American Indians living in Oklahoma have a complicated, interesting, and unique history. Their story involves hardship, tribal and individual victories, clashes of cultures, and juxtaposed realities with the American mainstream. Several themes resonate throughout the history of Oklahoma Indians, and they all involve a Native reality of physical and metaphysical forces. Understanding these themes gives much insight into the Indian identity. Adaptation and adjustment, always an important part of Native cultures, became an integral part of Oklahoma Indian lives, especially after removal to Indian Territory, as tribal communities rebuilt their governments and medicine people reestablished ceremonial ways.
The story of Oklahoma Indians begins with the people already here many centuries ago, the indigenous Spiro Mound builders, 500 to 1300 A.D. Regulators of early trade, these proud people flourished as an extension of the Mississippian mound builders east of the great Mississippi River. In the following generation early people settled along rivers: indigenous Caddoans (Caddo, Wichita, and Pawnee), Siouans (Quapaw and Osage), and Athapascans (Plains Apache). The early Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado recorded observations of Indian activities during the sixteenth century, and his men encountered Plains tribes hunting and raiding in this part of the vast West. Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Apache raided into the region and claimed hunting territories. The Cheyenne also used the region.
For Native peoples, the early decades of the nineteenth century became the period of "Indian Removal." Over a period of years in the 1830s the U.S. government removed eastern Indian tribes to Indian Territory. These people included the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw. Other southeastern tribes included the Alabama. Later, around the time of the Civil War and afterward, removed tribes from the Northeast would join them—the Delaware, Sac and Fox, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Peoria, Ottawa, Wyandotte, Seneca, and Iowa. Prairie tribes included the Kaw, Ponca, Otoe, and Missouri. The Indian Wars of the 1870s produced "reservations" in the Oklahoma region for Plains tribes such as the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and others. Further western tribes represented here included the Nez Perce and Modoc. In the end, the U.S. government removed a total of sixty-seven different tribes. All of these peoples and their communities developed cultures whose traditions have survived today in spite of several setbacks due to contact with non-Indians.
After Indian Removal and reservation making brought them here, these Native peoples adapted to the environmental conditions and climate. Elemental forces of creation—the sun, water, earth, and wind—guided their daily lives. Daily rituals of life and many traditional ceremonies continued to be practiced on a regular basis and continued to evolve as the indigenous cultures reemerged and readapted to new conditions. The oral tradition of storytelling preserved legends about important leaders and events and also recorded verbal accounts of new experiences and leaders. Thus, tribal accounts of the past continue to be based on oral tradition, rather than written, documentary sources.
The survival and success of Oklahoma Indians incorporates several significant themes. One theme involves a learned, shared experience that comprises a presumptive "collective identity" called "Oklahoma Indian." It has been said by many non-Oklahoma Indians and noted by other people that Oklahoma Indians are "different." But why? Perhaps they are so because of the collective experience of tragedy and triumph, defeat and survival, destruction and reconstruction, a shared fate of having to overcome setbacks and being forced to rebuild their communities and their nations several times. Oklahoma Indians are much like the metaphorical phoenix rising from the ashes in a rebirth. Each time, Oklahoma Indians have had to reconstruct their families, homes, communities, and nations.
A second theme involves the Indian view of the universe, of the physical and metaphysical worlds that comprise the Indian universe. The reality of Oklahoma Indians is one that comprises seeming contradictions: on the one hand, there is a continuation of traditional values and beliefs, deriving from their ancient forefathers from all parts of America. On the other hand, there is a progressive outlook. This "Indianness" is usually manifested via mixed-bloods raised in the Oklahoma Indian communities. Oklahoma Indians are steeped in this Native ethos. The tribes of Oklahoma carried the ethos, the beliefs, with them during their removals to the Indian Territory, and it sustained them while they rebuilt their fires of communities during the nineteenth century.
