OSAGE MISSION RECORDS

Records pertaining to the Osage Mission and Manual Labor School for Osage Indian boys and girls at present-day St. Paul, Kansas. Included is a pupils' attendance and account book, 1847-1866; a pupils' account book, an English-Osage dictionary, ca. 1885; and a pupils' attendance, accounts and reports, and correspondence book, 1855-1881. The principal correspondent was John Schoenmakers, S.J.

Gift of the Congregation of the Passion (Passionists), St. Paul, Kansas, 1982.

Processed by Mark G. Thiel, 1986, and microfilmed, 1986.

Historical Note

From 1825-1871 the Osage lived on a reservation in Kansas, which was then replaced by the current reservation in Oklahoma. By the 1840s, the U.S. government promoted English language literacy and Euro-American life skills and agricultural practices. Under government sponsorship, Jesuit missionaries (Missouri Province, St. Louis, Missouri) and Sisters of Loretto (Nerinx, Kentucky) taught Osage and Quapaw Indian boys and girls at the Osage Mission and Manual Labor School on the Osage Reservation, in Kansas,1847-1872. For further information, see "Osage," by Garrick A. Bailey, Vol. 13 Plains, Handbook of North American Indians, Smithsonian Institution, 2001.

Subsequent Catholic schools were located in Oklahoma on the Osage (near Fairfax, Pawhuska, and Skiatook) and Quapaw (Miami, Oklahoma) Reservations, which is detailed in the Guide to Catholic Indian Missions and School Records in Midwest Repositories.

Scope and Content

The records list pupils' names, dates of attendance, and tuition payments along. Some comments are included. While most are brief, a few are extensive, noting tribal affiliation, family background, scholastic achievement, and practice of the Catholic faith.

Restrictions: The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974 is a law governing access to student-related educational records that is enforced by the Family Policy Compliance Office (FPCO) of the U.S. Department of Education. In 1993, since FERPA's statutory language did not expressly answer questions regarding the termination of a student's right to prohibit disclosure, FPCO concluded that this right was personal and lapsed upon death (Correspondence of Leroy Rooker, Director of FPCO, to Honorable John J. Duncan, Jr., March 3, 1993). In standard archival practice, restrictions on life-long records are lifted 70 years after their date of creation. However, also due to FERPA's statutory language, these restrictions do not apply to student records held by non-educational institutions such as the U.S. National Archives, which also holds copies of these student attendance records. For more information about access to these records and other genealogical records at Marquette University, please submit an Application for Genealogical Query. For some schools, sanitized facsimiles (photocopies with obliterated confidential information) are available to on-site visitors as noted in the descriptive inventories. For contact information about access to these records at a record center of the U.S. National Archives, see Marquette's Guides to Catholic-Related Records about Native Americans in the United States. These records are not at Marquette, but at the institutions described.

Related Collections at Other Repositories

• Guides to Catholic-Related Records for the United States about Native Americans