Pawhuska High School football had an Osage Night at its Oct. 11 game that ended with a 50-12 win over the Tonkawa Buccaneers.
Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear and Janese Lasley were honorary captains and did the coin toss. During halftime, Osage dancers, singers and a drum circle performed to showcase the rich Osage culture.
Football players had names of family members and friends that have had or currently have cancer, like Lasley. The proceeds from the jerseys, t-shirt sales and Bingo Night were all donated to her. The Pawhuska cheerleaders also decorated Lasley’s home.
Chief Standing Bear was asked to walk out for the coin toss with Janese.
“It was emotional,” Standing Bear said. “I’ve known her family since I was very young. They are very talented, optimistic people.”
Head football coach, Matt Hennesy, started a “Pink Night” 15 years ago at the school, to honor those who have had or have cancer.
“We wear a pink commemorative jersey and put other people’s names on the back that we’re playing for that have cancer or have had cancer,” Hennesy said. “Then we sell the jerseys and give all the money to somebody locally. This year we decided to do it for Janese Lasley.”

Since coming to Pawhuska to coach seven years ago, he’s wanted to start Osage Night. This year he was able to with the help of tribal leaders that guided him to make the night happen.
Hennesy contacted Ashley Walker, whose husband Craig is an assistant coach for the team, as well as Assistant Principal Chief R.J. Walker whose son plays for the team, Vann Bighorse whose grandsons play for the team, and Chief Standing Bear were involved to make Pink Night and Osage Night come together. Hennesy has coached many Osages over the years and said the rich culture inspired him to try to make Osage Night happen.
“We just all worked out a plan, what would be the best way to honor our Osage family and let more people see the culture,” he said. “I couldn’t be more happy with how it went off.”
The pink jerseys had 𐓄𐓘𐓡𐓶𐓮𐓤𐓘 “Pawhuska” written in the Osage orthography and the seal of the Osage Nation on them. The Osage Nation Foundation helped pay for half the jerseys.
“I thought it was a really nice gesture to do that with the jerseys,” Chief Standing Bear said. “I would like to see the other schools do that too.”
“I talked to some of my other boys that aren’t Osage, and they told me how cool it was for them to get to represent their Osage brother that lines up next to them and they get to be a part of one big family,” Hennesy said. “As much as the Osage Nation does for our community, it’s the least we could do to give back and recognize the Osage Nation as well.”

Huskie Pride
Lasley is a well-known Huskies fan as she attended school in the district from Kindergarten to 12th grade.
“There’s no bigger fan of Pawhuska football than Janese Lasley,” he said. “She’s one of our biggest fans. It was a big deal to get to do this for her and getting to see her walk out there with Chief, which was cool watching him walk out there as well and represent our program.”
Lasley was voted Most School Spirit in high school and won the Huskie Pride award in 1995 during her senior year of high school.
“I’ve always had Huskie pride,” she said. “It wasn’t uncommon for everybody to be proud of where they came from. You just grew up with a sense of pride, and I never knew anything different.”
Lasley has always supported the Pawhuska football and school fundraisers for years, and since she has been battling cancer, the community has come in and helped her in her time of need. Coach Hennesy approached her about doing this year’s cancer fundraiser for her.
“When he asked me [to be the fundraiser recipient], I was shocked at first,” she said. “It’s a weird feeling because I’m honored, I’m humbled, and I kind of live my life minding my own business and doing my own thing, and I don’t realize how many people love and support me. It was very amazing, I was awestruck. I was very taken aback that they chose me.”
Lasley was used to being someone who supported other fundraisers for students and athletes in the district, and to have the role reversed was a different feeling.
“I’ve always been the giver,” she said. “I’m always the one on the other end, baking cakes or buying fundraiser stuff. To have the role reversed, I can’t describe it emotionally. I love my hometown, they had my back when I needed them.”
It was special for Lasley, as her two favorite things united: Pawhuska football and Osage culture.
“First of all, for them to have the Osage seal on there is amazing because they had to get special permission from the Osage Nation to even have the seal,” she said. “Right there, wow. The word Pawhuska was in Osage orthography; and to have my name on the back of one of those jerseys, I was so excited and it was just a full circle moment. They honored me, it was Osage Night, there’s the seal, it’s Pawhuska, my hometown, all of it into one, it was awesome.”

Pawhuska High School Junior, Isaac Williams, wore Lasley’s name on the back of his pink jersey, and is one of Lasley’s best friend’s sons.
“For him to choose me out of everybody, I was so honored,” she said. “Especially because he’s a center. My brother was a center, all the guys in my family were a center. Of course it was fitting.”
Lasley’s journey the last eight months has not been easy. In February, she found a lump in her breast.
“It didn’t hurt, and I always heard cancer does not hurt,” she said. “I knew I had a doctor’s appointment the next week, and brought it up to my doctor, kept it under wraps and didn’t tell anyone what I was going through.”
She had to wait until April to have the lump biopsied.
“You’re in that limbo state where I don’t know and I didn’t have any information to tell my family,” she said. “I told them I was going to have to have a biopsy, and I didn’t really have any information, but I just knew something wasn’t right.”
In April, her left leg started swelling around the time the hospitals experienced a cyber-attack and the hospital computers were down. After going to the hospital and back to the doctor, she went back to the doctor and was referred for an MRI, which showed a mass in the lymph node in her groin that was cutting off the circulation in her leg. Not too long after that, the May 6 Barnsdall tornado also hit Bartlesville and she had to have her appointments rescheduled. After the appointment was rescheduled, she had to get a biopsy on both her breast and the lymph node.

During this time her daughter, Gigi Sieke, was running for Miss Indian OU, Lasley was making a wedding coat for her and the OU softball team had their Native American Heritage Day, planning for Osages to dance at the softball game.
“If you know me, I’m constantly booked,” she said. “I’m at work, I just live my life.”
She didn’t receive her results until the day before the OU Spring Powwow.
“My doctor calls me and she’s like ‘Do you want to come in?’ and I tell her to tell me over the phone,” she said. “And she said, ‘You have lymphoma, and its large-cell B, and we are going to have to get you to an oncologist.’ It was a weird feeling because I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t nervous or anxious. I told myself at the beginning when I found the lump that whatever this is, I’m not going to be afraid. I’m going to face it. There’s a huge storm coming at me, and I wasn’t going to be scared, I was just going to run right into the storm and deal with what I have to deal with, keep a clear head, don’t get over emotional, do what the doctors say and come out on the other side. That was my mindset, and that was my attitude.”
Her lymphoma was aggressive. The tumors in her breast doubled in size from the first MRI to the biopsy and doubled in size from the biopsy to when she was admitted to the hospital, and the tumor in her leg changed drastically within a three-week time period.
Lasley being a Pawhuska Huskies fan helped her, because her daughter Gigi discovered the motto when she was a part of the football team in high school.
“She learned the Pawhuska Huskies motto is E.A.T.,” she said. “Dawgs EAT. EAT stands for Effort, Attitude, Toughness. I took that as my motto. It’s all about your attitude, it’s all about the effort you put in, it’s all about your toughness. For me, this would have to be mental toughness because physically I was weak.”
The motto helped her have the strength to get out of bed and do things that were a part of her normal routine. Lasley would still tell jokes, which also helped her get through her day.
Lasley went to the Grayhorse War Mothers dance, and the veterans’ songs helped give her strength as well.
“I was able to listen to a couple of veterans’ songs, and these are men that have seen war, and just hearing those kind of strengthened me,” she said. “I was like ‘I can battle this; I’m going to battle this.’”
Her sister took her to St. John’s hospital in Tulsa, where she received emergency chemotherapy. She took her medical records with her, and because of the cyberattack, they had to do everything by hand.
“I had emergency chemo, which is unheard of,” she said. “They treated me like it was 1984 cancer treatment because they did not have access to their computers. They had to do everything by pencil and paper and had to calculate everything with pencil and paper. St. Johns saved my life using 1984 technology, but they were such a well-oiled machine, they knew what they needed to do.”

With the chemo, Lasley and Gigi did not know how the treatments would work, so Lasley started making plans.
“I was in the hospital with my daughter, she and I were just alone,” she said. “I said, ‘We’re going to plan for the worst, but pray for the best,’ and she said ‘O.K.,’ and I said, ‘This is going to be hard for you, and this is going to be hard for me, so we’re going to have to plan my funeral,’ and we had to plan my traditional Osage funeral. It was very emotional, but we had to do it. If I had to leave this Earth, I did not want to leave her without knowing what to do.”
Sieke was in the process of taking finals while also writing everything down that the nurses and doctors would discuss with Lasley.
“When every nurse would come in, she would write down all my vitals, she would write down what medications they gave me, she was on it,” Lasley said. “I watched her grow from an 18-year-old kid into a grown woman. That was amazing, because I knew if anything was to ever happen to me, she was going to be O.K. because she is a little fighter.”
The swelling in her leg and the lump in her breast almost disappeared after she received emergency chemo. Lasley went through six rounds of chemo with three weeks between the rounds. Her cancer is almost completely gone, but she’s not yet in remission.
Lasley set health goals to keep herself motivated and she made an effort to attend the Inlonshka dances in June but had to keep physical contact limited.
“I set goals for myself, and the dances came,” she said. “My goal is to go to Friday night at Hominy because I wanted to see all the purple shirts. That was my health goal, was to get up and make it down to Hominy and sit on my bench and watch. It was really hard because everyone wanted to hug me or come see me, and I miss that. If anything, that’s what I miss the most, was being able to hug people or shake hands – as Osages we’re raised to acknowledge people; and I wasn’t able to do that because I was so vulnerable health wise.”
Another goal was to attend the Grayhorse dances. She was able to visit her family’s camp and sit on her bench.
“I could only do so much, and I knew once I reached my max, to just go home and sleep,” she said. “I did a lot of sleeping.”

Not only has she felt support from her hometown community in Pawhuska, but she has support from the Osage community.
“Every Drumkeeper’s family, they all came and checked on me at some point, and I was grateful for that,” she said. “I knew I had the support of my community.”
She has support from her coworkers at the Tax Commission, and they have created a safe environment for her so she can still come and work.
“My work, my boss and my team here at the Tax Commission have been amazing,” she said. “Just the love and support, the encouragement. They’ve all been very protective of me. That’s what you want as an employee of the Osage Nation, is that you want that protection, and you want to have the ability to know that you’re safe when you come to work, and they make sure of that.”
Her best friend from kindergarten that has been with her since day one has helped her whenever she’s needed it.
“I can’t speak highly enough of Danielle [Cass],” she said. “I had the support from my best friend, my childhood best friend, my best friend I’ve had my entire life. When I have my days where I’m down in the dumps, she would go, ‘I’m going to come get you and we’re going to go hit the backroads,’ and she would come pick me up and get me out of the house, and we would cruise some backroads.”
Her best friend would take her to go pick flowers, look for rocks or bring her something to drink.
“She just kept me going,” she said. “And that’s the only way a best friend knows how. Her and her kids are so supportive of me and her daughter.”
Lasley’s friends, family and the community has prayed for her, supported her and helped her with whatever she’s needed.
She still has a road of recovery ahead as she isn’t in remission just yet, but the number 47 sticks out to her, and she has a personal connection to it, but it keeps her going.“From that moment on, I knew I wanted to live to be 48 because my great-grandma died at 47 and my mother died at 47,” she said. “It was weird because I turned 47, and a week later I found my lump. That’s when I knew I was going to have to get through it, because I was not going to die at 47; and I think that’s what mustered up my strength.”
To view additional photos from Osage Night, view the Osage News Flickr album of the game at https://www.flickr.com/photos/osagenews/albums/72177720321259037/