What was supposed to be a boisterous second week of school at Dapsoka Ahnkodapi during the 2026-27 school year was instead a quiet, somber affair.
Teachers were packing up their classrooms when 12-year-old Wahreshe Hamilton and her mom, Geneva HorseChief Hamilton, visited the private Osage school, which served students between 6 weeks old and 8th grade.
"It's weird hearing no one screaming," Hamilton said, thinking about how the playground normally sounded at this time.
About a week before the school year, the Osage Nation executive branch decided to shut its doors along with the tribe's visitor center and Harvest Land farm.
Osage Principal Chief Joe Tillman declared a state of emergency Aug. 4, citing a financial shortfall in the tribe's projected budget. Ten days later, Tillman retracted it. Yet, he chose to keep Daposka closed.
"Expanding our language and culture must be our top priority," Tillman said in a statement on August 13. "By redirecting resources that currently serve approximately 90 students, we can invest in programs that reach many more Osage children and families."
Geneva HorseChief Hamilton called the closure an act of "dismantling [Osage] sovereignty."
"[I've] just been thinking about, from the very beginning at my grandma's kitchen table, watching my grandmas talk about how to save our language to where we are today, and thinking about how all of that is immeasurable investment, and how can he come through and just unilaterally just wipe off everything like it's insignificant," Hamilton said. " Now we have to fight someone who was supposed to be fighting for us."
Hamilton said a major motivator for her family to move to Pawhuska from Maryland was enrolling Wahreshe at Daposka. She started as a student there at 18-months old.
"She's the only child in my family who has gone to school here, and she's a bit of our cultural investment," Hamilton said. "Like [my] husband and I have invested in her culture by staying in this community, by living in this community, making sure she can be part of this school."
![Tina Burruss Townley taught English at Dapsoka Ahnkodapi and had decorations of Star Wars and English posters adorning the walls of her classroom. "When you turned off the light — and you had all the [neon] lights on — there were galaxies shooting and reflecting everywhere in the room," Townley said. "It was really cool." But after talking to her bosses and realizing the school was not reopening, she tore it all down.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/4964d52/2147483647/strip/true/crop/6720x4480+0+0/resize/840x560!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F1a%2F52%2Ff44f867c4b22898ca30602b6da8a%2Fosu0323.jpg)
Dapsoka's closure ripples across the community
Schools in Pawhuska have already started. Hamilton originally chose not to enroll Wahreshe in a public school after learning of Daposka's closure, holding out hope it would reopen. But with Daposka teachers, such as Tina Burruss Townley, who taught English, cleaning out their old classrooms on campus, the closure is becoming more real.
"As soon as we got the announcement, I hopped up, and I went over to the chief's office, to the welcome center," Townley said. "I was trying to get a meeting so that I could be like, 'What is going on? Why?'"
The short notice, she said, didn't just mean students had to rush to find new schools. But teachers, too.
"With public school for the most part, you're gonna sign a contract like before … or during the month of June," Townley said. "So all of those jobs, generally speaking, they're going to be taken."
She said she is mostly worried about the students and the gap this closure caused in their lives and the community. She taught in Hominy Public Schools before and said that at Daposka, students were immersed in Osage culture, history and language.
"It's just more effective, in my opinion as an educator, to have them immersed in that [language], have them using it every day, multiple times a day throughout the day, rather than just in one class," Townley said. "When I was growing up learning Spanish in school, I only spoke it in that one class. And so when you're trying to apply it to [the] real world, it doesn't work as well."
But Townley said, ultimately, both types of educational institutions are important.
"Two things could be true at the same time," Townley said.
Osage Nation said it plans to transfer funding from the school to public school curriculum, including Osage language courses at Pawhuska Public Schools. It announced Daposka would close on August 5, and students from 8 weeks old to pre-kindergarten will transition to Wahzhazhe Early Learning Academy. Parents with children outside of those age ranges were encouraged to enroll in the district.
But some community and Osage Congress members fear language classes in public schools aren't enough, and there is research to back up their concerns.
Indigenous language speakers as community leaders
Tiffany Lee, a Native American Studies professor at the University of New Mexico, has been studying Indigenous language revitalization for more than 20 years. She is Diné and Lakota.
"The models that I've experienced or seen observed, the best model obviously is immersion school because you're in the language most of the day, but you're also building a community," Lee said.
Her research found that immersion students often score higher on mainstream standardized tests of English, language arts, and mathematics and have more confidence in their Indigenous identities.
"It builds their confidence in who they are because now they are learning these subjects, but they're also speaking their language," Lee said. "Some of the communities will call upon these students, who are maybe middle school students, to open ceremonies for them because they know the protocols and they know how to do it in the language. So they're really seen as leaders of the community … because they're bringing those communities back together through the language."
A spokesperson for Principal Chief Joe Tillman has questioned the legitimacy of Daposka Ahnkodapi, telling a KOSU reporter the school was not a true immersion school despite previous press releases, interviews with parents and testimony by community members before Osage Congress, describing it as such.
No matter the level of Osage language used, some is better than none, Lee said.
"You're setting a goal — even if your school isn't 100 percent or even 50 percent [taught in] the Native language — the value you're sharing through the school's mission and vision and all that you do, including culture," she said. "This power of Indigenous languages is beyond just learning to speak; it's creating and strengthening families and communities through it."
Congress said Daposka will not return in the next fiscal year. Its request to Tillman, along with more than 1,000 other community members, to reconsider reopening Daposka was denied.
Now Wahreshe and her mom have to decide what's best for their family.
"Right now, I'm actually looking at homeschool curriculum and also the two different schools," Hamilton said.
But she said in the past her other children who attended public school in the area had negative experiences, and she is unsure what she is going to do.
Wareshe said she is also nervous about entering a new school community. She said her teachers at Daposka often felt like older siblings who took a gentle approach to teaching.
"The teachers are really nice and comfortable to be around," Wareshe Hamilton said. " I want to save my school, and I just like being here."
Osage Congress is throwing around different ideas to fill the gap left by the closure, including a potential charter school down the road. But nothing has been finalized.
Principal Chief Joe Tillman did not respond to multiple requests for an interview for this story.
This report was produced by the Oklahoma Public Media Exchange, a collaboration of public media organizations. Help support collaborative journalism by donating at the link at the top of this webpage.
