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Episode 8: The Pivot
Louise Red Corn It was on the second page. The tagline was: “If it stinks, we’ll find it eventually.”
Rachel Adams-Heard This is Louise Red Corn. She’s a journalist. She used to run the Bigheart Times — the newspaper that published that list of all the non-Osage headright holders back in 2009. The paper’s had a lot of taglines over the years.
Louise Red Corn The former owner of the paper had it just being, “The only newspaper in the Barnsdall area that gives a diddley.” And I thought, “No, that’s just not good enough.” So I changed it to “The only newspaper in the world…” and they came over and they were like, “Louise, that’s just a really gross exaggeration.”
Rachel Adams-Heard Louise works for the Osage News now. She’s married to Raymond Red Corn, the former assistant principal chief who delivered the bid for the Bluestem acquisition. These days, Louise mostly covers the Osage Nation, but she’s spent a lot of her career writing county news, and you can’t cover Osage County without covering the Drummonds.
Louise Red Corn I mean, I’ve written a lot of stories about them from speeding tickets to assaults to exaggerated statistics at the Mercantile in terms of how busy they are.
Rachel Adams-Heard These stories date back a while. Speeding tickets that were dismissed. The time a Drummond punched a police officer. Gentner Drummond represented him in court, and the man pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault of an officer. A story about Ree Drummond’s Mercantile in Pawhuska, and whether it was actually seeing the thousands of visitors a day she said it was.
Louise Red Corn I think sometimes there is the aforementioned chutzpah that they don’t always follow the rules the way everybody else does. A lot of people kowtow to them — kowtow to the Drummonds and just sort of give them a green light. And I think the reason in Pawhuska is that the Drummonds have done a hell a lot of good for Pawhuska. You know, sales-tax collections are up between 30 and 50% over pre-Mercantile times. They built a new football field at the high school. They’re in the process of building an animal shelter that — and they’ve never sought, I mean, they’ve kept those things secret almost. I mean, they just have not even ever claimed credit for those two items. So, I mean, there’s a certain amount of gratitude that is natural.
Rachel Adams-Heard I’ve heard this from other people too — that there are Drummonds today who have helped revitalize Pawhuska. They’ve brought jobs, tourists, money to a place that needed it. That they’ve given back to the community. And not everyone feels that way, of course. But what Louise is talking about here gets at the complexity of it all.
The complexity of a place shaped by a hundred years of history, with shifting rules and fortunes and power dynamics. A place where tremendous wealth was lost — and gained — by families who are still neighbors. Who run into each other at the store, or dinner, or Friday night football games.
And that complexity, it doesn’t just describe the relationship between the Drummonds and the Osage Nation. Because there’s another character in this story, that’s been here all along: the United States government.
Jean Dennison [Introduces herself in Osage…] My name is Jean Dennison. I’m a citizen of the Osage Nation from Oklahoma and an associate professor of American Indian studies at the University of Washington.
Rachel Adams-Heard Jean was one of the first people I interviewed for this story. I was nervous. I was an oil reporter from Houston. A lot of this history I was learning about for the first time. I couldn’t figure out if the trust relationship with the US government was a good thing or a bad thing. If Osage citizens liked it.
And Jean told me, I wasn’t going to find one answer. She said over and over again that this story — the Osage Nation’s story — is really complicated.
When Jean and I talked this last time, it was about that trust relationship with the US government. Something Osage leaders have fought tirelessly for — for over a century. Something they want to use today to protect the land they bought from Ted Turner, by putting it back into trust with the US.
I wanted to ask Jean why — why pursue the trust relationship if it’s been so flawed in the past, and, occasionally, even today. I guess I wanted to know: Why bother?
Jean Dennison There was a lot of failures to honor the kinds of promises that were made in these treaties by the United States government. But ultimately these treaties really did offer the United States access to our lands, but they also offered Osages the ability to have some kind of protection against other kinds of threats.
And that’s really what this trust relationship was about — was this ability to have increased protection against the threats that were rising in our territories.
Rachel Adams-Heard In order words, the federal government was a tool. A tool to keep the state out of the Osage Nation. Jean says, it was a flawed one. But it was the best tool the Osage Nation had at the time.
Jean Dennison And so what we see again and again is these kinds of looking at the world around us and trying to figure out, what are the tools, what are the things that we can do to make this pivot again and again. Looking at the situation around us and saying, “Okay, the structures that we have in place right now are not working for us, they’re creating more chaos than they are creating order. And so we’re going to pivot.”
Rachel Adams-Heard The Osage Nation is in the middle of a pivot. One that involves land, oil, and sovereignty. That will determine the future of who controls these nearly 1.5 million acres — and how.
This is In Trust. I’m Rachel Adams-Heard, and in this episode, you’re also going to be hearing from someone else, Allison Herrera. She’s a contributing reporter on this series and she’s here to help me explain this pivot.
Elizabeth Lohah Homer I did a presentation for the Osage Nation employees back, I believe it was in 2009 or 2010.
Rachel Adams-Heard This is Elizabeth Lohah Homer, the lawyer in DC who sits on the Osage Nation’s Supreme Court.
Elizabeth Lohah Homer I had told people — I had said this before the Irby decision came down — if there’s any justice left in America, the Osages win the Irby case.
Rachel Adams-Heard The Irby case. This is just one in a whole bunch of reservation cases in recent years that are incredibly important for understanding where everything stands today. Where the state’s jurisdiction ends, and tribal nations’ jurisdiction begins.
No one’s covered these cases more closely than Allison Herrera, the Indigenous Affairs reporter for KOSU, a public radio station in Oklahoma. She’s going to help me out on this one.
Allison Herrera Allison here. So, Irby. It was a case about taxation. Whether the state could collect income taxes from Osage citizens who live and work in Osage County. But just like all of these cases, the Irby case was about something much bigger than that. Because at the center of it was a question: Was there still an Osage Reservation? Or had it been disestablished when the US divided up all the surface land into parcels under the 1906 Allotment Act?
I talk to a lot of federal Indian law experts. And they all pretty much said no; the Osage Reservation was never disestablished. The 1906 Act did a lot of things, but it didn’t get rid of the reservation.
That’s what Elizabeth was saying in that presentation, back in 2010. She thought the Osage Nation had an even better case than a lot of other tribal nations because of the Osage Mineral Estate and all the underground land that the Osage Nation fought to hold onto.
Rachel Adams-Heard Then, the decision hit.
Elizabeth Lohah Homer I was sitting in front of my computer at my desk, and I got an electronic copy of Irby and started reading it. And the next thing I know, I’m having a hard time breathing. I was just, Oh, my God, this is the worst, the worst opinion.
Allison Herrera The US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled the Osage Nation Reservation had been disestablished. That it was no longer Indian country.
Elizabeth Lohah Homer And so to me, the Irby decision truly struck me as — there is no justice left in the United States. And as an officer of the court and a lawyer for my entire life, my entire career, that just was emotionally wrenching. Devastating to me because it was so wrong. So wrong.
Rachel Adams-Heard In the decade after the Irby decision, the Osage Nation tried to find a path forward. Another way to get its reservation recognized by the court.
Allison Herrera But they were kind of stuck. You can’t bring the same case twice. The court had ruled. And, it ruled that the Osage Reservation was disestablished.
Rachel Adams-Heard But then—
(Audio from US Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts: “We’ll hear argument first this morning in Case 18-9526, McGirt versus Oklahoma…”)
Rachel Adams-Heard In 2020…
(Audio from US Supreme Court, Ian H. Gershengorn: “Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court…”)
Rachel Adams-Heard …something big happened. Another case: McGirt v. Oklahoma.
(Audio from US Supreme Court, Ian H. Gershengorn: “This case is resolved by the fundamental proposition that decisions about sovereign rights are for Congress to make, and Congress makes those decisions by speaking clearly in the text. The decision below must be reversed because the text makes clear that Congress never terminated the Creek Reservation and never transferred federal criminal jurisdiction to Oklahoma.”)
Allison Herrera McGirt was another case involving a reservation in Oklahoma. But this time, it was the Muscogee Nation Reservation, also known as the Muscogee Creek Nation. This case was about a felony crime and whether it should be prosecuted in federal or state court. But just like the Irby case, it was also about something much bigger — whether the Muscogee Nation’s Reservation still existed.
The McGirt case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. It was decided on July 9, 2020 — the last day before the court said it would recess. And as someone who’s covered Indigenous affairs for a while, I’ll just never forget it. This was one of the biggest wins for tribal sovereignty in decades. The highest court in the land ruled that the Muscogee Nation Reservation still existed. The Allotment Era — when the US government divided up Native land — didn’t change that.
In the months after the McGirt decision, other tribal nations in Oklahoma asked state courts to apply the ruling to their own reservations. The Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw Nation, Seminole and Quapaw. They had their reservation statuses affirmed, too. But it hadn’t been applied to the Osage Nation. At least not yet.
Wilson Pipestem McGirt is a case, in my mind, of one of great hope. But also great pain.
Rachel Adams-Heard This is Wilson Pipestem, the attorney who’s represented the Osage Nation and the Osage Minerals Council. You heard from him a couple episodes ago. Allison and I went to his office in Tulsa over the summer to talk to him about these cases. How they affect the Osage Nation. What Osage leaders want to do moving forward.
Allison Herrera And Wilson said one of the biggest things McGirt highlighted to him was what could have happened during the 1920s — if the Osage Reservation had been recognized.
Wilson Pipestem That would have been federal jurisdiction over all of those murders, but they treated the Osage Reservation like it didn’t exist anymore. So you had to bring a case against somebody in Osage County Court where justice was not to be found, right. So it wasn’t until somebody was murdered on trust land — Henry Roan was murdered on trust land — that they decided it’s federal jurisdiction now. To me, that shows you the protection that reservation status can bring, because those cases would have been federal jurisdiction to start with. And we may have been able to avoid the loss of many lives if the federal government would have respected the homelands of the Osage people and treated as a reservation, as it should have been for over 100 years now.
Allison Herrera What Wilson is talking about here gets at the importance of having these reservations in the first place. It affects who gets to tax you, protect you and punish you.
Wilson Pipestem You know, there’s just no doubt in my mind as a legal matter, the Osage Reservation was never disestablished. It just never was. The language is not in any of those laws. And even when the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Irby said, “Well, we looked at all the statutes, we don’t find any language of disestablishment, so we’ll go to these other things that now McGirt in the Supreme Court has decided…” — no, you can’t get past that first question. So the Osage Reservation was never disestablished.
Rachel Adams-Heard Elizabeth and Wilson are not the only ones who feel this way. The Osage leaders I’ve talked to are adamant: Their reservation still exists. And eventually, they’ll get the court to recognize that.
Wilson Pipestem And the sooner we can get to that ruling, the easier the transition will be.
Allison Herrera This past year, the Osage Nation piggybacked on a criminal case to try to get the McGirt decision applied to them. They lost with a state district judge for Osage County. But we’ve reached out to the tribe. They said they’re still weighing their options — deciding the best way to move forward. A pivot.
Rachel Adams-Heard But that’s not the only pivot the Osage Nation is planning. When we come back, we talk to the man leading another big pivot.
Geoffrey Standing Bear I’m the kind of person that likes to understand things, even though the older I get, I realize how limited we all are in trying to understand everything. It’s been on my mind, day and night.
(Audio from Geoffrey Standing Bear’s inauguration — introduction: And now ladies and gentlemen, our Kihekah has some words to say to us. His inaugural address.)
Geoffrey Standing Bear There was no written speech.
(Audio from Geoffrey Standing Bear inauguration. Geoffrey Standing Bear: “On June 28 — it was less than two weeks ago — an election in the state of Oklahoma was held. And in that election, several officials of the state who have pledged opposition to the Native American self-governance won their primaries. That was illustrated the next day, June 29, when the Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled in the case of Castro-Huerta.”)
Rachel Adams-Heard This is Geoffrey Standing Bear, the principal chief of the Osage Nation. He’s leading the tribe through all this — how to respond to the McGirt case, and the current state of Oklahoma politics.
Standing Bear is the chief who decided to bid the max amount the Osage Congress would allow, back when the tribe bought the land from Ted Turner. And over the summer, he won another term as chief. He gave his inauguration speech at the Osage Casino in Tulsa. And during it, he kind of dropped a bomb.
Geoffrey Standing Bear I looked to my left and I saw our Minerals Council…
(Audio from inauguration, Geoffrey Standing Bear: “Minerals Council, it’s time for you to fully manage our mineral estate for our people.”)
Geoffrey Standing Bear And I looked over to my right where the Osage Congress, where our legislature was sitting, and said…
(Audio from inauguration, Geoffrey Standing Bear: “Congress, we need you to enact the laws of the Osage Nation to do this.”)
Allison Herrera What Chief Standing Bear is proposing is a big deal. After more than a century of the Bureau of Indian Affairs managing the Osage Mineral Estate, the Osage Nation would be taking it over. All the duties that fell to the BIA would now be the Osage Nation’s responsibility: overseeing leases, making sure oil sites get cleaned up.
This hasn’t happened yet, and it still has a long way to go. Part of the reason Standing Bear wants to do this is pretty practical. He thinks the Osage Nation can do a better job than the US government. The BIA is, after all, a federal bureaucracy. Stuff takes a long time. There’s internal office politics. Outdated software. Staffing issues.
But Standing Bear says this is also about something much bigger.
Geoffrey Standing Bear All of our areas that are engaged in sovereignty, in my view, the one area that is most exposed is our Osage Mineral Estate. So we need to get in there, preempt that with self-governance and use that mineral estate as our, our people who … We purchased this mineral estate in 1872, with our own money. Let us use it the way our elders intended it for us to use it.
Rachel Adams-Heard Allison and I wanted to talk to Standing Bear after he gave this speech. We wanted to know why now. Why, after so many decades, would the Osage Nation want to take it over.
Allison Herrera So we called him just a few days after that speech to ask him about it.
Geoffrey Standing Bear This is a threat that’s unique from the others. It is a threat of control by the state on a regulatory basis, taxation basis, criminal basis. Those are powerful forces.
Allison Herrera In other words, this is about keeping the state — Oklahoma — out of the Osage Nation. And Standing Bear said it’s more important than ever, because of how Oklahoma responded to McGirt. By bringing another case he mentioned: Castro-Huerta.
(Audio clip from broadcast news program.
Anchor One: The US Supreme Court ruling on criminal jurisdiction on tribal land in Oklahoma.Anchor Two: So this ruling today means the state of Oklahoma can exercise criminal jurisdiction over non-Native Americans on tribal land. This comes after the case Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, which questioned who could prosecute non-tribal members who committed crimes against Native Americans.Anchor One: And of course this ruling narrows the 2020 decision McGirt v Oklahoma, which said that Native Americans.)
Rachel Adams-Heard Another court case—I know. But this is important. Because when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Muscogee Nation, Oklahoma wasn’t happy.
On the other side of all this is Kevin Stitt. He’s the governor of Oklahoma. And his office has been at the forefront of trying to undo McGirt, that decision that meant so much for tribal sovereignty. Stitt says by taking away the state’s control, Oklahoma risks becoming some sort of lawless land, with thousands of criminals released from jail.
But Allison’s done some reporting on this.
Allison Herrera My reporting partner Rebecca Nagle and I pulled data from all the tribes over three years to see how many cases would actually be affected by the McGirt decision. And what we found was fewer than 1,000 cases in Oklahoma were affected. But Oklahoma stands by their number, and that argument — that thousands of criminals would be released — has been a pretty key part of the state’s response to McGirt. And over the summer, Oklahoma was successful in limiting the impact of McGirt. The Supreme Court ruled in the state’s favor in the Castro-Huerta case.
Stitt is running for re-election this year. It would be his second term as Governor. He easily won the primary in June, and his next stop is the general election in November.
Rachel Adams-Heard And that election is also where over 100 years of Osage Nation history and Drummond history collide in the present day.
Because as we’ve told you, the Republican candidate to become the next attorney general of the state — the chief law enforcement officer for all of Oklahoma — is the lawyer and big landowner whose family has deep roots in Osage County: Gentner Drummond.
This is a pretty important role at an even more important time, especially when it comes to who gets to prosecute whom. The AG, after all, is the one who guides the state’s response on matters like this. During that first interview in his office, Gentner said one of the things he was running on was a promise — a promise to work more with tribal nations in Oklahoma than Stitt has.
Gentner Drummond With the cacophony surrounding the McGirt decision, our governor, for some reason, just can’t see it in himself to act rationally. And so he’s driven a wedge between the Native American tribes and the state of Oklahoma. And I think that I can undo that.
Allison Herrera Tribal leaders in Oklahoma supported Gentner — and their support means a lot. When the final votes were rolling in during the June primary, Choctaw Nation Chief Gary Batton put out a statement saying this was a win for tribal sovereignty.
So here we have a Drummond, about to be the next attorney general of the state, vowing to work for tribal sovereignty — at a time when the chief of the Osage Nation sees an existential threat from the state. A threat he’s worried would affect the Osage Mineral Estate — the same one that members of Gentner’s family had fought to get a piece of a century ago.
Rachel Adams-Heard If your head is spinning, so were ours. We asked Standing Bear about what he thinks all this means. How this history impacts the state of play today. And his answer was, basically, it’s complicated. And not just because of the Drummonds’ history in Osage County.
Geoffrey Standing Bear During the election, we met and I said — I know Gentner pretty good. He’s a good guy, in my mind, except his views on protecting his ranch and surface owners have come into conflict with us and our mineral estate. I said, “Gentner, if you would pledge not to sue Osage Nation again on these issues between the surface land and the mineral estate, I will ask our Minerals Council to support you, and I would support you for attorney general.” He would not do that.
Rachel Adams-Heard What Standing Bear is saying here is something we haven’t told you about yet but comes up a lot in Osage County. Gentner’s lawsuits. Gentner’s firm brought a lot of lawsuits against oil companies in the area on behalf of other landowners. He considers himself a steward of the land. He has a lot of it, after all — land that he says has been damaged by oil and gas production. That whole time, all the royalties from that oil and gas are going to headright holders.
Gentner Drummond If you injure the land, you fix it. That’s all. That’s all I asked. I was litigating on a case-by-case basis on my land. If you dumped thousands of gallons of saltwater, I would require you to clean it up. And if you wouldn’t clean it up, then I’d sue you.
Allison Herrera But in 2014, Gentner and his law firm did something more drastic. They brought a lawsuit on behalf of an Osage rancher and another landowner in Osage County.
Gentner Drummond When we stepped back, and one of my very intelligent attorneys in this law firm realized, “Well, there’s a NEPA — National Environmental Protection Act — and let’s go use NEPA to make the BIA do its job.” And that’s what we did.
Allison Herrera Basically, they didn’t just go after one oil company. They went after the whole system. The way the BIA was permitting wells in Osage County.
This was one of the biggest lawsuits to affect the Osage Mineral Estate — ever. After Gentner and his law firm brought the case, the BIA said it would revamp its process for permitting wells in Osage County. But those permits started to take a long time. All the while, oil prices were super low. Headright payments were taking a huge hit. A lot of Osage headright holders saw it as an attack — not just by the BIA, but by Gentner Drummond himself.
Gentner says he was a convenient scapegoat. But Standing Bear says that case has him and other Osage leaders on guard.
Geoffrey Standing Bear We have to be cognizant that the new attorney general of Oklahoma, or we believe he’ll be the new attorney general, has displayed interest adverse to our legal interest and our policy interests. We hope Gentner Drummond will work with us, but we are very aware of his views and his history.
Rachel Adams-Heard There’s something else I want to mention, that involves Gentner Drummond’s law firm and Standing Bear’s office.
Just last year, an attorney at Gentner’s law firm represented a woman who worked for the Osage Nation and said she was sexually harassed by two men who served in the chief’s office. According to a letter Gentner’s firm sent to a lawyer for the chief’s office, the woman raised complaints with the tribe’s HR department and was later fired. Drummond Law called it a retaliatory termination and requested a $125,000 settlement.
When the Osage News reported on the proposed settlement earlier this year, they quoted an Osage congressman who said Standing Bear was using the Osage peoples’ money to buy the woman’s silence. One of the accused men still works in his office. Standing Bear says personnel matters are confidential and that he signed a law earlier this year to prohibit sexual harassment.
From the beginning I was told this story was complicated. What I didn’t realize was just how intertwined the Drummond story and the Osage story were — not just in the 1920s, but today.
And after more than a hundred years of history — of decades living side by side on this land — there’s a big question hanging over Osage County: Can the Osage Nation reclaim more of what was lost? Land, headrights, sovereignty. And as they try, will they find an ally in Gentner Drummond?
I started this story with a question: Did the Drummonds have headrights? And if so, how did they get them? But I ended with a totally different understanding of how three brothers built an empire, on the Osage Reservation.
I learned about a store, where they could charge huge markups. A store that dozens of Osage families became indebted to. A lot of times, those debts were repaid when an Osage person died, and one of the Drummond brothers became the administrator of their estate, a position that allowed them to approve claims from their family’s own store. Sometimes, it was the funeral itself that brought the store huge business. A $9,000 funeral. An $18,000 promissory note. The Osage price.
I learned how all of this was done while the Drummond brothers were guardians, meant to protect their Osage wards’ money above all else.
I learned about secrets tucked deep in family stories, and others hidden away in land abstracts and court archives. Secrets that shape this place today. A place where neighbors were given totally different rulebooks. One that allowed some people to have tremendous power, and another that took that control away.
A place where many of the descendants of those people — Osage and Drummond — live side by side. Where the great-grandchildren of an Osage allottee can run into the great-grandchildren of a Drummond guardian while picking up a sandwich at Subway. Or filling up their tank at the gas station.
In November, Oklahoma voters will elect a new attorney general. It’s almost certain to be Gentner Drummond, the descendant of a man who came to this land almost 150 years ago to trade with the Osages. A descendant who will have a leading voice in what the future looks like for tribal nations and the state of Oklahoma.
Meanwhile, the Osage Minerals Council will keep meeting to figure out if they’re going to take over the management of their mineral estate. And if so, what that’ll look like.
Then there’s the ranch. The 43,000 acres the Osage Nation bought from Ted Turner. Standing Bear says the tribe is still working to put it in trust. To make this land inalienable. Osage forever.
Geoffrey Standing Bear In the meantime, my job is to keep the peace with our neighbors and among ourselves until we can think this through. This is a critical time. It’s not letting up. It keeps coming. And I also thought after McGirt, well, it’ll get to us eventually, but it keeps coming.
(Audio from inauguration, Geoffrey Standing Bear: “And this brings me immediately to the day that we all must work together to follow our constitution and protect our mineral estate and all our lands. And how do we do that?
History has shown that where federal law clearly preempts state law, tribal governance — self-governance — preempts state law. Preempts means we need to get there first. Governing ourselves on our lands, with our territory and our people.
I’ll do everything, and assistant chief will do everything we can to claim this territory — to preempt this territory — as Osage law managed by our minerals council.”)
Geoffrey Standing Bear Then at the end I looked at my Uncle Mogri Lookout, he’s my relative. And I said, I want to quote your father Henry, uncle Henry Lookout. And he was you might say a holy man. And he told us, among many things, he said —
(Audio from inauguration, Geoffrey Standing Bear: “Life is short. Be quick about it. Thank you.”)
Rachel Adams-Heard That concludes this part of In Trust. We’re taking a break so we can work on more stories.
Allison Herrera We’ll be back soon. See you then.
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