The Unassigned Lands and the Five Nations, What the Run Erased

The name Unassigned Lands was a bureaucratic fiction that obscured a longer and more complicated history. The nearly two million acres that opened in eighteen eighty-nine had been home to the Five Civilized Tribes, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, since the forced relocations of the eighteen thirties known as the Trail of Tears. Under the treaties that ended that removal, the tribes held their territories in perpetuity.

The phrase in perpetuity turned out to mean about forty years. After the Civil War, the federal government imposed new treaties on the Five Tribes, partly on the grounds that some tribal members had allied with the Confederacy. Those Reconstruction-era treaties required each nation to accept freed enslaved people as citizens, a provision the tribes handled with varying degrees of willingness and delay, a reckoning that extends into the present day, and to cede the western portions of their lands for settlement by other tribes and, eventually, by non-Indian homesteaders.

Into what is now central Oklahoma, the government relocated more than thirty tribal nations from across the country: the Potawatomi, the Kickapoo, the Shawnee, the Cheyenne and Arapaho, the Comanche, the Kiowa, the Apache, and many others. By the time of the eighteen eighty-nine run, Indian Territory was one of the most diverse Indigenous concentrations on the continent. The city that rose on the North Canadian River was planted inside this world, not on empty ground.

The First Americans Museum, which opened in Oklahoma City in twenty twenty-one, takes its name and its mission from that fact, thirty-nine tribal nations now have headquarters or cultural ties to the state of Oklahoma, the largest concentration of tribal nations in the United States. The red earth remembers longer than the deeds do.