Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community

A Giving Heritage

Jim Cooley author Daniel C Swan author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Indiana University Press

Published:21st Oct '19

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Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community cover

Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community: A Giving Heritage explores how gift exchange, motivated by the values of generosity and hospitality, serves as a critical component in the preservation and perpetuation of Osage society. Authors, Daniel C. Swan and Jim Cooley collaborate with members of the Osage Nation to discuss this foundational cultural practice over two centuries and in multiple social contexts.


The book begins with an in-depth examination of the Mízhin form of marriage, which bound two extended Osage families together for economic, biologic, and social reasons intended to produce value and community cohesion for the larger society. Swan and Cooley then follow the movement of Osage bridal regalia from the Mízhin from of marriage into the "Paying for the Drum" ceremony of the Osage Ilonshka—a variant of the Plains Grass Dance, which is a nativistic movement that spread throughout the Plains and Prairie regions of the United States in the 1890s. The Ilonshka dance and its associated organization provide a spiritual charter for the survival of the ancient Osage physical divisions, or "districts" as they are called today. Swan and Cooley demonstrate how the process of re-chartering elements of material culture and their associated meanings from one ceremony to another serves as an example of the ways in which the Osage people have adapted their cultural values to changing economic and political conditions. At the core of this historical trajectory is a broad system of Osage social relations predicated on status, reciprocity, and cooperation. Through Osage weddings and the Ilonshka dance the Osage people reinforce and strengthen the social relations that provide a foundation for their respective communities.

Readers whom the title might lead to expect a visually attractive presentation of a traditional form of Osage textile art will not be disappointed. But they will encounter much more: an extremely effective account, based on insiders' perceptions for the most part, of central and recurrent expressions of ethos, which anyone interested in Osage people must read.

-- Williams M. Clements - Arkansas State University * Journal of Folklore Research *

Daniel C. Swan and Jim Cooley richly craft together history, practice, and the nuances of kinship making by using the materiality of wedding clothes as the entry point. Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community speaks to multiple audiences from those interested in material culture (beyond wedding clothes to understand gifts of blankets, broadcloth, food, and animals), religion, and complex social relations within Indigenous communities living under the pressures of American colonialism.

-- Fiona P. McDonald - University of British Columbia, Okanagan * Museum Anthropology Revi

  • Winner of CMA Book Prize 2020 (United States)
  • Commended for Wayland D. Hand Prize 2020 (United States)

ISBN: 9780253043023

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 939g

320 pages