Family matters, tribal affairs

About this book

Carter Revard was born in the Osage Indian Agency town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. He won a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, and in 1952 was given his Osage name by his grandmother and the tribal elders. How his family coped with the dizzying extremes of the Great Depression and the Osage Oil Boom and with small-town life in the Osage hills is the subject of this book. It is about how Revard came to be a writer and a scholar, how his Osage roots have remained alive, about the alienation of being an Indian who "didn't look Indian," and about finding community, even far from home. Above all, this is a book about identity, about an Osage son who grew up to find that the world is neither Indian nor white but many colors in between.