The Pivot

A century has passed since a lot of the transactions that helped the three Drummond brothers amass tens of thousands of acres of Osage land. Now, with the Osage Nation seeking self-determination and Gentner Drummond running for state office, the fates of Osage and Drummond descendants continue to cross. Learn more at bloomberg.com/intrust.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It was on the second page. The tagline was if
it stinks, will find it eventually. This is Louise Redcorn.
She's a journalist. She used to run The Big Heart Times,
the newspaper that published that list of all the non
os aged head right holders back in two thousand nine.
The papers had a lot of taglines over the years.

(00:23):
The former owner of the paper had it just been
the only newspaper in barn in the Barnstall area that
gives a deadly and I thought, no, that's just not
good enough. So I changed it to the only newspaper
in the world. And they came over and they're like, Louise,
that's just a really gross exaggeration. Louise works for the
oth Age News now. She's married to Raymond Redcorn, the

(00:46):
former assistant Principal chief who delivered the bid for the
Blue Stem acquisition. These days, Louise mostly covers the oth
Age Nation, but she's been a lot of her career
writing county news. And you can't cover Ocge County without
covering the Drummonds. I mean, I've written a lot of
stories about them, from you know, speeding tickets to assaults
to exaggerated statistics at the mercantile in terms of how

(01:11):
busy they are. These stories date back a while speeding
tickets that were dismissed at the time of Drummond punched.
A police officer getting a Drummond represented him in court
and the man pleaded guilty to a misdemeanors. Saw an
officer a story about read Drummonds mercantile and Pahuska. Whether
it was actually seeing that thousands of visitors a day,
she said it was. I think sometimes there is the

(01:34):
afore aforementioned hutzpah that they don't always follow the rules
the way everybody else does. A lot of people cow
tow to them, cow tow to the dramas and just
sort of give them a green light. And I think
the reason in Pahuska is that the Drummonds have done

(01:55):
a hell of a lot of good for Pahuska. You know,
sales tax collections are between thirty and over pre mercantile times.
They built a new football field at the high school.
They're they're in the process of building an animal shelter
that and they've never sought I mean, they've kept those
things secret almost I mean, they just had not even

(02:18):
ever claimed credit for those for those two items. So
I mean there's a certain amount of gratitude that is natural.
I've heard this from other people too, that there are
Drummonds today who have helped revitalize POSCA. They've brought jobs, tourists,
money to a place that needed it, that they've given

(02:39):
back to the community. And not everyone feels that way,
of course, But what Louise is talking about here, it
gets at the complexity of it all, the complexity of
a place shaped by a hundred years of history, with
shifting rules and fortunes and power dynamics, a place where
tremendous wealth was lost and gain. My families were still

(03:02):
neighbors who run into each other at the store, we're dinner,
we're Friday night football games. In that complexity, it doesn't
just describe the relationship between the Drummonds and the os
Age Nation, because there's another character in this story that's
been here all along, the United States Government. Howid hey

(03:23):
who agree tjo wash Nikahi are. My name is Jeane Dennison.
I'm a citizen of the Nation from Oklahoma and an
associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington.
Jean was one of the first people I interviewed for
this story. I was nervous. I was an oil reporter

(03:46):
from Houston. A lot of this history I was learning
about for the first time. I couldn't figure out if
the trust relationship with the US government was a good thing,
We're a bad thing if os Age citizens liked it.
And Jeane told me I wasn't going to find one answer.
She said over and over again that this story, the
oth Age nation story, is really complicated. When Jane and

(04:10):
I talked this last time, it was about that trust
relationship with the US government, something oth Age leaders have
fought tirelessly for for over a century. Something they want
to use today to protect the land they bought from
Ted Turner by putting it back into trust with the US.
I wanted to ask Jean, why why pursue the trust

(04:34):
relationship if it's been so flawed in the past and
occasionally even today. I guess I wanted to know why
bother there was a lot of failures to honor the
kinds of promises that were made in these treaties by
the United States government, but ultimately these treaties really did
offer the United States um access to our lands, but

(04:58):
they also offered oth Ages is the ability to UM
have some kind of protection against other kinds of threats.
So that's really what this trust relationship was about, was
this ability to have UM increased protection against the threats

(05:24):
that were rising in our territories. In other words, the
federal government was a tool, a tool to keep the
state out of the oath Age nation. Jean says it
was a flawed one, but it was the best tool
the oth Age Nation had at the time. And so
what we see again and again UM is these kinds

(05:47):
of looking at the world around us and trying to
figure out what are the tools, what are the things
that we can do to make this pivot again and
again looking at the situation around us and saying, Okay,
structures that we have in place right now are not
working for us. They're creating more chaos than they are
creating order, and so we're going to pivot. The o

(06:18):
Stage Nation is in the middle of a pivot, one
that involves land, oil, and sovereignty that will determine the
future of who controls these nearly one point five million
acres and how this is in trust. I'm Rachel Adams

(06:38):
heard and in this episode, you're also going to be
hearing from someone else, Alison Edita. She's a contributing reporter
on the series, and she's here to help me explain
this pivot. I did a presentation for the Stage Nation

(07:06):
employees back. I believe it was in two thousand and
nine or two thousand and ten. This is Elizabeth Sloha Homer,
the lawyer in d C who sits on the O
Stage Nations Supreme Court. I had told people, I had
said this before the Rby decision came down. If there's
any justice left in America, the oh stages win the

(07:28):
Irby case. The Irby case, this is just one and
a whole bunch of reservation cases in recent years that
are incredibly important for understanding where everything stands today, where
the state's jurisdiction ends, in tribal nations jurisdiction begins. No
one's covered these cases more closely than Allison Edita, the

(07:51):
Indigenous affairs reporter for KOs U, a public radio station
in Oklahoma. She's going to help me out on this one,
Alison so Irby. It was a case about taxation, whether
the state could collect income taxes from O s Age
citizens who live and work in os Age County. But
just like all of these cases, the Irby case was

(08:13):
about something much bigger than that, because at the center
of it was a question was there still an O.
S Ge reservation or had it been disestablished when the
US divided up all the surface land into parcels under
the nineteen o six Altman app I talked to a
lot of federal Indian law experts and they all pretty
much said no, the O. S Age Reservation was never disestablished.

(08:36):
The nineteen o six Act did a lot of things,
but it didn't get rid of the reservation. That's what
Elizabeth was saying in that presentation back she thought the
os Age Nation had an even better case than a
lot of other tribal nations because of the O. S
Age mineral estate and all the underground land that the
os Age Nation thought to hold onto. Then the decision hit.

(09:04):
I was sitting in front of my computer at my desk,
and I got an electronic copy of Herby and started
reading it. And the next thing I know, I'm like
having a hard time breathing, you know, I was just,
oh my god, this is the worst, the worst opinion.
The U. S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit

(09:26):
ruled the O s Age Nation reservation had been disestablished,
that it was no longer Indian country. And so to me,
the Irby decision truly struck me as there is no
justice left in the United States, And as an officer
of the Court and a lawyer for my entire life,
my entire career, that that just was emotionally wrenching, devastating

(09:54):
to me because it was so wrong, so wrong. In
the decade after the Rby decision, the OCGE Nation tried
to find a path forward, another way to get its
reservation recognized by the Court, but they were kind of stuck.
You can't bring the same case twice. The Court had ruled,

(10:16):
and it ruled that the O C reservation was disestablished.
But then we'll hear argument first this morning case eight
McGirt versus Oklahoma, Mr. Chief Justice, and may have pleased
the court. Something big happened another case mcgert the Oklahoma

(10:39):
This case is resolved by the fundamental propositions that decisions
about sovereign rights so for Congress to make, and Congress
makes those decisions by speaking clearly in the text, the
decision below must be reversed because the text makes clear
that Congress never terminated the Creek Reservation and never transferred
federal criminal jurisdiction to Oklahoma. Mc group was enough case

(11:00):
involving a reservation in Oklahoma, but this time it was
the Misgogy Nation reservation, also known as the Muscogee Creek Nation.
This case was about a felony crime and whether it
should be prosecuted in federal or state court, But just
like the Irby case, it was also about something much bigger,
whether the Misgogy Nations reservation still existed. The mcgurt case

(11:24):
went all the way up to the Supreme Court. It
was decided on July nine, the last day before the
court said it would recess, and as someone who has
covered indigenous affairs for a while, I'll just never forget it.
This was one of the biggest wins for tribal sovereignty
in decades. The highest court in the land ruled that
the Misgogy Nation reservation still existed. The allotment era when

(11:47):
the US government divided up native land didn't change that.
In the months after the mcgurt decision, other tribal nations
in Oklahoma asked state courts to apply the ruling to
their own reservations. The Chickasaw Cherokee Choked On Nation Seminal
and Quapa they had their reservation status as affirmed too,

(12:08):
but it hadn't been applied to the se Nation, at
least not yet. McGirt is um is a case in
my mind of one of great hope but also great pain.
This is Wilson pipe Stem, the attorney who's represented the

(12:29):
os Age Nation and the oth Age Minerals Council. You
heard from him a couple of episodes ago. Alison and
I went to his office and Pulsa over the summer
to talk to him about these cases, how they affect
the Osage Nation, what O s Age leaders want to
do moving forward, and Wilson said one of the biggest
things McGirt highlighted to him was what could have happened

(12:51):
during the nineties if the os Age Reservation had been recognized,
that would have been federal jurisdiction over all of those murders.
But they treated the Sage Reservation like it didn't exist anymore.
So they were bringing you had to bring a case
against somebody in O Sage County court where justice was
not to be found right. So it wasn't until somebody

(13:14):
was murdered on trust land, or Henry Rowan was murdered
on trust land that they decided it's federal jurisdiction. Now,
to me, that shows you the protection that reservation status
can bring, because those cases would have would have been
federal jurisdiction to start with, and we may have been

(13:35):
able to avoid the loss of many lives if the
federal government had respected the homelands of the O s
h people and treated as a reservation as it should
have been for over a hundred years. Now, what Wilson
is talking about here gets at the importance of having
these reservations in the first place. It affects who gets

(13:57):
to tax you, protect you, and punish you. You know,
there's just no doubt in my mind as a legal matter,
the Sage Reservation was never disestablished. It just never was.
The language is not in any of those laws. And
even when the tense Circuit Court of Appeals and Herby said, well,
we looked at all the statutes. We don't find any
language of disestablishments, so we'll go to these other things

(14:20):
that now McGirt in the Supreme Court has decided no,
you can't get past that first question. So um uh,
the Sage reservation was never disestablished. Elizabeth and Wilson are
not the only ones who feel this way. The oth
Age leaders I've talked to our adamant their reservation still

(14:41):
exists and eventually they'll get the court to recognize that.
And the sooner we can get to that ruling, the
easier the transition will be. This past year, the Sage
Nation piggybacked on a criminal case to try to get
the mcgert decision applied to them. They lost for the
state district judge force Age County. But we've reached out

(15:04):
to the tribe. They said they're still weighing their options,
deciding the best way to move forward a pivot, but
that's not the only pivot the nation is planning when
we come back. We talked to the man leading another
big pivot. UMU. The kind of person that likes to

(15:30):
understand things, even though over again I realized how limited
we all are and trying to understand everything. It's been
on my mind day and night. And now, ladies and gentlemen,

(15:52):
has some words to say to us is inaugural address? Yeah,
there was a written stage kay on June. It was
less than two weeks ago an election in the state
of Oklahoma was held and in that election, several officials

(16:19):
of the state who have pledged opposition to the Native
American self governance one their primaries. That was illustrated the
next day June when the Supreme Court of the United

(16:40):
States of America ruled in the case of Castro A Wuerta.
This is Jeffrey standing Bear, the principal chief of the
Osage Nation. He's leading the tribe through all this how
to respond to the mcgart case in the current state
of Oklahoma politics. Standing Bears Chief who decided to bid

(17:01):
the maximount the Congress would allow back when the tribe
bought the land from Ted Turner, and over the summer
he won another term as chief. He gave his inauguration
speech at the Osge Casino in Tulsa, and during it
he kind of dropped a bomb. I looked to my
left and I saw our Minerals Council. Minerals Council, it's

(17:24):
time for you to fully manage our mineral estate for
our people. And I looked over to my right where
the Osage Congress, our legislature was sitting and said, Congress,
we need you to enact the laws of the os
Age Nation to do this. What Chief Standing Bears proposing

(17:51):
is a big deal. After more than a century of
the Bureau of Indian Affairs managing the O. S H
Mineral Estate, the O s H Nation would be taking
it over. Are all the duties that fell to the
b a A would now be the O s Age
Nation's responsibility overseeing leases, making sure oil states get cleaned up.
This hasn't happened yet, and it still has a long

(18:13):
way to go. Part of the reason Standing Bear wants
to do this is pretty practical. He thinks the os
Age Nation can do a better job than the US government.
The b i A is, after all, a federal bureaucracy.
Stuff takes a long time. There's internal office politics, outdated software,
staffing issues. But Standing Bear says this is also about

(18:34):
something much bigger. All of our areas that are engaged
and sovereignty. In my view, the one area that is
most exposed is our O. S Age mineral state. So
we need to get in there, pre empt that with
self governance, and use that mineralist state as our people

(18:56):
who we purchased this naralist state in eighteen seven, need
too with our own money. Let us use it the
way our elders intended it for us to use it.
Allison and I wanted to talk to Standing Bear after
he gave this speech. We wanted to know why now,
why after so many decades, would the Stage Nation want

(19:16):
to take it over. So we called him just a
few days after that speech to ask him about it.
This is a threat that's unique from the others. It
is a threat of control by the state on a
regulatory basis, taxation basis, criminal basis um. Those are powerful forces.

(19:39):
In other words, this is about keeping the state Oklahoma
out of the Stage Nation. And Standing Bear said it's
more important than ever because of how Oklahoma responded to
McGirt by bringing another case. He mentioned castro Berta, the U. S.
Supreme Court ruling on criminal jurisdiction on tribal land in Oklahoma.
So this ruling to day means the state of Oklahoma

(20:01):
can exercise criminal jurisdiction over non Native Americans on tribal land.
This comes after the case of Oklahoma versus Castro Huerta,
which questions who could prosecute non tribal members who committed
crimes against Native Americans. And of course this ruling here
narrows the decision Regret versus Oklahoma, which said that Native
Americans another court case, I know, but this is important

(20:26):
because when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the
Miskogee Nation, Oklahoma wasn't happy. On the other side of
all this is Kevin Stitt. He's the governor of Oklahoma
and his office has been at the forefront of trying
to undo mcgurt, that decision that meant so much for
tribal sovereignty. Still says by taking away the state's control,

(20:50):
Oklahoma risk becoming some sort of lawless land with thousands
of criminals released from jail. But Allison has done some
reporting on this. My reporting part Rebecca and Eagle and
I pulled data from all the tribes over three years
to see how many cases would actually be affected by
the mcgert decision, and what we found was fewer than

(21:11):
one thousand cases in Oklahoma were affected. But Oklahoma stands
by their number and that argument that thousands of criminals
would be released has been a pretty key part of
the state's response to mcgurt, and over the summer, Oklahoma
was successful in limiting the impact of mcgurt. The Supreme
Court ruled in the state's favor in the castral work

(21:34):
the case. Stick is running for re election this year.
It would be his second term as governor. He easily
won the primary in June, and his next stop is
the general election in November. In that election is also

(21:55):
where over a hundred years of o s Age Nation
history and Drummond history collide in the present day. Because,
as we've told you, the Republican candidate to become the
next Attorney General of the state, the chief law enforcement
officer for all of Oklahoma is the lawyer and big
landowner whose family has deep roots in os Age County,

(22:18):
getting a Drummond. This is a pretty important role at
an even more important time, especially when it comes to
who gets to prosecute whom. The a g after all,
is the one who guides the state's response on matters
like this. During that first interview in his office, Gettner
said one of the things he was running on was

(22:39):
a promise, a promise to work more with tribal nations
in Oklahoma than still has with the Cacaffey surrounding the
moderate decision. Our governor for some reason just can't see
it in himself to act rationally, and so he's driven
a wedge between the name of American tribes in the

(23:01):
state of Oklahoma, and I can I think that I
can undo that. Tribal leaders in Oklahoma supported Getner, and
their support means a lot. When the final votes were
rolling in during the June primary, Choctaw Nation Chief Gary
Batten put out a statement saying this was a win
for tribal sovereignty. So here we have a drumming about

(23:22):
to be the next attorney general of the state, vowing
to work for tribal sovereignty at a time when the
chief of the Osage Nation sees an existential threat from
the state, a threat he's worried would affect the o
Sage mineral estate, the same one that members of Gettner's
family had fought to get a piece of a century ago.

(23:42):
If your head is spinning, so we're hours. We asked
standing Bear about what he thinks all this means how
this history impacts the state of play today, and his
answer was, basically, it's complicated, and not just because of
the Drummond's history in Osage County. During the election, we

(24:04):
met and I said, uh, I know, Gettner um pretty good.
He's he's a good guy in my mind, except his
views on protecting his ranch and service owners have come
into conflict with us in our mineralist state. I said, Getner,

(24:25):
if you would pledged not to sue os Age Nation
again on these issues between the surface land and the
mineralist state, I will ask for Minerals Council to support you,
and I would support you for Attorney General. He would

(24:46):
not do that. What standing Bear is saying here is
something we haven't told you about yet, but comes up
a lot in oth Age County, get As lawsuits. Get
Nurse firm brought a lot of lawsuits against oil companies
in the area on behalf of other landowners. He considers

(25:08):
himself a steward of the land. He has a lot
of it. After all, land that he says has been
damaged by oil and gas production that whole time, all
the royalties from that oil and gas are going to
head right holders. If you injure the land, you fix it.
That's all. That's all I asked. I was litigating on
a case by case basis on my land. If you

(25:29):
dumped thousands of gallons of salt water. I would require
you to clean it up, and if you wouldn't clean
it up, then I'd suit you. But in Gettner and
his law firm did something more drastic. They bought a
lawsuit on behalf of an Osage rancher and another landowner
in o Sage County. When we'll stepped back in one

(25:49):
of my very intelligent attorneys in this law firm or
live as well, there's a NIPA National Environmental Protection Act,
and let's go use NIPA to make the b i
A do its job. And they that's what we did. Basically,
they didn't just go after one oil company, they went
after the whole system the way that b i A
was permitting wells in Osage County. This was one of

(26:10):
the biggest lawsuits to affect the O s Age in
mineral estate. Ever after Gettner and his law firm brought
the case, the BIA said it would re vamp its
process for permitting wells in Osage County, but those permits
started to take a long time. All the while oil
prices were super low, head right payments were taking a

(26:31):
huge hit. A lot of Osage head right holders saw
it as an attack not just by the b A,
but by Gettner Drummond himself. Gettner says he was a
convenient scapegoat, but Standing Bear says that case has him
and other Sage leaders on guard. We have to be
connizant that the new attorney general the local home ours.

(26:57):
We believe you'll be the new tonat generals displayed interests
adverse to our legal interests in our policy interests. We
hope getting her Drummond will work with us, but we
are very aware of his news and his history. There's

(27:19):
something else I want to mention that involves getting a
Drummond's law firm and Standing Bears office. Just last year,
an attorney at Gettner's law firm represented a woman who
worked for the os Age Nation and said she was
sexually harassed by two men who served in the Chief's office.
According to a letter Gettner's firm sent to a lawyer

(27:41):
for the chief's office, the woman raised complaints with the
tribes HR department was later fired. Drummond Law called it
retaliatory termination and requested a one d thousand dollar settlement.
When The os Age News reported on the proposed settlement
earlier this year, They quoted an O s Age congressman

(28:01):
who said Standing there used the O s Age people's
money to buy the woman's silence. One of the accused
men still works in his office. Standing Bear says personnel
matters are confidential and that he signed a lot earlier
this year to prohibit sexual harassment. From the beginning, I
was told the story was complicated. What I didn't realize

(28:24):
was just how intertwined the Drummond story and the oc
Age story were, not just in the nineties, but today,
and after more than a hundred years of history, of
decades living side by side on this land, there's a
big question hanging over os Age County. Can the os
Age Nation reclaim more of what was lost? Land head rights, sovereignty?

(28:51):
And as they try, will they find an ally and
get her Drummond. I started this story with a question
did the Drummonds have head rights? And if so, how

(29:13):
did they get them? But I ended with a totally
different understanding of how three brothers built an empire on
the Stage Reservation. I learned about a store where they
could charge huge markups, a store that dozens of O
s Age families became indebted to a lot of times.
Those debts were repaid when an O Stage person died

(29:35):
and one of the Drummond brothers became the administrator of
their estate, a position that allowed them to approve claims
from their families own store. Sometimes it was the funeral
itself that brought the store huge business. A nine thousand
dollar funeral eight thousand dollar promisory note the Osage price.

(29:55):
I learned how all of this was done while the
Drummond brothers were guardians, meant it protect their O Stage
words money above all else. I learned about secrets tucked
deep in family stories and others hidden away in land
abstracts and core archives, secrets that shape this place today.

(30:15):
A place where neighbors were given totally different rule books,
one that allowed some people to have tremendous power and
another that took that control away. A place where many
of the descendants of those people O Stage and Drummond
lived side by side. Where the great grandchildren of an
O Sage a Latt can run into the great grandchildren

(30:38):
of a Drummond guardian while picking up a sandwich at subway.
We're filling up their tank at the gas station. In November,
Oklahoma voters will elect a new Attorney General. It's almost
certain to be getting or Drummond, the descendant of a
man who came to this land almost a hundred fifty
years ago to trade with the Stages, a descendant who

(31:00):
will have a leading voice and what the future looks
like for tribal nations and the state of Oklahoma. Meanwhile,
the oth Age Minerals Council will keep meeting to figure
out they're going to take over the management of their
mineral estate and if so, what that will look like.
Then there's the ranch, the forty thousand acres the os

(31:21):
Age Nation bought from Ted Turner. Standing there, says the
tribe is still working to put it in trust to
make this land inalienable O Sage forever. The meantime, my
job is keep the peace with our neighbors and among
ourselves until we can think this through. This is so

(31:43):
critical time. It's not letting up. It keeps coming. And
I also thought after mcgurt, well you'll get to us eventually,
but it keeps coming. And this brings me immediately to

(32:09):
the day that we all must work together to follow
our constitution and protect our mineralist state and all our lands.
And how do we do that. History has shown that
we're Federal law clearly pre empts state law, tribal governance,

(32:34):
self governance pre empts state law. Pre EMPs means we
need to get there first, governing ourselves on our lands,
with our territory and our people. I'll do everything and
Assistant Chief will do everything we can to claim this territory,

(32:59):
to pre empt this territory as o sage law managed
Byer Minerals Council. Then at the end, I looked at
my uncle Bogary Lookout. He's my relative, and I said,
I want to quote your father, Henry. Uncle Henry look Out,

(33:20):
and he was you said, a holy man, and he
told us many things. He said, life is short, be
quick about it. Thank you. That concludes this part of Intrust.

(34:08):
We're taking a break so we can work on more stories.
We'll be back soon. See you. Then. For maps, newspaper archives, photos,
and other documents related to this episode, go to Bloomberg
dot com slash in Trust. In Trust is a production
of Bloomberg and I Heart Media. This episode is reported

(34:29):
and hosted by Me Rachel Adams Heard and me Alison Rara.
Victor Ebayez is our senior producer. Samantha Story is our
executive producer. Jeff Grocott is our senior editor. Additional editing
by Daniel Ferrara, Production support from Gilda de Carle, sound
engineering by Blake Maples, theme music by Laura Warrman, Photography

(34:53):
by Shane Brown. Additional thanks to Margaret Sutherland, Linley Lynn,
David Ingold, Evan Applegate, Devin Pendleton, Ariel Brown, Jane Yeoman's,
Eugene Rusnick, Cynthia Hoffman, Frank Coleshaw, Jackie Kessler, Bernadette Walker,
Emily Engelman, Michael Fraser, Thomas Houston, Stephanie Davidson, Mckinninda Keiper,

(35:18):
Carly Snyder, Melissa Shadrick, Rakia Soluja Flynn, McRoberts, and Robert Blow.
You can email us at Podcasts at Bloomberg dot net.
Find in Trust anywhere you get your podcasts