The Five Nations' Schools Before Kansas Had Schools

The Cherokee Nation established a system of public schools in Indian Territory in eighteen forty-one. The state of Kansas would not establish public schools until eighteen sixty-one. A nation that had been marched across the continent at gunpoint, that had buried between a quarter and a third of its people in transit, that was operating on land it had been coerced to accept, built a functioning public education system twenty years before the state that replaced its territory got around to it.

This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.

The Cherokee re-founded the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, originally published in Georgia before the removal, in Indian Territory by eighteen forty-four. They built the Cherokee Female Seminary in eighteen fifty-one, one of the first institutions of higher education for women west of the Mississippi River. The founding date for the seminary is documented in sources from the University of Oklahoma Press and the Oklahoma Historical Society, though some specifics of the earliest institution remain in the historical record of this period.

The Choctaw Nation had established its own school system in Indian Territory before the Civil War. The Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations similarly re-built civic and governmental institutions from the ground up on land they had not chosen.

The Curtis Act of eighteen ninety-eight, which dissolved tribal governments and extended allotment to the Five Civilized Tribes, also abolished the tribal school systems that had operated in Indian Territory. It replaced them with a federal system. The federal system that replaced them was inferior by almost every available measure.

Oklahoma became a state in nineteen oh seven. The institutions the five nations had built from nothing, in the aftermath of forced removal, were written out of the state's founding narrative. They are documented in Tahlequah, at the Cherokee Heritage Center, if you want to read the account the state left out.