Indian Territory's Governments

For most of the nineteenth century, the Five Civilized Tribes did not merely live in Indian Territory. They governed it.

Each of the five nations, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, and the Seminole, maintained a full constitutional government, with a written constitution, an elected legislature, a court system, a school system funded by tribal revenues, and a capital city. The Cherokee capital was at Tahlequah. The Choctaw capital was at Tuskahoma. The Chickasaw capital was at Tishomingo. These were not reservation arrangements. They were nations operating as nations.

The Cherokee wrote their constitution in eighteen twenty-seven, modeled partly on the United States Constitution. The Choctaw had a constitution by eighteen sixty, revised after the Civil War. The nations built seminaries and academies that educated students from across the region. The Cherokee Female Seminary, opened in eighteen fifty-one, was one of the first institutions of higher learning for women west of the Mississippi.

The Civil War fractured all five nations. Some members sided with the Confederacy; others remained loyal to the Union. The reconstruction treaties of eighteen sixty-six punished the nations for Confederate alliances by stripping them of the western portions of their territory and requiring them to admit freedmen to citizenship. But the governments themselves survived and rebuilt.

It was the Dawes Act of eighteen eighty-seven, and especially the Curtis Act of eighteen ninety-eight, that finally dismantled them. Tribal courts were abolished, communal land was allotted out to individuals, and the tribal rolls were frozen. By nineteen oh six, on the eve of statehood, the United States had systematically deconstructed governments that had functioned, continuously, for seventy years.

The nations did not disappear. Today all five maintain active governments, courts, economies, and cultural programs. The Cherokee Nation is the largest tribal nation by enrollment in the United States. The governments were interrupted. They were not ended.