Raymond Lasley was born January 6, 1953, in Tulsa, Okla. He is the father of three children, Melinda Coburn, Janese Sieke, and Isaiah Lasley, and he has six grandchildren. His pride and joy.
He is the son of Raymond and Peggee Lasley, the grandson of Walter and Mary Lasley, and Granville and Dora Stone.
He is from the Grayhorse District and his Osage name is Homondako. When asked what it means, he says, “My best interpretation is, and according to Leroy Logan, the man who named me, ‘The light on Earth at night.’ So, at nighttime, when it’s dark, there’s still a glow, a little bit of light, that’s what my name means.”
Throughout his life, he has lived in various places, including Colorado Springs, Colo., Manitou Springs, Colo., Woodland Park, Colo., Hominy, Pawhuska, Norman, Lawrence, Kans., Tulsa, and in 1996 he moved to Grayhorse and has been there ever since.
He graduated from Pawhuska High School and attended Haskell Indian Nations University where he obtained an Associate’s degree. He also met and married the love of his life, Gloria Blanchard Lasley.
He’s had many professions and started working at the age of 15, hauling hay and driving a tractor on a farm west of Pawhuska. When he was 16, he started driving a wheat truck and delved deeper into farming. While still in high school, he worked for the Osage tribe maintaining the greens and fairways at its golf course, which used to be located on the Osage campus.
After he graduated from Haskell, he started working on a pipeline in Colorado. He then became a professional firefighter and did so in Norman from 1978 to 1982. He also worked as a contractor, doing construction and painting houses. Then he went to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the minerals department for 12 years.
He played a crucial role in establishing the Osage tribe’s first TANF program as its director, securing $419,000 in federal funding and $150,000 from the state, totaling nearly $600,000 annually for a welfare assistance program in the late 1990s. Lasley was also part of the team that developed the Nation’s first Sovereignty Day, when the Osage Nation Constitution was signed on May 6, 2006.
He is currently a member of the Osage Nation’s Traditional Cultural Advisors committee, representing Grayhorse.
He sat down with the Osage News to talk about growing up around the Inlonshka, his Osage buddies, and blue corn hominy.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited lightly for clarity. To watch the entire interview, visit the Osage News’ YouTube channel.
Osage News: What are your favorite memories of your childhood?
Raymond Lasley: There’s a lot of them, believe me, there’s a lot of favored childhood memories. One of my most cherished memories was at Immaculate Conception parochial school in Pawhuska. They had a parish hall, and in that parish hall we’d have handgames and dances and different functions. And one function was Roman Shackleford’s birthday party. And this was about 1967 or 1966, I don’t recall which, and they had a birthday party for Roman. All the kids were there, and we were seventh or eighth graders, something like that. And we had a dance. Well, let me back up a little bit. In the 1960s, they had all these dance programs on television where they would do the latest dances, the jerk, the monkey, the fruit, and all these crazy dances. And we’d watch that on the weekends. Well, fast forward to Roman’s birthday party, and Romaine Shackleford had a reel-to-reel recorder there. And as each of us came in, actually, when we were all there, he got every one of us individually, and we’d go up there, and he’d interview us, kind of like what we’re doing here, and he’d ask us a couple questions about who we were, and what we were doing, that kind of thing. And everybody just had, it was the best party, Roman Shackleford’s birthday party was the best party we had. Romaine, I’m sure he’s got that reel to reel tape somewhere with all of our voices on there, little seventh and eighth grade, sixth, seventh and eighth grade kids getting up there and having that microphone and talking on there like it was like we were on the dance party program and out of Tulsa, which, by the way, there was a lot of Osages that went to that dance party program in Tulsa. And I won’t name names, but a lot of them are from Hominy, and you’re probably related to a few of them.
ON: What was your favorite dance back then?
RL: My favorite dance was The Jerk, because I could do it. It was easy and all you had to do was snap your back, snap your back (he begins to demonstrate … very well, we might add).
It was fun. It was a fun dance, The Jerk. I wasn’t too cool on The Monkey and The Watusi or any of that stuff. There’s too much movement, but The Jerk was more my thing.
ON: How much has Grayhorse changed since you were young?
RL: Oh, gosh. Now, I didn’t live in that house in Grayhorse when I was young. That was my aunt Eva. My aunt Eva had that house. We had a fence around it at the time. The fence is gone now, that was there. And then there was a summer house, next to where the round house used to be. Now, I remember the roundhouse because my first time ever being the dances, it was in that roundhouse. And, one of the things I remember was getting up on the top steps in that roundhouse and looking out the window. I could see the men from up there very well. And there was probably maybe 20, maybe 20 dancing. Well, my aunt Eva saw me up there, and she made me get down. So I watched it from down on the bottom, but that was before the roundhouse burned down, so, in the 1950s, I think, I don’t know which, late 1950s I would say. And then there was a summer house there, near the community building where they cook. There was a summer house there, and that’s where they used to serve the meals for the committees, and all the kids would wait outside. They served the committees, and then they would serve the adults, and then after the adults, they’d call the kids in, and we’d be able to go and sit down and eat after everybody else. But it was small, and that’s how it was. And then, after the roundhouse burned down, they had a, almost like a barn raising, where they built the arbor, that tin roof arbor that they had. And most of the men in the Grayhorse district showed up with their families when we were raising the arbor. They were welding all the pipes that needed to be welded together. They were putting that tin roof on, and they gave all those little kids little buckets of paint. And we’re all those vertical poles that are all around that arbor. We took them, they gave us little paint brushes and our little buckets of paint, and we got the paint as far as we could reach on those poles. So, you see different heights on the paint, where it goes up, somebody shorter, somebody taller, and it was like that all the way around – until they finally just uniformed it. But we got in there, and I believe the first year that we danced under that arbor was the first year that they put me in. I believe it was 1961. I’ve got pictures, photographs from 1961 with my aunt Jody, and we were there in the house where I live now, in Grayhorse.
ON: How old were you?
RL: I think I was eight, seven, or eight. I’m pretty sure it was eight, because we’d moved back from Colorado, and we were living here in Pawhuska at the time. And then we went 30-some years with that arbor, and then we had that community building. I believe Charlie Tillman got that funded through a grant, and we got by with that for several decades, and now we’ve got amazing, amazing dance ground, amazing community building, amazing chapel. The visitors’ camps are all nice. They’re fantastic. Nice and neat and tidy. Now we’ve got a water treatment plant going in. We have a lagoon that is being repaired and replaced.
ON: Did you ever think those kinds of advancements would come from the tribe?
RL: No, I thought a rural community was going to be a rural community. Actually, we have better variables than they have in Fairfax. So I mean, that’s kind of what I look at, and different ones that I talked to. When I talk about the responsible use of our resources, and we have limited resources, but you talk about being responsible with our resources, just go to our villages. Look at our villages. Look at what we’ve done to our villages with our resources. There’s no better way of spending our money than putting it on our culture. We’ve extended our culture another 100 years with these structures, doing what we’ve done, and that’s the largest change that I’ve seen. No more are we going to see those wildfires go through and destroy our buildings and homes out there. And we’ve got the modern conveniences and fantastic O’s out there. We’ve got showers, gosh, paved parking. We just had gravel out there. One time we were little, another fellow and I, Lester Williams, Lester is Johnny Williams’ younger brother, and we used to run around together. We both started dancing about the same time. We used to sit next to one another, where we got in trouble together, running out there on the dance ground got called out by our older ones. We used to get out there in the gravel parking lot, and we would throw rocks on that tin roof while they were dancing and hit that roof. We did a couple of times, and then we’d see the heads start turning around, and we’d move on, take off from there. But it was small. The dance was small. There may have been 40 dancers, 50 dancers.
ON: What was the happiest time of your life?
RL: Oh gosh, that was definitely when I was married, having children and grandchildren. Without a doubt. Watching those little babies grow up to be adults and moving forward with their lives and having their own children and lives. That is probably the most gratifying thing in my life, is just family.
ON: What do you love most about being Osage?
RL: It’s hard to say. It’s hard to put into words what is most loved about being Osage. It’s from the time we wake up and from the time we go to sleep, we’re Osage. We laugh, we pray, we share food with one another, we dance with one another, and that friendship that we had. I mentioned that my friends that I grew up with, my Osage buddies, that I grew up with.
ON: What is your favorite Osage meal?
RL: You know, it’s not going to be just one dish, it’ll be a combination of all of those dishes. And, you know, we go back to those dishes that we used to have when I was a kid and the yonka pins. I always think about those, with the strip meat soup. Meat gravy is right up there with the top. That buffalo that we had at Grayhorse the other day was probably some of the best meat gravy I’ve ever had. That was really good. That bison, oh my goodness, that was delicious. Kidneys. Kidneys were always good. Blue corn hominy, that’s gotta be one of my favorites, blue corn hominy with well-cooked pork, that is, oh gosh, that’s really good. Melts in your mouth.
ON: What is your motto?
RL: Well, we know how not to act. There were some people who were being, I don’t know if they were being arrested or being called out. But I told the kids, ‘Look, we know how not to act.’
