Who Gets Osage Oil Money? A List From BIA Raises New Questions
Bureau of Indian Affairs discloses headright holdings of trusts, churches, companies — and a defunct care home
Site of the Hissom Memorial Center in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, on February 23, 2010. The institution for people with intellectual difficulties closed in 1994 following allegations that staff abused residents. It remains on a list of shareholders in the Osage Mineral Estate.
Photographer: Stephen Pingry/Tulsa World
More than a century ago in what’s now Oklahoma, leaders of the Osage Nation negotiated with the US to put all the mineral rights to their reservation in a federally managed trust. Shares were distributed to a roll of Osage citizens.
Over the following decades, some one-quarter of the shares of the Osage Mineral Estate left Osage hands — some through violence, others via estates and sales — as part of a larger transfer of wealth from the Osage people to White settlers that is the subject of the podcast “In Trust.” Despite efforts by Osage leaders and citizens to determine where those shares went, the Osage Mineral Estate’s trustee — the US government — kept secret the names of non-Osage shareholders, and how many they held.