In this article from Missouri Life, “The Tribes of Missouri, Part 1: When the Osage & Missouria Reigned,” the author Ron Soodalter barely hints that the Osage and Missouria people are living people who maintain relationships with Missouri.
Admittedly, the focus of the article is historical. The Osage Nation has very competent academically-trained historians and archaeologists, and citizens who can relate oral histories that involve the Osage time in Missouri, who should have been consulted.
Magazine articles and museum curators who treat Indians as an extinct form of wildlife–or as extirpated in a particular region–are demeaning. The following two paragraphs are galling to me:
There are no full-blooded Missouria alive today; the last one died in 1985. Two centuries after their ancestors were absorbed into other tribes, the remnants of the once-powerful Niutachi exist only within the amalgamated tribal group formally known as the Otoe-Missouria.
Nor were these two tribes unique. After the various land-hungry nations staked their respective claims on the seemingly boundless expanse they called the New World, no tribe that had long occupied or settled in Missouri would ever again claim control over itself or its old way of life.
I hope the forthcoming installments in this series are different.
Ozarks Law & Economy 