Blood, oil, and the Osage Nation: The battle over headrights

When Richard J. Lonsinger was just a toddler, he was abandoned by his mother at a bus stop in Texas, along with three of his siblings. A member of the Ponca tribe of Oklahoma, Lonsinger went first to foster care, and then was adopted by a white family. It wasn't until he reached his twenties that he really started to think a lot about where he had come from.

"At 21, 22, I felt pretty alone," he says. "I was trying to figure out, you know, what am I supposed to be? Who am I supposed to be?"

To try to answer these questions, Lonsinger called the offices of the Ponca tribe, where he was put in touch with his birth family, including his birth mother and the rest of his siblings. He eventually made contact and tentatively began to form relationships with them. But when his birth mother passed away in 2010, Lonsinger was neither invited to her funeral nor included in the distribution of her estate.

After a lifetime of feeling left out of his family, he decided to take action. He asked the probate court to reopen her estate and to distribute her assets equally among all of her eight children. One of her most valuable assets was something called an Osage headright.

"I started asking friends, business associates and friends in Oklahoma about, 'What does it mean to have an Osage headright?'" he recalls. "And they're like, 'Well, Ric, look, that's a big deal.'"

In 2014, the probate judge ruled in favor of Richard and his siblings who had been abandoned with him decades before. They would all receive equal shares of their birth mother's headright, an inheritance it would take Lonsinger the better part of a decade to fully understand.

The Osage Reign of Terror

The history behind the headright system begins in the late 1800s, when the Osage were driven off their reservation in Kansas. They ultimately settled in Northern Oklahoma, purchasing new land with the blessing of the federal government.

Then, in 1887, the Dawes Act was enacted in order to break up Indian land into parcels and allot those smaller pieces to individuals. Because the Osage had bought their land outright, though, they were better situated to resist the changes than many other tribes.

When the U.S. government finally passed a statute in 1906 to allot Osage land, it included two important provisions. First, land would only be distributed to members of the Osage tribe. Second, no matter who owned that land, the rights for mineral resources like coal, gas and oil would still be owned collectively by the tribe. The rights to the oil, in particular, would turn out to be incredibly valuable.

To divvy up the profits from the collectively owned mineral rights, a new system was put in place. Each of the 2,229 Osage members on the tribal rolls in 1907 was given an equal share of the money coming in, what would come to be called a "headright." Private companies would lease land from the tribe in order to extract oil, gas, gravel, or coal, and then pay a percentage of what they made into a trust managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA, in turn, would distribute payments from that trust to headright holders.

Once the oil was really flowing, the Osage Nation became the wealthiest community in the world, per capita. People received payments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in inflation-adjusted terms. They bought fancy clothes, big houses, and nice cars. News spread quickly, though, about all these suddenly wealthy people and attracted a raft of swindlers and conmen to Oklahoma.

Ostensibly to help the Osage retain their wealth, the U.S. government put in place a system of guardianship, by which non-Osage were assigned to watch over members of the Osage tribe who were deemed "incompetent" to manage their money. In practice, guardianship was often an overtly racist system.

"If you were considered a full-blood, American Indian, you were automatically deemed incompetent," says Tara Damron, Program Director with the White Hair Memorial Center in Hominy, Oklahoma, "so let's assign you a white guardian who's supposed to handle your financial affairs."

Guardians would often pay themselves out of the money they were supposed to be protecting and then give their Osage wards a pittance in allowance. There were many instances of white people marrying people in the Osage tribe, sometimes by force, becoming their guardians, and then killing them for their headrights. (The bestselling book "Killers of the Flower Moon" by David Grann focuses on this time, known as the Osage Reign of Terror. A film adaptation of the book, directed by Martin Scorsese, is slated to be released this summer.) Throughout the 1920s many headrights left the tribe.

Since that time there have been many amendments made to the original agreements between headright holders and the government intended to make the system less prone to abuse, but the way the money is distributed to headright holders by the federal government remains under dispute even today.

Richard and the modern day fight over headrights

Not long after Richard Lonsinger began receiving his first quarterly checks from the BIA, he began to educate himself about the history of the headright system. "I dove into really what it is and what it means," he says.

In addition to the complex and violent history, Lonsinger also began to learn about the present-day legal battles over the control and management of the trust. One series of lawsuits, grouped under the name Fletcher v. The United States, alleges financial mismanagement and a lack of transparency on the part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Another, brought by the Osage tribe itself, resulted in a settlement of 380 million dollars for headright holders in 2011.

One big sticking point is the issue of non-Osage headright holders. According to reporting from Bloomberg News, a quarter of all headright payments go to non-Osages. Businesses, schools, churches, and individuals not affiliated with the Osage Nation, have all somehow become headright holders.

Lonsinger likens the government's unwillingness to offer a fuller accounting of how headright holders' money is flowing to a relic from the past. "It's like reading a piece of history of what it used to be in the 1800s towards Native American," he says.

In 2018, Lonsinger was recruited to join a new iteration of the Fletcher v. The United States lawsuits as a plaintiff in a class action. The lead lawyer on the case, Jason Aamodt, believed that adding Lonsinger, a Native American non-Osage headright holder, would strengthen the case. For Lonsinger, helping to fight for what he sees as Indigenous rights in the courts has been deeply meaningful on a personal level.

"I'm so proud that I have an opportunity to be a part of this case. It means something, you know?" says Lonsinger. "Here I felt like I wasn't part of something, but I'm part of something that's much bigger."

In the decade since Richard first tried to get his share of his birth mother's headright, he has had a lot of time to think about its significance, and who he thinks should own it. A few years ago, he made a decision about what should happen to his headright after he dies. In his estate planning he made it clear that he wants his headright to be left to the Osage Nation.

"I mean, half my life was without it," he says. "So, you know, what's it mean when I'm gone? They deserve it more."

This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with help from Alyssa Jeong Perry and Emma Peaslee. It was engineered by Brian Jarboe and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was edited by Keith Romer, with help from Shannon Shaw Duty from Osage News.

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Music: "Heat," "Stop the Missiles," and "My City Life."