A bridge between two peoples

The OK'OC association was founded on 8 September 1989 in Lafrançaise (Tarn-et-Garonne) by a group of about a dozen people, half of whom lived in Montauban, the county town of the département.

Our association began with a twofold aim: to raise awareness of traditional Native American cultures, their history, their living memory and their contemporary struggles, and to awaken consciences around the Occitan revival. There was, and still is, an urgent need to keep this culture of the South alive and to reinvent it so that it finds its full place in today's world.

This encounter between two cultural heritages, which everything seems to set apart but which have much in common, lies at the heart of our approach. And it is rooted in a little-known episode, as moving as it is authentic.

In November 1829, three Osage Indians arrived in Montauban, exhausted. Having left Le Havre two years earlier, this small group had wandered across Europe with neither resources nor bearings. Thanks to a surge of solidarity among the people of Montauban, they finally found their way back to their village in Kansas.

Why had they come? What were they looking for? What became of them? To understand, we have to go back a long way in the history of Louisiana, the French colony in America that covered the central part of the United States, a third of the country's present area.