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In Trust is an investigative podcast from Bloomberg News and iHeartMedia. This is the seventh episode in the series and we encourage you to listen to the story from the beginning. Find previous episodes here. A transcript of this episode is available.

At the turn of this century, one of the Drummonds did something his family rarely did: He sold a chunk of land.

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It was 2001. Chuck Drummond — a grandson of Cecil, one of three brothers who started the family’s cattle business —  sold a big piece of land to Ted Turner, the billionaire media mogul. For years, Turner grazed bison there. Then, in 2015, rumors started to swirl that Turner was looking to get out of Osage County. 

Osage leaders knew this was a rare moment: their chance to buy back land — 43,000 acres — that the tribe had held title to more than 100 years earlier. And now they had the ability to do it. In the early 2000s, the Osage Nation had reformed its government under then-Chief Jim Gray to control its own affairs in a way it hadn’t for a century, paving the way for an economic revival.

“This represented an opportunity to buy one of the biggest chunks of Osage County that would come on the market in our lifetime,” recalls Raymond Red Corn, the assistant principal chief at the time.

Episode seven delves into the government reform that allowed the Osage Nation to determine its own citizenship, after a century of being ruled by the 1906 Allotment Act. It retraces a fateful month with Red Corn, involving white-knuckled financial calculations and a nervous drive to Kansas to deliver a bid that could change the fate of his nation.

Ultimately, Red Corn chalks it up to a matter of sovereignty — pure and simple: “I was there when Chief signed the deeds to close it and said, ‘This is the day we stop going backwards. This is the day we begin to go the other direction, toward buying all of this reservation back.’” 

— With assistance from Allison Herrera 

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