American Indian Genocide Museum 'How Indian Territory Became the State Of Oklahoma'

Image credit: Xiang Zhang (Xiang Zhang Fine Art) Used with permission

How Indian Territory Became The State Of Oklahoma

Steve Melendez
President, American Indian Genocide Museum

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Fifteen years before The Dawes Act became law on January 8, 1887, the U.S. Congress was having second thoughts about Indians being sovereign nations in “Indian Territory." Indian Territory was the land promised at the end of the “Trail of Tears." Today, we know it as the State of Oklahoma.

Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 was the ethnic cleansing of the Indians east of the Mississippi to their new promised land west of the Mississippi. What is wrong with this picture of a homeland supposedly protected from land-hungry whites suddenly transformed into a landscape of “Oklahoma Sooners” riding buckboards and horses galloping into Indian Territory to stake their claim?