John Joseph Mathews

John Joseph Mathews (November 16, 1894 – June 16, 1979) became one of the Osage Nation's most important spokespeople and writers, and served on the Osage Tribal Council during the 1930s. He studied at the University of Oklahoma, Oxford University and the University of Geneva after serving as a flight instructor during World War I.

Mathews' first book was a history, Wah'kon-tah: The Osage and The White Man's Road (1929), which was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club as their first by an academic press; it became a bestseller. His book The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961) was a life work, preserving many collected stories and the oral history of the Osage. He also wrote a biography of E. W. Marland, noted oilman and governor of Oklahoma in the 1930s.

Mathews was born at Pawhuska, Oklahoma as the only son among five children of William Shirley and Eugenia (Girard) Mathews. His banker father was the son of John Allan Mathews, a noted trader, and Sarah Williams, the mixed-race daughter of A-Ci'n-Ga, a full-blood Osage, and "Old Bill" Williams, a noted missionary and later Mountain Man who lived with the Osage. Mathews grandparents had met in Kentucky where "Old Bill" Williams had sent his daughters for school after A-Ci'n-Ga had died. John Joseph Mathews' mother was Pauline Eugenia Girard, whose family had emigrated from France. One-eighth Osage by ancestry, as well as Anglo-Scots-Irish and French, the Mathews children all attended local schools in Pawhuska.

Service in World War I came before college, and John Mathews became a flight instructor and second lieutenant after time in the cavalry. Afterward, he went on to the University of Oklahoma, then studied at his own expense at Oxford University in England, graduating in 1923. He studied international relations at the University of Geneva and the Graduate Institute of International Studies and traveled in Africa before returning to the United States, determined to study the culture and traditions of the Osage.

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