The Osage Nation Museum is the oldest tribally owned and operated museum in the country, and it is the essential starting point for understanding what Pawhuska is about. The collection spans Osage history from pre-contact times through the present, with particular attention to the early 20th century oil era and the Osage Reign of Terror documented in David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon.
The exhibits combine historical artifacts — traditional regalia, beadwork, photographs, ledger books — with frank accounts of the systematic murders of Osage people by non-Native members of the community who had schemed to inherit their oil rights. The story is shocking and important, and the museum tells it without melodrama. Staff members are often Osage Nation citizens who can speak to the history from personal and family experience.