What If Native American Tribes Had Gotten Their Own State?
The State of Sequoyah: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Quest for an Indian State, by Donald L. Fixico, University of Oklahoma Press, 206 pages, $34.95
In McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), the Supreme Court rejected Oklahoma’s attempt to prosecute crimes committed on a reservation by an Indian. Henceforth, the tribe, not the state, would have jurisdiction over Indian crimes on Indian lands. It was such a win for Indian sovereignty that the Muscogee have dubbed July 9, the day the decision came down, as Sovereignty Day.
If history had taken a different turn, the place now known as Oklahoma could have seen an even stronger win for Native American sovereignty. That area was once known as Indian Territory: a land where tribes displaced from other parts of the U.S. had been resettled. In 1890, a part of it was carved out to form the Oklahoma Territory, but a large portion of what is now the state of Oklahoma remained in Indigenous hands. Even as the Oklahoma Territory applied for statehood, so did the Indian zone. On November 7, 1905, delegates from the Five Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole—met in Muskogee, Oklahoma, at the Hinton Theater. They voted overwhelmingly to support a constitution for a proposed state of Sequoyah, named for the Indian who was the first to write down the Cherokee language.
They lost that fight: When Oklahoma was admitted to the Union in 1907, the Indian and Oklahoma territories were consolidated into a single state. But in The State of Sequoyah, which relates the history of that battle and of the larger idea of an Indian state, the Arizona State University policy historian and ethnohistorian Donald L. Fixico makes a case for the continued relevance of such ideas. “If the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico are possible candidates for statehood, then so should be the state of Sequoyah,” he argues.
The Five Tribes were not actually “tribes” in the sense that most people use the word today: They consisted of autonomous townlike communities, each with their own histories and their own systems of property and governance. In the decades that followed their removal from the East, the Five Tribes revised their traditional infrastructures, adopted
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