In Wah’Kon-Tah, John Joseph Mathews relied heavily on the papers of Osage agent Major Labian J. Miles to recreate the world of the Osage during the last quarter of the Nineteenth century and first quarter of the twentieth century. Using his own experiences, Mathews stressed the spirituality, dignity, and humor of the Osages as they acculturated to the non-Indian world and adapted some of its aspects for their own use.

Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road (Volume 3) (The Civilization of the American Indian Series)

Literature & Fiction

Mathews, John Joseph

United States

University of Oklahoma Press

Perhaps once in a generation a great book appears on the life of a people—less than a nation, more than a tribe—that reflects in a clear light the epic strivings of men and women everywhere, since the beginnings of time. The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters is such a book. Drawing from the oral history of his people before the coming of Europeans, the recorded history since, and his own lifetime among them, John Joseph Mathews created a truly epic history. This account of the Osages, a Siouan tribe once centered in the area now occupied by St. Louis, later on small streams in southwestern Missouri and southeastern Kansas, then in northeastern Oklahoma, is a spiritual one. Their quest in the centuries-long record was for the meaning of Wah’Kon-Tah, the Great Mysteries. In war, in peace, in camps and villages, in their land of the Middle Waters, the Osages met all of the changes and hardships people are likely to meet anywhere. Mathews tells the Osages’ story with rare poetical feeling, in rhythms of language and with dramatic insights that surpass even his first book, Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road, which was selected by a major book club when published in 1932. Mathews managed his vast canvas with consummate skill, marking him as one of the major interpreters of American Indian life and history.

The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (Volume 60) (The Civilization of the American Indian Series)

History

Americas

Talking to the Moon is an unusual and charming story of a Thoreau-like adventure in remote northeastern Oklahoma. Following his university education and his service as a pilot in World War I, John Joseph Mathews returned to his beloved Osage country. He built a sandstone house on a blackjack-covered ridge in the midst of his ranch, and there he lived for ten years, stirred by a natural world that was still undisturbed by the demands of civilization. He became a part of the life that moved about his cottage. In this beautiful account of what he saw and did and thought, Mathews describes his solitary life among the creatures of the ridge with rare perception and style. His observations are based on the white man's seasons as well as the Indian cycles of the moon, and he discourses upon the eccentricities of man, the behavior of animals (including the communicative talking to-the-moon coyote), and the encompassing and particular beauty of his wilderness home. Even the most jaded reader will be touched by the sensitivity and generosity of Mathews' response to the natural world. To read Talking to the Moon is to be reminded that this world once existed for all of us.

Talking To The Moon: Wildlife adventures on the plains and prairies of Osage country

Reference

Challenge Windzer, the mixed-blood protagonist of this compelling autobiographical novel, was born at the beginning of the twentieth century "when the god of the great Osages was still dominate over the wild prairie and the blackjack hills" of northeast Oklahoma Territory. Named by his father to be "a challenge to the disinheritors of his people," Windzer finds it hard to fulfill his destiny, despite oil money, a university education, and the opportunities presented by the Great War and the roaring twenties. Critics have praised Sundown generously, both as a literary work and a vignette into the Native American past.

Sundown

When John Joseph Mathews (1894–1979) began his career as a writer in the 1930s, he was one of only a small number of Native American authors writing for a national audience. Today he is widely recognized as a founder and shaper of twentieth-century Native American literature. Twenty Thousand Mornings is Mathews’s intimate chronicle of his formative years. Written in 1965-67 but only recently discovered, this work captures Osage life in pre-statehood Oklahoma and recounts many remarkable events in early-twentieth-century history.Born in Pawhuska, Osage Nation, Mathews was the only surviving son of a mixed-blood Osage father and a French-American mother. Within these pages he lovingly depicts his close relationships with family members and friends. Yet always drawn to solitude and the natural world, he wanders the Osage Hills in search of tranquil swimming holes—and new adventures.Overturning misguided critical attempts to confine Mathews to either Indian or white identity, Twenty Thousand Mornings shows him as a young man of his time. He goes to dances and movies, attends the brand-new University of Oklahoma, and joins the Air Service as a flight instructor during World War I—spawning a lifelong fascination with aviation. His accounts of wartime experiences include unforgettable descriptions of his first solo flight and growing skill in night-flying. Eventually Mathews gives up piloting to become a student again, this time at Oxford University, where he begins to mature as an intellectual.In her insightful introduction and explanatory notes, Susan Kalter places Mathews’s work in the context of his life and career as a novelist, historian, naturalist, and scholar. Kalter draws on his unpublished diaries, revealing aspects of his personal life that have previously been misunderstood. In addressing the significance of this posthumous work, she posits that Twenty Thousand Mornings will challenge, defy, and perhaps redefine studies of American Indian autobiography.”

Twenty Thousand Mornings: An Autobiography (Volume 57) (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Challenge Windzer, the mixed-blood protagonist of this compelling autobiographical novel, was born at the beginning of the twentieth century "when the god of the great Osages was still dominate over the wild prairie and the blackjack hills" of northeast Oklahoma Territory. Named by his father to be "a challenge to the disinheritors of his people," Windzer finds it hard to fulfill his destiny, despite oil money, a university education, and the opportunities presented by the Great War and the roaring twenties. Critics have praised Sundown generously, both as a literary work and a vignette into the Native American past. 

Sundown (The Gregg Press western fiction series)

Gregg Press

The Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer

University Of Nebraska Press

Susan Kalter presents seventeen previously unpublished short stories by John Joseph Mathews and skillfully intertwines literary analysis, author biography, and archival research with his journals and personal correspondence. Mathews is considered one of the founders and shapers of the twentieth-century Native American novel, yet literary history has largely ignored his work. An Osage writer from Oklahoma, Mathews also spent time in Los Angeles and Europe. The stories in this volume were written at the dawn of the nuclear age by an author who exposed the social dynamics of an emerging world order, an author who had also published explicitly about the ways he observed the East Coast establishment suppressing southwestern writers. This work shows us the aesthetics we missed out on as a result. Topics range from adulterous murder to Cherokee removal, from the thrill of the hunt to the cultural impasses between U.S. citizens in Mexico and their hosts, from the modern Middle East to the fantastical future. The stories bear the consciousness of a postwar world--its confusions and regrets, its orthodoxies and hypocrisies--as well as the mark of a practiced and prolific writer. The Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer sheds light on the complexity of Native American experiences of the last century and the ripple of these stories today. &nbsp;

This revealing book presents a selection of lost articles from "Our Osage Hills," a newspaper column by the renowned Osage writer, naturalist, and historian, John Joseph Mathews. Signed only with the initials "J.J.M.," Mathews's column featured regularly in the Pawhuska Daily Journal-Capital during the early 1930s. While Mathews is best known for his novel Sundown (1934), the pieces gathered in this volume reveal him to be a compelling essayist. Marked by wit and erudition, Mathews's column not only evokes the unique beauty of the Osage prairie, but also takes on urgent political issues, such as ecological conservation and Osage sovereignty. In Our Osage Hills, Michael Snyder interweaves Mathews's writings with original essays that illuminate their relevant historical and cultural contexts. The result is an Osage-centric chronicle of the Great Depression, a time of environmental and economic crisis for the Osage Nation and country as a whole. Drawing on new historical and biographical research, Snyder's commentaries highlight the larger stakes of Mathews's reflections on nature and culture and situate them within a fascinating story about Osage, Native American, and American life in the early twentieth century. In treating topics that range from sports, art, film, and literature to the realities and legacies of violence against the Osages, Snyder conveys the broad spectrum of Osage familial, social, and cultural history.

Our Osage Hills: Toward an Osage Ecology and Tribalography of the Early Twentieth Century

Snyder, Michael

Essays & Correspondence

Lehigh University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mathews, John Joseph. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mathews, John Joseph

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mathews, John Joseph. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road (Volume 3) (The Civilization of the American Indian Series)

The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (Volume 60) (The Civilization of the American Indian Series)

Talking To The Moon: Wildlife adventures on the plains and prairies of Osage country

Sundown

Twenty Thousand Mornings: An Autobiography (Volume 57) (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series)

Sundown (The Gregg Press western fiction series)

The Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer

The Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer

Our Osage Hills: Toward an Osage Ecology and Tribalography of the Early Twentieth Century