A sacred site in St. Louis will return to the Osage Nation

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For the first time in its history, St. Louis is acknowledging the sovereignty of the Osage Nation and its ancestral rights to the oldest human-made structure in the city’s limits.

A new agreement will transfer the sacred Sugarloaf Mound to the Osage Nation. St. Louis, once known as “Mound City,” was home to more than a hundred of these sacred structures built by Native peoples centuries ago. The decision to transfer this mound is an important step to acknowledging the city’s Indigenous roots, advocates say.

“The Osage Nation played a big part in that landscape where the city of St. Louis exists today and we are still alive and we still care about that area because thousands of our ancestors are buried there,” said Andrea Hunter, director of the tribe’s historic preservation office in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

The Osage are the ancestors of the moundbuilders who once populated the area. As early as 900 A.D., Native people built communities in the area where the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers meet. Hunter said this area, at its height, was home to up to 25,000 people. Before French settlers cleared the mounds to build St. Louis, historians say there were more than a hundred mounds, many of them small burial sites, dotted on both sides of the Mississippi River.

About 15 minutes from St. Louis, across the Mississippi River in Illinois, 80 mounds still stand at the Cahokia Mounds World Heritage and State Historical Site, which is known as the largest pre-Columbian site north of Mexico. At its height more than 900 years ago, the settlement extended more than 4,000 acres.

After a yearslong fight to gain ownership of Sugarloaf Mound, Hunter said the Osage Nation has hopes to turn the mound into a “miniature Cahokia,” with an interpretive center where community members could come and learn about the sacred space.

The journey to regain control of Sugarloaf began in 2008 when former Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan showed interest in preserving the historic structure. The land around the mound belonged to three different property owners. When one piece of land went up for sale, a committee was formed to try to secure funding for the Osage Nation. The tribe purchased the parcel of land the following year.

The Osage Nation, with help from Counterpublic, an art and civil impact organization, started the rematriation process in 2023. Rematriation refers to the Indigenous woman-led efforts to restore relationships between indigenous peoples and their ancestral lands.

While the work was being done to return the land to the tribal nation, Counterpublic installed an art exhibit at the site. The three-month exhibit featured Native artists whose work focused on reparative futures and how art can be used to tell histories and to heal. On the plot next to the mound, artists Anita and Nokosee Fields, a mother and son duo, installed 40 platforms adorned with ribbons that reference Osage cosmologies of balance between sky, water, and earth.A billboard from artist Anna Tsouhlarakis reads, “When You Listen The Land Speaks,” words intended to question place, land, identity, and narrative.

“We went through the tribal protocol to be invited to work in that space to begin with and that was an invitation to both program it with artists work as well as to work with the Osage to actually return the mound to their self-determined future,” said James McAnally, Counterpublic’s executive and artistic director.

Once the nonprofit got the okay, they began reaching out to the owners of the two other properties, one of whom had lived in her house on the mound for nearly 80 years.

“She grew up in the house, grew up in the mound. Her family has a scrapbook archiving its history. So it’s been a part of her life. So there’s a kind of starting conversation and just approaching that with care of what would this look like to sell or transfer the home in a meaningful way?” McAnally added.

The woman, Joan Heckenberg, signed a transfer agreement over to the Osage. Theremaining piece of property is owned by the St. Louis chapter of Kappa Psi, a national pharmaceutical fraternity, which agreed Thursday to engage in discussion for a sale or transfer of the remaining piece of the land, Counterpublic said.

“The Osage Nation is very pleased to hear that Kappa Psi is willing to meet with the tribe to discuss the transfer of the fraternity property to the Nation. After 15 years of attempting to dialog with Kappa Psi, it is a relief that we can finally come to the table,” Hunter said in a statement to PBS News. “To successfully regain Sugarloaf Mound in its totality is a tremendous step towards enhancing our tribal sovereignty. The Osage Nation is grateful for the opportunity.”

Brigid Farrar, a representative for the fraternity, said in an email to PBS News that “The Kappa Psi pharmaceutical fraternity values our relationships within our communities and fully supports our local alumni group in St. Louis selling the property and putting it back in the hands of the Osage Nation. In support of Kappa Psi values, we are dedicated to fostering respectful and impactful partnerships that honor cultural heritage and strengthen community bonds.”

McAnally, who lives in South St. Louis, recalls passing the mound weekly over the years, and said “it just felt like beyond time that more people knew about it and that something would start happening there more publicly.”

Alongside the land transfer agreement, a resolution from the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, sponsored by Alderwoman Cara Spencer, will acknowledge the Osage’s sovereignty and support their quest for the remaining pieces of Sugarloaf Mound at an upcoming meeting.

“The work the Osage Nation and Counterpublic are doing to preserve this mound represents our last chance to ensure this important part of our community’s past isn’t lost forever,” Spencer wrote in a news release.

Lee Broughton, Counterpublic’s co-founder and president, said it was important for the nonprofit to do its part.

“St. Louis has not recognized its Indigenous roots officially before and this is an incredibly powerful step forward in what we think is a good direction to determine how we want to live together,” he said.

For the Osage Nation, the work is not just educating people about Native history but also that people understand the “full picture of who we are, not only just who we were,” Hunter said.

She referenced a separate historic land agreement on Nov. 18 that returned 43,000 acres of reservation.

“That land has now been put back into trust and it’s ours forever. And we’re never going to give that or give that up again,” she said.

“We didn’t go away. We didn’t disappear. We’re still here.”


https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-s ... age-nation