Five Civilized Tribes Museum, Muskogee

The building that houses the Five Civilized Tribes Museum was not built as a museum. It was built in eighteen seventy-five as the first Union Indian Agency, the administrative headquarters through which the United States federal government managed its official dealings with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole nations in Indian Territory. The label Five Civilized Tribes was the government's own phrase, a backhanded acknowledgment that these nations had developed written languages, formal governments, and European-style economic institutions, which Washington found easier to negotiate with than nations it did not understand.

The Union Agency building served its original purpose for decades, handling land transactions, annuity payments, and disputes between tribal citizens and the growing flood of non-Native settlers who were pushing into Indian Territory in defiance of its legal status. It stood at Muskogee, which was already becoming the commercial and governmental center of eastern Indian Territory and would eventually become one of the most important cities in the new state of Oklahoma after statehood in nineteen oh seven.

By the nineteen fifties, the building sat largely unused. A women's cultural organization called the Da-Co-Tah Indian Club began campaigning in September of nineteen fifty-one to repurpose it as a museum honoring the five nations whose history the building had long administered. The museum opened formally in nineteen sixty-six.

Today it holds one of the most significant collections of Five Tribes art in the country, including a large body of work by Jerome Tiger, a Muscogee Creek and Seminole painter who died in nineteen sixty-seven at the age of twenty-six after producing hundreds of works that helped define a modern Native American visual language. His paintings blend traditional ceremonial imagery with a fluid, contemporary draftsmanship that still stops visitors cold.