Oklahoma Primary Sources: Native American History in Oklahoma

Oklahoma is home to nearly forty American Indian tribes, and includes the largest Native population of any state. As a result, many Americans think of the state as “Indian Country.” For more than half a century readers have turned to Muriel H. Wright’s A Guide to the Indian Tribes of Oklahoma as the authoritative source for information on the state’s Native peoples. Now Blue Clark, an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, has rendered a completely new guide that reflects the drastic transformation of Indian Country in recent years. As a synthesis of current knowledge, this book places the state’s Indians in their contemporary context as no other book has done. Solidly grounded in scholarship and Native oral tradition, it provides general readers the unique story of each tribe, from the Alabama-Quassartes to the Yuchis. Each entry contains a complete statistical and narrative summary of the tribe, encompassing everything from origin tales and archaeological research to contemporary ceremonies and tribal businesses. The entries also include tribal websites and suggested readings, along with photographs depicting prominent tribal personages, visitor sites, and accomplishments.

Oklahoma is home to nearly forty American Indian tribes, and includes the largest Native population of any state. As a result, many Americans think of the state as “Indian Country.” For more than half a century readers have turned to Muriel H. Wright’s A Guide to the Indian Tribes of Oklahoma as the authoritative source for information on the state’s Native peoples. Now Blue Clark, an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, has rendered a completely new guide that reflects the drastic transformation of Indian Country in recent years. As a synthesis of current knowledge, this book places the state’s Indians in their contemporary context as no other book has done. Solidly grounded in scholarship and Native oral tradition, it provides general readers the unique story of each tribe, from the Alabama-Quassartes to the Yuchis. Each entry contains a complete statistical and narrative summary of the tribe, encompassing everything from origin tales and archaeological research to contemporary ceremonies and tribal businesses. The entries also include tribal websites and suggested readings, along with photographs depicting prominent tribal personages, visitor sites, and accomplishments.

In the 1940s and 1950s, long before historians fully accepted oral tradition as a source, Eve Ball (1890-1984) was taking down verbatim the accounts of Apache elders who had survived the army's campaigns against them in the last century. These oral histories offer new versions -- from Warm Springs, Chiricahua, Mescalero, and Lipan Apache -- of events previously known only through descriptions left by non-Indians. A high school and college teacher, Ball moved to Ruidoso, New Mexico, in 1942. After winning their confidence, Ball would ultimately interview sixty-seven Apache people.

Anetso, a centuries-old Cherokee ball game still played today, is a vigorous, sometimes violent activity that rewards speed, strength, and agility. At the same time, it is the focus of several linked ritual activities. Is it a sport? Is it a religious ritual? Could it possibly be both? Why has it lasted so long, surviving through centuries of upheaval and change? Based on his work in the field and in the archives, Michael J. Zogry argues that members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation continue to perform selected aspects of their cultural identity by engaging in anetso, itself the hub of an extended ceremonial complex, or cycle. A precursor to lacrosse, anetso appears in all manner of Cherokee cultural narratives and has figured prominently in the written accounts of non-Cherokee observers for almost three hundred years. The anetso ceremonial complex incorporates a variety of activities which, taken together, complicate standard scholarly distinctions such as game versus ritual, public display versus private performance, and tradition versus innovation. Zogry's examination provides a striking opportunity for rethinking the understanding of ritual and performance as well as their relationship to cultural identity. It also offers a sharp reappraisal of scholarly discourse on the Cherokee religious system, with particular focus on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation.

Published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Comanches have engaged Euro-Americans' curiosity for three centuries. Their relations with Spanish, French, and Anglo-Americans on the southern Plains have become a highly resonant part of the mythology of the American West. Yet we know relatively little about the community that Comanches have shared and continue to construct in southwestern Oklahoma.Morris Foster has written the first study of Comanches' history that identifies continuities in their intracommunity organization from the initial period of European contact to the present day. Those continuities are based on shared participation in public social occasions such as powwows, peyote gatherings, and church meetings Foster explains how these occasions are used to regulate social organization and how they have been modified by Comanches to adapt them to changing political and economic relations with Euro-Americans.Using a model of community derived from sociolinguistics, Foster argues that Comanches have remained a distinctive people by organizing their face-to-face relations with one another in ways that maintain Comanche-Comanche lines of communication and regulate a shared sense of appropriate behavior. His book offers readers a significant reinterpretation of traditional anthropological and historical views of Comanche social organization.

In Creek Paths and Federal Roads, Angela Pulley Hudson offers a new understanding of the development of the American South by examining travel within and between southeastern Indian nations and the southern states, from the founding of the United States until the forced removal of southeastern Indians in the 1830s. During the early national period, Hudson explains, settlers and slaves made their way along Indian trading paths and federal post roads, deep into the heart of the Creek Indians' world. Hudson focuses particularly on the creation and mapping of boundaries between Creek Indian lands and the states that grew up around them; the development of roads, canals, and other internal improvements within these territories; and the ways that Indians, settlers, and slaves understood, contested, and collaborated on these boundaries and transit networks. While she chronicles the experiences of these travelers--Native, newcomer, free, and enslaved--who encountered one another on the roads of Creek country, Hudson also places indigenous perspectives squarely at the center of southern history, shedding new light on the contingent emergence of the American South.

Cheewa James, a direct Modoc descendant, offers an explosive and personal story of her ancestry-a richly documented, non-fiction narrative with high-energy, fictionalized inserts. This book is the most comprehensive ever written about this remarkable tribe, covering Modoc history from ancestral times to the present. It includes rare photographs, both black & white and color, never before published. Were it not for Custer's Little Bighorn Battle, the Modoc War would probably be remembered as America's most significant Indian confrontation. One of the most costly Indian wars ever fought, the six-month Modoc War pitted some 55 warriors against 1,000 soldiers. The jagged, hostile terrain-today's Lava Beds National Monument-was the scene of a war like none other. Newly revealed evidence awaits readers' eyes and judgment as to why the 1873 California/Oregon Modoc War started. For over 130 years, the voices of two soldiers were locked away in letters in relatives' trunks. Now they speak out. As prisoners of war, the exiled Modocs in Oklahoma survived an enemy whose weapons were more lethal than guns. Book jacket.

Tell Me, Grandmother is at once the biography of Goes-in-Lodge, a traditional Arapaho woman of the nineteenth century, and the autobiography of her descendant, Virginia Sutter, a modern Arapaho woman with a PhD in public administration. Sutter adeptly weaves her own story with that of Goes-in-Lodge -- who, in addition to being Sutter's great-grandmother, was first wife of Sharpnose, the last chief of the Northern Arapaho nation. Writing in a question-and-answer format between twentieth-century granddaughter and matriarchal ancestor, Sutter discusses four generations of home life, including details about child rearing, education, courtship, marriage, birthing, and burial. Sutter's portrait of Goes-in-Lodge is based on tribal history and interviews with tribal members. Goes-in-Lodge speaks of social and ceremonial gatherings, the Sun Dance, the sweat lodges, and the changes that took place on the Great Plains throughout her lifetime. Sutter details her own life as a child born in a teepee to a white mother and Indian father and the discrimination and injustice she faced struggling to make her way in an increasingly Euro-American world.

Volume 114 in the Civilization of the American Indian Series "[William] Unrau's book is the definitive written history of the Kansa to date, particularly in terms of their interaction with the federal government."--American Indian Quarterly "Unrau examines tribal legends and tradition to trace the origins of the Kansa culture to a single Indian nation, located in 'an unidentified area east of the Mississippi River' and made up of the people who separated before the mid-sixteenth century into the Kansas, Quapaws, Omahas, Osages and Poncas. Balancing tradition and archaeological evidence with French and Spanish records, [Unrau] suggests several routes of migration that could have brought the Wind People to the Kansas River valley."--The American West

"Food, Control, and Resistance is a comparative research study from the nineteenth and twentieth century that displays food rationing and its cultural impact between the Pawnees and Osages in Nebraska and Indian Territory and the Moorundie Aborigines and Ngarrindjeris at Point McLeay in South Australia"--

"This study of the Potawatomi Indians begins in the dim corridors of the prehistoric past and discusses the history and social evolution of these people down to the mid-1960's. In doing so the author includes much that is significant about the history and development of the Midwest and about American-Indian relations...A model of excellence for the ethnohistory of a single tribe...In sum, this book gives the story of the Potawatomi people with accuracy, interest, and feeling."--Wisconsin Magazine of History

When it adopted a new constitution in 1969, the Seminole Nation was the first of the Five Tribes in Oklahoma to formally reorganize its government. In the face of an American legal system that sought either to destroy its nationhood or to impede its self-government, the Seminole Nation tenaciously retained its internal autonomy, cultural vitality, and economic subsistence. Here, L. Susan Work draws on her experience as a tribal attorney to present the first legal history of the twentieth-century Seminole Nation. Work traces the Seminoles' story from their removal to Indian Territory from Florida in the late nineteenth century to the new challenges of the twenty-first century. She also places the history of the Seminole Nation within the context of general Indian law and policy, thereby revealing common threads in the legal struggles and achievements of the Five Tribes, including their evolving relationships with both federal and state governments. As Work amply demonstrates, the history of the Seminole Nation is one of survival and rebirth. It is a dramatic story of an Indian nation overcoming formidable obstacles to move forward into the twenty-first century as a thriving sovereign nation.

When two Wichita traders first encountered Europeans visiting the Pecos Pueblo in 1540, the Wichita tribes dominated the Southern Plains area, which stretched from Kansas to Central Texas. In the three centuries that followed, the Wichitas would be forced to negotiate with competitors, both European and Indian, for land, resources, trade, and their very survival. The Wichita Indians presents a thorough narrative of these bands from their first contact with Europeans until 1845, when the United States annexed Texas. Historian F. Todd Smith provides background information on the Wichita Indians' provenance--the separate tribes of Taovayas, Tawakonis, Kichais, Wacos, and other bands whose shared language and culture united them for survival when external pressures increased. Offering detailed descriptions of their battles, negotiations, trading practices, and survival strategies, Smith traces the Wichitas' struggles to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances and defend themselves from encroaching tribes and white settlers. A companion to Smith's other works on the early Caddos and the post-1845 Wichita and Caddo peoples, The Wichita Indians fills a gap in the history of Native Americans by focusing on this important tribe whose influence peaked on the Southern Plains long before the United States came into being.

In countless ways, the Yuchi (Euchee) people are unique among their fellow Oklahomans and Native peoples of North America. Inheritors of a language unrelated to any other, the Yuchi preserve a strong cultural identity. In part because they have not yet won federal recognition as a tribe, the Yuchi are largely unknown among their non-Native neighbors and often misunderstood in scholarship. Jason Baird Jackson’s Yuchi Folklore, the result of twenty years of collaboration with Yuchi people and one of just a handful of works considering their experience, brings Yuchi cultural expression to light. Yuchi Folklore examines expressive genres and customs that have long been of special interest to Yuchi people themselves. Beginning with an overview of Yuchi history and ethnography, the book explores four categories of cultural expression: verbal or spoken art, material culture, cultural performance, and worldview. In describing oratory, food, architecture, and dance, Jackson visits and revisits the themes of cultural persistence and social interaction, initially between Yuchi and other peoples east of the Mississippi and now in northeastern Oklahoma. The Yuchi exist in a complex, shifting relationship with the federally recognized Muscogee (Creek) Nation, with which they were removed to Indian Territory in the 1830s. Jackson shows how Yuchi cultural forms, values, customs, and practices constantly combine as Yuchi people adapt to new circumstances and everyday life. To be Yuchi today is, for example, to successfully negotiate a world where commercial rap and country music coexist with Native-language hymns and doctoring songs. While centered on Yuchi community life, this volume of essays also illustrates the discipline of folklore studies and offers perspectives for advancing a broader understanding of Woodlands peoples across the breadth of the American South and East.