Eddy Red Eagle Jr. remembers the day well: He was just a boy, and a Pawhuska Village elder, Wakon Iron, had summoned the community to a meeting in the sparse shade provided by young oak saplings in front of the home he shared with his wife, Red Eagle’s Aunt Maggie.
“They put out a couple of scaffolds, and residents of the village came. My older brother and I saw what was going on. We were, in a sense, eavesdropping. Charlie Whitehorn, Rose Hill, Raymond and Waltena Red Corn, Harold and Louise Red Corn, Lillie Cunningham, Red Carter, Paul Pitts, Ted Brunt and more. They all flocked in.”
Wakon Iron’s purpose was certain: The village, he told those assembled, needed a community building where tribal members could take and mourn their loved ones when they passed on.
By the end of the meeting, the plan had been hatched: Brunt, who was on the school board, offered that the old Indian Camp School, a two-room wooden schoolhouse at 21st and Boundary, was about to be demolished because a new school had supplanted it in 1958.
“That’s how it started,” Red Eagle said. “Then the group decided to create a five-man board. That was the first five-man board of the three districts, if I’m not mistaken.
“They called it the Wakon Iron Community Center and that name stuck – rightfully so, because it was Uncle Wakon who had the drive and got it formed.”
For almost 20 years, the old schoolhouse was the epicenter of Osage culture in Pawhuska: It hosted not only funerals and funeral feasts, but also countless committee dinners and breakfasts, handgames, namings, birthdays, cradleboard ceremonies, baby showers, language classes, and other cultural and community events.
“It was amazing how many people we got in there,” Red Eagle said.
By 1974 or so, the space was getting a little cramped, and after many years of scraping by, the Nation came into some money – a grant, perhaps from Phillips 66, as most recall – that the tribal council decided to spend on building community buildings in each village. Soon, the new Wakon Iron Hall was built, but it was just a shell; individual families donated the furnishings and interior.
“It was just a big box,” recalled Paula Stabler. “My grandmother built the family room, got the carpet laid and the walls put in.”
Stabler remembers the first event she ever attended there: Wakon Iron Day, which fell on his birthday, April 1, probably in 1974 or 1975. The year is a little shaky, but Stabler remembers what she wore to the event – a velvet shirt and red skirt – that someone had made for her in 1973, when she was powwow princess – and she remembers Eddy Red Eagle emceeing at that Wakon Iron Day, overseeing the giveaway.
Mary Elizabeth Ricketts was the head cook for two Drumkeepers but spent 30 years cooking at the little and big Wakon Iron buildings. There was no kitchen at the former schoolhouse – which she attended through the 4th grade – so all of the cooking was done outdoors over fire or in private homes in the village then toted into the hall when it was suppertime.
Initially, there was no kitchen in the big Wakon Iron, either. “We used a grocery cart to get everything over to the building,” Ricketts said. “We had to take turns turning bread because it would be so hot.
“We worked hard back then.”
A bittersweet goodbye
On July 11, workers started demolishing the 12,000-square-foot Wakon Iron to make way for a new community hall that will be half again as large as the old one – the huge Wakon Iron of almost 18,000 square feet that should be completed by May 1, 2023.
The older Indian Camp School, which had been converted to a chapel after the big Wakon Iron, was demolished last month and a new chapel recently opened in its place.
“It’s bittersweet,” Ricketts said. “We always had a good time cooking, and it brings back a lot of memories. The big thing was always the fellowship with other people. People were together.”
The building currently being demolished, however, was rife with issues – and while it housed fond memories, it also housed cockroaches, mice and other pests.
“I’m just glad that it’s finally happening,” said Ricketts. “We’re going to get a new building for the people and for the future, and all of the cooks will have a decent place to fix meal. It had gotten really bad in the past few years.
“I hate to even think about the roaches and how they’d come running out of the stove.”
Stabler said that when she got on the Five-Woman Board in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the big Wakon Iron was in “bad, bad shape.”
“People have no idea,” she said. “Grass was growing inside the building and up the walls. It didn’t just have roaches, it was roach-infested; you’d lift up a countertop and it would be swarming with roaches.”
A bingo operation in the hall had gone on long enough that walls and ceilings were covered with tarry smoke residue.
“I pulled my truck in there and put a ladder in the bed and kids wiped the inside down with ammonia,” Stabler said. “When we took down the ceiling tiles, the air-conditioning vents were no longer attached to the ceiling, which is why there was no cooling. We were picking up dead mice all the time. It was a horrible, filthy job.
“We did the best we could, in those days, we literally had no money except what we made from a pop machine that was popular. The tribal council gave us $10,000 and we used a lot of volunteers.”
Stabler remembered Jodell Heath and Kathryn Red Corn working like dogs to get the hall in shape, and dozens of people used their own mowers to keep the grass cut and keep the rat, tarantula and snake populations under control.
Bingo then gaming came to the hall in the 1990s and early 2000s and turned into a nightmare due to lack of accounting, as Stabler recalls: “The people running it were well paid and that was against the constitution of the village. Pull tabs and cigarettes were being sold but none of it was being accounted for.”
The tribal council took over the hall for a while and put in gaming machines.
“We fought them and fought them,” Stabler said. Finally, she obtained a copy of a waiver from the U.S. Secretary of the Interior authorizing gaming on village land – only if the proceeds were used for the benefit of the community.
“I went to the tribal council and told them I was there on behalf of the Five-Man Board and that they were to get out of the building immediately.
“They all got furious. I said, ‘No, I have this waiver. That building belongs to the village and we’re not getting any benefits.’”
The board then negotiated an agreement to lease land for a new casino at the corner of 15th and U.S. 60, where the casino has sat ever since, in exchange for 4 percent of the gross revenue, a deal that will end when the casino moves to its new location across the highway.
Building a community
With income, the board started turning the village around, starting with the Wakon Iron. The crime rate in the village at the time was quite high, but the Five-Woman Board made a conscious decision to build an inclusive crew of laborers.
“We were ridiculed because we were hiring drug addicts and that kind of stuff,” Stabler said. “We fed them breakfast and lunch and paid them $50 a day cash. We were ridiculed but it brought our community together. We lived and worked like a community, supporting each other and being proud of how things looked.”
The last funeral feast in the big Wakon Iron was held June 24 for Jackie Cunningham McCann, a revered cook and adored woman whose grandmother, Lillie Cunningham, used to host village feasts at her home before Wakon Iron called that historic meeting under the young oak trees that led to the creation of a village gathering place.
Red Eagle spoke at McCann’s funeral feast and reminded the 400 present that the building in which they were assembled would soon be gone.
“I told them, ‘Remember what goes on inside this space belongs to you,’” Red Eagle said. “You are the people, you are the Osages, and you have possession of the activity in this space.
“Everything that took place there has always been true to Uncle Wakon’s intentions: We need a place for our people to take care of their families and for cultural activities.
“Big things were done in the little Wakon Iron. Babies going on boards. Birthdays. I got my name in that old Wakon Iron.
“We had big committee dinners that began and ended in prayer. All of that carried over to the big Wakon Iron and all of it will be carried over to the new Wakon Iron.
“The name Wakon Iron is uttered no doubt every day in our community and that’s a wonderful tribute to what Uncle Wakon did on that spring day and on that corner.”
