OSAGE RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS. The Osage people (wazhazhe or ni u koⁿshka) were the aboriginal occupants of a large territory in the center of the present-day United States located between the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers west of the Mississippi, with reservation lands located today in northeastern Oklahoma. The Osage people are a part of a larger family of American Indian communities including the Poncas, Omahas, Kansas, and Quapaws and related linguistically to the Lakotas and Dakotas.

The Osage were the focus of study by an American Indian ethnographer who was fluent in a closely related dialect. Francis La Flesche, himself an Omaha, published some two thousand pages of ethnographic descriptions of the Osage for the Bureau of American Ethnography, recording substantial parts of many ceremonies. His publications include ceremonial descriptions and extensive recitations in Osage collected from several older practitioners with whom he...