Jimmy Lee Beason II Osage Nation
When I was a teenager, eko wi.da (my grandma) showed me how to identify and gather wild onions. I remember visiting her house in rural Oklahoma and walking down the country road in front of her house looking for thin, long green leaves reaching out from the ground. We would also venture into the woods and look for them. She told me that you have to pick them at a certain time before they start to flower, otherwise they were no longer good to eat. We would dig up a good-sized batch and fill a bag full of them, take them back to the house and clean them. Once clean, she heated up some oil and threw them in the skillet allowing them to sauté for a while until it was time to add egg. When they were done it was time to eat!
Most tribal communities in Oklahoma enjoy wild onion dishes. Osages also harvested and ate wild onion along with other naturally growing plants. Before Euro-Christians invaded our lands altering our way of life, harvesting plant foods was a way to supplement the buffalo and deer Osage men hunted. Needless to say, the concept behind our farming practices were vastly different from those brought by the invader.
Most edible plants were gathered in the “wild” while crops such as corn, squash and beans were planted and cultivated in spaced out rows. It has been estimated there needed to be about two acres of crops per Osage family. With a village possibly numbering a couple thousand people, that is a lot of ground to cover and needless to say everyone pitched in.
Tending to the crops and harvesting were controlled by wako^ wazhazhe, Osage women. When Euro-Christian colonizers observed our societies, they criticized Osage men as being lazy and Osage women as being forced into servitude. This insinuation is utterly false and speaks to the mindset of the Euro-Christian American males who made these observations which were rooted in their own practices of forcing their daughters and wives into subservient roles.
In contrast, Osage women were in charge of the crops and delegating responsibility to the men when need be. There were also ceremonies that acknowledged the act of disrupting the environment to maintain balance and reverence for what we were provided out of respect. In Osage worldviews, women are reflective of the nurturing aspect of the land that provides for us. Where women brought life into this world, providing nourishment and care for the people to grow and live, so to would they provide nourishment and care to the plants that grow to sustain our lives. Through Osage women, their families as well as the plants they tended to, were able to live for generations.
Corn was planted in early spring and tended to until May. The majority of Osages would then leave on their spring buffalo hunt and return about a month later when the corn was in the milking stage. To prepare them to eat, Osages liked to keep the ears in the husk and place them in a pit with hot coals. Once they were done roasting, buffalo fat was poured over them to provide more flavor.
Osage women knew exactly where to look for edible plants, which ones could be eaten, how they should be prepared and how they should be stored. During the summer they gathered nuts and different kinds of berries. “Indian potatoes” or “wild potatoes” were dug up just before fall and were stored for use over the cold winter months. Netleaf hackberries were also used by Osages to make hackberry cakes. There were also paw paws, prickly pears, wild onions, persimmons, yonkapins, prairie turnips, wild grapes, black walnuts, pecans, and hazel nuts. Even today, at our cultural events Osage women run the show and many of these foods are still enjoyed. This knowledge still carries on today from a time when Osage women would have been considered specialists in botany.
Compare this to America’s mythologized image of a lone, sweaty White man toiling away with an ox, barking orders at his family to boost his sense of superiority for “taming” the land while he alone takes all the credit. These are two very different worldviews that are virtually incompatible and speaks to why we as human beings need to restore balance through acts of respect, reciprocity, and acknowledgement for what our grandmother provides for us. Indeed, these values are what will carry the next generations forward.
