Osage Traditions — Reading Companion

The Secret Society and Its Seven Degrees

Dorsey learned of a secret society with seven degrees, in which “the traditions of the people have been preserved to the present time.” His account is fragmentary: he could obtain only parts of two traditions, dictated by Ha d a-ɔüʇse and checked against partial accounts from other Osage who sang the same chant. The author warns that he was “urged not to speak to them on this subject” among younger men. This framing positions the recorded material as guarded knowledge, not public lore. The society’s graded structure is never fully described in the excerpts, but the repeated appeals to “grandfather” and “grandmother” in the chants suggest a ritualized dialogue between generations of initiates.

Symbolic Chart and Celestial Geography

Figure 389, a facsimile of a chart drawn by Ha d a-ɔüʇse, anchors the narrative. At the top stands a cedar tree—called the tree of life—with six roots, three per side. Below it runs a river with branches. The chart then depicts a sequence of stars: the Red or Morning Star, six stars (Ta¢a d ¢i n , compared by the Omaha to “Large foot of a goose”), the Evening Star, a small star (Mikak'ĕ-ɔiñʞa), and the Pleiades (Mikak'ĕ u d átse pé¢ŭ n d a, “the Seven Gentes of Stars”) between the Moon. Dorsey notes that “nothing is said about this tree till the speaker nearly reaches the end of the tradition,” after which follows the “ceremony of the cedar.” The chart thus functions as a mnemonic map, with celestial bodies corresponding to stages in the chant.

Interlinear Chant and Repetitive Structure

The core of the text is a chant in Osage with interlinear English translation. Each line follows a fixed pattern: a speaker addresses “O grandfather!” (Tsiká!) or “O grandmother!” (iɥʞú!), states an action or observation, and receives a reply. For example, “Bird red | to the st. an. ob. | arrived and stood | he really said | O grandfather!” The chant repeats the formula “Máxe | úʞawi n ’xe” (Upper world | gyration) four times, each time concluding that the people “were not human beings” until the fourth gyration, when they stand on a sycamore at harvest time. The repetition of “he really said” and the call-and-response between elder and younger brothers (wísŭñʞaé, wíɔi n ¢é) emphasize oral performance and ritual correctness.

Readers should approach this work as a field record shaped by Dorsey's brief visit and his reliance on a single primary consultant. The interlinear format preserves the chant’s structure but obscures its musical and performative dimensions. Comparing the two versions of the tradition—and noting where lines are marked as wanting—reveals the limits of the documentation. The symbolic chart offers a visual key to the narrative’s cosmology, but its meaning is only partially glossed in the text.

Dorsey’s seven-degree chart felt like holding a folded map of memory, each chanted line a ridge I’d walked in some other life. It reminded me of winter evenings spent turning pages of Algic Researches, Comprising Inquiries Respecting the Mental Characteristics of the North American Indians, First Series. Indian Tales and Legends, Vol. 2 of 2 — Context and Discussion, where kinship spoke through fox and star alike.