The first thing Kathryn Red Corn said she was going to do is take a trip to Kentucky after her retirement.
“I’m going to the races,” she said.
After 17 years of serving as the director of the oldest tribally owned museum in the country, she retired on March 31. Her friends and family have been invited to a Roast and Retirement Party on April 11 at The Water Bird Gallery located at 134 E. 6th Street, in Pawhuska. The party begins at noon.
Red Corn will keep working on museum projects she began on contract for the Nation. Projects like the popular Osage Weddings Project she is working on in conjunction with the Sam Noble Natural History Museum. She is also an elected Osage Minerals Councilwoman and she will serve out her term, which ends in 2018.
A request
Red Corn’s career at the Osage Tribal Museum began with a request from a good friend. Rosemary Wood, longtime Osage activist and former Osage Tribal Councilwoman who served on the 29th and 30th Osage Tribal Councils, called on her to save the museum.
Wood said after the turbulent times in the 1990s when the Osage government was upheaved time and again, first becoming the National Council in 1994 and then in 1997 the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the decision, reverting back to the Osage Tribal Council. She said during that time programs and departments within the tribe had suffered just as much as the court battles had made the people suffer.
“I was the first Osage Tribal Council Member to visit the museum, following the 1997 court of appeals’ decision; I found it in absolute disarray. It was a physical manifestation of the tribe’s disrupted organization and structure. Three times the Tribe had had to disassemble itself and reassemble itself while, simultaneously, governing the Osage Nation and administering the Osage Mineral Estate,” she wrote in a four-page letter dedicated to Red Corn. “The museum needed workers to clean, move, and store cultural materials; with knowledge of the care and handling of art and artifacts; skill identifying, coding and inventorying vast amounts of information; ability to organize methods of procedure and materials.”
She said most importantly, they needed an Osage person with tribal knowledge of the old and the new.
“I knew Kathryn Red Corn to be such a person. As is our custom, in important matters, I went to her home to discuss my concerns. I explained that the museum was in complete disarray with old documents, photographs, and paintings lying about, exposed to light and dust,” Wood said. “There were ceremonial clothes of cloth, ribbon-work, finger-woven yard ties and belts lying on tables and chairs. There were fans and sticks and flutes and whistles, beads and buckskin. Posters and announcements of days gone by and things I didn’t know what were. There was a photograph of my great-grandmother’s second husband.
“It looked as though a village had been attacked and every one had to leave in a hurry.”
Wood said Red Corn’s personal and professional experiences leading up to her taking the post at the museum had made her ready for the job. She had lived in the Pawhuska Indian Village most of her life, as a child and now as an elder and her family has been participants in In-Lon-Schka since the Kanza brought the Drum to Wa.Ka.Ko.Li’n, she said. Red Corn had also founded, co-founded and organized many national Indian youth educational programs. She had worked with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of Education in Washington, D.C.
She said Red Corn worked extensively with scholarship programs familiarizing herself with institutions of higher education, their operating frameworks and their culture. Through the years she conducted herself in a manner consistent with one committed to the Osage Tribe, the Osage people, to their education and their culture.
Wood asked Red Corn, on a voluntary basis, to store and display collections so they would not deteriorate, to identify, inventory and code items so they would not be stolen. She also asked her to develop a procedure to accept new objects into the collection.
“I knew, that Kathryn knew, that it was a request not to be taken lightly. She was well aware of the effort and personal time that would be required. But she agreed. She volunteered. She went to work and accomplished the three requests I had made of her,” Wood wrote. “These actions were absolutely necessary to the protection and preservation of the museum. She then took the museum to places that only her vision and inspiration could.”
Projects
In the past 17 years Red Corn has helmed multiple projects and countless events at the museum. Some of her most recent projects include:
– 2,229: an exhibit that showcases photographs of the original 2,229 Osage allottees of the 1906 Act. The project keeps growing over time and has helped hundreds of Osages find photos of their ancestors and trace their genealogies.
– Territory: inside the museum on the north wall is a map of the 1908 Osage Reservation and shows the exact location of the 2,229 allotted land parcels.
– Osage Timeline: a book that lists the dates and descriptions of major events in Osage history.
– Osage Ten: a project that replicated bronze busts that were made of 10 Osages in the early 1900s. The replicas can now be viewed in the museum.
– Montauban, France: her work in keeping a historical relationship alive with the resident of Montauban brought delegations to the Osage, as well as the Osage to Montauban.
– STL250: she worked in close coordination with a planning committee to involve the Osage in the 250th Anniversary of St. Louis.
– Osage Ballet: museum resources, staff and promotion helped launch the Osage Ballet.
– Osage Weddings Project: she is working closely with the Sam Noble Natural History Museum on gathering projects for an exhibition on Osage Weddings.
Over the years she has hosted lectures and speakers on Osage history, held book signings and readings for Osage authors, held receptions and gatherings for Osages and Osage officials, and continued to increase the museum’s collections and paintings.
Lou Brock, interim curator and a museum employee since 2005, said working with Red Corn has always been inspirational and a blessing. Her presence at the museum will be missed but he has a sneaking suspicion she won’t be far.
“She has been the director since 1998. This place really needed some tender loving care and she exceeded that expectation,” Brock said. “She made me feel welcome just as much as anybody else and we just did what needed to be done and there is still a lot to do – and that’s a good thing.”
By
Shannon Shaw Duty
Original Publish Date: 2015-04-10 00:00:00
