason they didn't
go straight to the broker's office hand in their seventy
four million dollar bid right when they got there. We
were in hutch we were new, We made the time
and everything. There's also sometimes when you're among native people
(34:18):
for a really long time and you begin to understand history,
your trust level is um It does not go all
the way to the bottom there. There's some things you
just do not trust. And our Jane I talked about it,
but we weren't going to just lay that down and
walk off. We just weren't going to do that because
(34:39):
under nefarious circumstances, which we did not think it was,
but we weren't taking any chances. Anybody could have shown
up at any time that day and delivered the bid.
The deadline was for thirty anybody could put whatever number
they wanted to do in there, so we were gonna
wait until it that was not a possibility. We just
(35:01):
sat there with ours in our hands. Four o'clock got
there and there still wasn't. There's only two bids, and
we expected three. We didn't know we had our own
grapevine going, but we we knew that there might be
as many as three bids and possibly four, but the
number that we kept hearing was three. So Raymond and
(35:24):
r J wait outside the broker's office all day bit
in hand, waiting to turn it in at the last
possible moment. So it's four o'clock. We're sitting there, still
chit chatting with with the broker, and I reached a
point where it's like, let's just go. I mean, I
was kind of bored. I mean, we've had enough talk
(35:47):
with him that and we knew what our number was.
So r J did not want to leave. R J
wanted to stay. He said, no, I think we should
stay here. I said, r J, it's gonna be like
super awkward. We're sitting here for an hour and a
half and then another bidder walks in and we've been
sitting here for this long. I mean that that that's
(36:08):
that doesn't smell good, and so it was as much
for appearances as anything else. And I was in the
executive branch and invited r J long, So r J
kind of reluctantly relented, and we said goodbye and left
our bid. At about ten ever or four, we leave
(36:29):
his office. He's on the fourth or fifth floor. We
leave his office, walked to the vestibule outside the elevators
and there's a cowboy standing there with a briefcase, and
we're getting ready to go down and he's just arriving.
And as we're going down, r J says, you think
(36:50):
that was that other guy? I said, I don't know,
r J. I'm really tired of thinking about it. I'm
just we're out. Let's just go. So we went back
to the car, we got in and we headed home.
I checked in with chief, told him we delivered the
bid successfully, et cetera. And as it turns out, the
(37:13):
gentleman was the other bidder, and we did not know
that at the time. But we're on our way back,
we figured the last bid has been submitted. We don't
know where we stand. It's two and a half hour
drive home. We are still on I we are less
(37:34):
than an hour out of hutch but we're still in Kansas.
My cell phone rings and he said, I have reviewed
the bids, I have spoken with Ted Turner, and you
are a successful bidder and at present you're the high bid.
(38:01):
Raymond knew when he got this call that it wasn't
the end of it. There were still a lot of
other details to be worked out, the financing, all the
legal stuff, everything involved in a massive land deal. But
he was the first person in the O s Age
Nation to know that their bid there are seventy four
million dollar bid was the highest, that if everything else
(38:24):
fell into place, they'd own this land again. And as
that starts to sink again, Raymond feels elated, just delated.
We pulled. We pulled over on the side of my
got out high five. I just didn't want to try
(38:48):
to drive and talk about this. At the same time.
Chief was incredulous that we I was incredulous that I
gotta call him away out. I mean that that was
like totally unanticipated. It was wonderful. Did you what did
you say to r J? Because I assume you were
you were on the phone, so he can't hear, like,
what did you tell him? I just remember we're in
(39:10):
a in that ford. We call it the Chief mobile. Uh,
we're in that ford and we pull over and he said,
he said, your ship man. I said, no, I'm not.
And um he was. He was every bit as giddy
as as I was. Giddy. Is a really good to
(39:32):
describe how he felt with that. The deal closed six
months later in June, nearly one fifty years after the
Each nation bought this land from the Cherokee Nation, they
(39:54):
owned a big piece of it again. It was just
an incredible feeling to be so close to um to
to an historical inflection point. Um. It was, I don't know,
it's it. I'll never have that feeling again, I don't
(40:17):
think um And to have it once, uh, in your
tribe's history is a lot. It's it's a really good feeling.
And I'm I'm proud of us for doing that. It
does go without saying that that this never would have
happened if not for the reformation of the government. So
(40:39):
that old saw about you know, standing on the shoulders
of those that came before you. There were sacrifices in
in visionaries in the past and in o s Age
government going all the way back to the sixties um
that we're trying to move us out of what we
were in the position we were placed in. And I
(41:00):
can know six in the years since, the Osage Nation
has brought in more bison to graze on this land,
cattle to the tribes also bought some more land, nothing
like the Blue Stem acquisition. That much land doesn't go
on the market very often. But the os Age nations
buying property in downtown Pahaska, building a new health center,
(41:20):
a food processing plant. There's still something outstanding with the
ranch the nation bought from Ted Turner. Right now, it's
held in something called the simple the most common way
to own real estate. Oth Age leaders want to change
that to make sure that land can never again lead
the os Age Nation. They want to put the land
(41:42):
in trust. One must remember at the purpose of the
land into trust process was instituted by the United States
to allow tribes to go back and re acquire lands
(42:03):
that may have been lost for any number of reasons
and taken out of out of the tribe's hands. And
so it's a level of protection that you couldn't get.
The land is not health and trust, that's correct, It's
(42:25):
it's a nine and day difference between fee and trust.
But there's a problem. When the oath Age Nation applied
to have this land put into trust, the federal government
said it couldn't do that, at least not yet. The
surface land, the government said was too damage from decades
of oil and gas drilling. They said it would need
(42:45):
millions of dollars worth of remediation work before they would
agree to accept the title on behalf of the oath
Age Nation. Raymond says it's a bit of an ironic
twist because all that oil and gas drilling it was
permitted by the US government, that was their job as
trustee of the o s Age Mineral Estate. That set
(43:06):
of facts would point to the b i A as
the responsible party for that environmental degradation. Yet the same entity,
the b i A, is the one that raises its
hand and says we can't put this into trust. Look
at this environmental degradation. I've asked the b i A
(43:28):
about this. They declined to comment and have not made
Secretary deb Holland available for an interview. I've also talked
to R. J. Walker about this, since he's the current
assistant Principal Chief. He said the os Age Nation is
working with the b i A to submit a new
application to put the land in trust. As with so
much of the history here, the os Age Nation is
(43:50):
trying to make sure it's land and its sovereignty are
secure forever, trying to take back control of what was theirs.
And Raymond told me, just like it took time for
this land to leave O s Age hands, it'll take
time to get it back. And so when you look
out at a plat map of both Age County today
(44:11):
and you see how many non O Sage landowners there are,
you see that as a design of allotment. Honestly, I
think I'm enough of an optimist that I don't look
at those maps. What I do look at is the
map of O s Age holdings and see how much
more there is that we need to do. If I
(44:34):
spend too much time as an elected official dwelling on
the past, I'm not focusing on the future. We only
all have our attention to apply to anything. If we
apply it to the future, then we're going to continue
on this path of reacquisition of lost land. If we're
looking back, all we're doing is dwelling on something that
(44:58):
we can't change. Can We should we study it and
learn from it. Absolutely, should it be what we quote
chapter and verse on a daily basis not, In my opinion,
We're going to succeed by looking forward and figuring out
how we continue to earn the resources to continue this
purchase of previously owned lands. That's where I think our
(45:22):
focus could should be always. I was there when Chief
signed the deeds and to close it and said, this
is the day we stopped going backwards. This is the
day we begin to go the other direction towards buying
all of this reservation back. And it will take us
(45:45):
long to buy it back as it did sell it,
perhaps even longer, but we have the means to do so.
If the Germans can build up small land empire, there's
no reason we can. M no no no no no
(46:19):
no no no no no no no no no no.
For maps, newspaper archives, photos and other documents related to
this episode, go to bloomberg dot com. Slash in Trust
(46:44):
In Trust is a production of Bloomberg and I Heart Media.
It's reported and hosted by me Rachel Adams, heard additional
reporting by Alison Edda special thanks to Jeane Dennison, whose
book Colonial and Tangle documented the Osage Nation's government reform.
Her upcoming book, Rebuilding Relationships of Respect Self Determination in
(47:08):
the Osage Nation, will document the Osage Nations land purchase.
Davis Land is our senior producer. Samantha Story is our
executive producer. Jeff Grocott is our senior editor. Additional editing
by Daniel Ferrara. Additional production by Victor eBay As, production
support from joelga to Carly. Sound engineering by Blake Naples.
(47:30):
The music by Laura Workman. Photography by Shane Brown. You
can email us at Podcasts at Bloomberg dot net. Find
in Trust anywhere you get your podcasts m
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