State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah

The State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America on the southern Great Plains, bounded by Kansas to the north, Missouri and Arkansas to the east, Texas to the south along the Red River, and the Free State of Colorado and the March of Arizona at the far end of its panhandle. The capital is Guthrie, the largest city is Oklahoma City, the Governor is Naomi Teague and the Premier is Ross Fixico.

It was admitted on 16 November 1907. The most recent constituent polity admitted to the Union is the Free City of Philipsburg, which entered in 1921.

Nearly half of its land lies under the jurisdiction of thirteen Native nations, whose governments are not creatures of the State and cannot be altered by it. Those nations held treaties with the Crown before Oklahoma-Sequoyah existed, governed their own territory with their own constitutions, courts, schools and newspapers for two generations before it existed, and consented to its creation on terms. The terms are the reason the State’s legislature has three chambers rather than two: beside a House of the People and a Senate sits a House of Nations, delegated by the nations themselves, holding consent over any measure that touches treaty land, treaty rights, sacred sites or the nations’ own minerals.

Above that constitutional arrangement the State is an ordinary plains polity of wheat, cattle, oil, wind, county courthouses, turnpikes and tornado sirens, and most of what happens in it has nothing to do with the settlement at all.

Name

The State’s name carries both of the territories it was made from, and neither was allowed to absorb the other.

Oklahoma is Choctaw, from okla, people, and humma, red. It was the name of the western territory opened to settlement by the land runs, and it carries the settler half: the runs, the county seats, the wheat country, the oil fields and the two metropolitan cities.

Sequoyah is the name of the state the Five Nations proposed for themselves and did not get. Their convention at Muskogee in 1905 drafted a constitution for a separate polity of that name, after the Cherokee who devised the syllabary in which his nation still writes. The bill to admit it failed in the Commons in 1906 by eleven votes, and what the Nations obtained instead was the compromise: one State, both names, and a chamber of their own inside it.

The hyphen was insisted on by the Muskogee delegates and resisted at New Westminster as inelegant. It survives, and the State’s own instruments have never once used either half alone.

Geography and climate

The State runs some 750 kilometres from the Ozark foothills to the end of the panhandle, and the country changes completely across that distance. It is one of the sharpest east-to-west gradients in the Realm: oak forest and hills at one end, short-grass plain at the other, and the rainfall falling away almost a centimetre for every thirty kilometres travelled west.

The eastern hills and forests

The east is wooded, watered and broken: the southern Ozarks in the north-east, the parallel ridges of the Ouachitas in the south-east, and between them the valley of the Arkansas. This is the country the Five Nations were removed to, and it is where nearly all treaty land lies. It looks like the upland south rather than the plains, which is the first thing that surprises visitors who expect the whole State to be flat.

The cross timbers and the two metros

Through the middle of the State runs a belt of scrubby blackjack and post oak, the cross timbers, which the people who live in it call the blackjacks. It was a genuine obstacle to wagons, it marks the boundary between the woodland east and the open west, and it is poor country for timber and adequate for cattle. Both metropolitan cities sit in it or just beyond it, as does the capital, and as does Blackjacks, the country residence of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America, which stands on a section in Logan County outside Guthrie and takes its name from the country rather than the other way about.

The western plains

West of the cross timbers the country opens out into wheat and cattle: the Osage hills of tallgrass prairie in the north-east, the gypsum hills, the salt plains, the red-earth breaks of the western river valleys, and the granite knuckles of the Wichita Mountains, which rise abruptly out of the plain in the south-west and hold the Realm’s oldest bison range.

The panhandle

The panhandle is a rectangle 270 kilometres long and 55 wide at the far north-west, and its history is that for a generation it belonged to nobody. It was left out of every territorial organisation, was governed by nothing at all, and was known accordingly as No Man’s Land, with squatter courts, claim associations and a short-lived attempt to organise itself as a territory of its own. It was attached at statehood because there was nowhere else to put it.

It has never quite joined. It is closer to Denver and Amarillo than to its own capital, keeps the time and the trade of its neighbours, and produces a petition to be transferred to somebody else about once a generation, which nobody in Guthrie has ever taken seriously and nobody in the panhandle entirely means.

Rivers and reservoirs

Two great rivers cross the State west to east. The Arkansas comes down from the Colorado mountains through Tulsa and out into Arkansas, and is maintained as a navigation to the State line. The Red River is the whole southern boundary with Texas, and the boundary has been litigated between the two polities four times, because a river that moves its bed moves a frontier with it.

Almost every other body of water in the State is artificial. Oklahoma-Sequoyah has more built shoreline than almost anywhere in the Realm, the product of fifty years of federal dam building for flood control, navigation and municipal water. What was flooded to make them was bottomland: farms of both peoples, and, in the east, whole Nation towns, cemeteries and ceremonial grounds taken before any consent procedure existed to stop it.

The last of them was stopped. A dam proposed in 1968 on the upper reaches of a treaty river was refused consent by the House of Nations, the ministry took the refusal to the courts expecting to win, and lost. That case is the moment the consent power stopped being a formality, and every account of the settlement’s modern working begins with it.

Climate and severe weather

The climate is continental and violent. Summers are long and hot, with the western plains regularly above 40 degrees; winters are short, dry and punctuated by ice storms that take down the power lines across half the State; spring is the dangerous season.

Oklahoma-Sequoyah lies at the centre of the Realm’s tornado country, and the consequences are civic rather than merely meteorological. The Realm’s Severe Weather Service is headquartered at Norman, and the watches and warnings issued for the whole of the United Kingdom of America are written in this State by people who live under the same sky. Warnings are issued in Nation languages as well as English, which is a requirement of State law and not a courtesy. Local forecasters are trusted public figures who stay on air for six hours at a stretch when it turns, and are recognised in the street for it.

The Woodward tornado of 1947 killed a hundred and seven people in a single evening, and every building code, school shelter standard and siren network in the State dates itself from that night. It also produced the Realm’s storm-cellar law, under which no person may be turned away from a shelter, public or private, when a warning is out, and every school and public building must keep one. The law is treated across the Realm as a curiosity of the frontier statutes. In Oklahoma-Sequoyah it is simply the reason the door is unlocked.

The aquifer

Beneath the western counties and the panhandle lies the Ogallala, a body of fossil groundwater that made irrigated farming possible on the high plains from the middle of the last century. It is being drawn down at many times its recharge, and unlike most environmental questions this one has an arithmetic answer: the State’s own water reports name the decade in which particular counties will cease to be able to irrigate, and those decades are within the working lives of the people farming there now.

History

Before removal

The country was inhabited and governed long before any of the names in this article existed. The Wichita and Caddo held the river valleys of the south and west in settled towns with agriculture and long-distance trade. The Osage ruled the north-east and a great deal beyond it, and were the dominant military power of the southern plains for the better part of a century. The Comanche and Kiowa held the high plains south and west, and their authority over that country was real enough that the Realm treated with them as powers.

None of these peoples were removed here. They were already here, and the arrival of the eastern nations was, from their side, an intrusion arranged by a third party.

Removal

In the 1830s the Realm removed the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee and Seminole nations from their homelands in the south-east to the country that became the eastern half of this State. They were marched in winter, in parties of thousands, under military escort, and a substantial proportion of each nation died on the road or in the first year after arrival.

The removals were carried out lawfully, by statute, by ministries answerable to an electorate, with courts sitting and newspapers printing, and they were carried out in the sovereign’s name, because the treaties they broke were Crown treaties made in the sovereign’s name. The Dominion Era article treats that as the indictment rather than the mitigation, and this article does not soften it.

What this State adds is the detail that the sovereign objected and was ignored. The Crown’s misgivings were minuted, communicated to ministers and set aside, and the papers were published in the following century. The Nations know this, and have never once regarded it as an excuse. Their standing position, stated at every convocation, is that a Crown whose objection changes nothing has not objected, and that the name on the instrument is the name that is answerable for it. The position is uncomfortable for the Realm precisely because it is correct as constitutional law: a sovereign who reigns and does not rule cannot both be the party to the treaty and be excused from breaking it.

The judgment that was obeyed

Removal was avoidable, and the proof is that once it was avoided.

In 1833 the Cherokee Nation sued in the Realm’s own courts to restrain its removal, and won. The Royal American Supreme Court held in Cherokee Nation v Brearley that a treaty made in the sovereign’s name bound the sovereign’s ministers, that the Nation was a party capable of enforcing it, and that no statute in general terms would be read to abrogate a specific treaty guarantee unless it said so in words. The ministry complied. Removal of the Cherokee was suspended, the agent was withdrawn, and for two years the judgment held.

It was defeated by a document rather than by a court. In 1835 a ministry negotiated the Treaty of New Echota with a faction of some twenty Cherokee men who held no office and no authority from their nation, and who signed a cession of the whole homeland against the declared opposition of the principal chief, the national council and the great majority of the people. The instrument was regular on its face, and like every treaty with a nation it took effect on signature, with no Act of Parliament needed. Removal resumed under it in 1838, and the great dying on the road happened under a treaty that a court could not reach because the court’s judgment had been about a different one.

The killings of 1839 followed in the new country: three of the principal signers were put to death in a single day under the Nation’s own law against unauthorised cession, and the division between the descendants of the signers and the descendants of those who opposed them remained an organising fact of Cherokee politics for a century and is not wholly gone now.

Brearley survived all of it, and is the foundation of treaty jurisprudence in the Realm. It is cited in every treaty case the Realm has decided since, in Cascadia and the March and the Great Lakes as much as here, and the sentence for which it is remembered is carved at Muskogee.

That sequence, a judgment obeyed and then evaded by a bargain signed by the wrong people, is the direct ancestor of this State’s consent rule. The House of Nations exists so that no agreement affecting a nation can ever again be got from somebody who does not speak for it.

The nations in the territory

From the 1840s the removed nations rebuilt, and what they rebuilt was not a reservation but a set of states.

Each had a written constitution, an elected principal chief or governor, a bicameral legislature, a supreme court, a code of laws, a treasury, a school system and a national newspaper. The Cherokee Advocate, printed at Tahlequah in English and in the syllabary from 1844, is the oldest newspaper in continuous publication west of the Mississippi. The Cherokee seminaries at Tahlequah, one for young men and one for young women, were free, were taught to a standard that eastern colleges accepted, and predate every institution of higher learning in the surrounding territories.

In the Realm’s legal language they were self-governing nations in treaty with the Crown. There was no Realm officer set over them, no territorial governor, no federal legislature with authority in their territory. They ran their own affairs and dealt with the Realm through treaty and through an agency, and they did so for two generations. This is the fact the whole settlement rests on, and the reason the compromise of 1907 could not simply be imposed: the Realm was not organising an empty territory but negotiating with functioning governments.

The secession crisis and the treaties of 1866

The Realm’s secession crisis reached the territory in 1861, and it divided it.

Some nations, or factions within them, allied with the rebels, for reasons that were partly about slavery, partly about the Realm’s record of broken treaties, and partly about who happened to hold the agency and the annuity payments. Others stayed loyal. Several split down the middle and fought each other, with the old removal divisions reappearing under new names, and the fighting in the territory was proportionally among the worst anywhere in the Realm: towns burned, the Cherokee capital sacked, the herds driven off, and a third of some nations refugees in Kansas by the end of it.

The reckoning came in the treaties of 1866, and it fell on everyone. The Realm required cessions of the western part of the territory from nations that had sided with the rebellion and from nations that had not, required rights of way for railways through all of it, and required the emancipation of the people the Nations had held as slaves and their admission to citizenship. The land ceded in 1866 is the land the runs were later made on, which is why this State’s settler half exists at all and why the Nations regard 1861 as the most expensive year in their history.

Slavery and the Freedmen

The Five Nations had held enslaved people, brought with them on the removal roads and worked on the plantations they rebuilt in the new country. Slavery in the territory was abolished by the treaties of 1866, and in three of the five nations by their own national councils in the year before that, under pressure and ahead of the requirement.

The same treaties admitted the emancipated and their descendants to citizenship of the nations that had held them. That admission has been contested by some nations, in some generations, on the ground that citizenship is theirs alone to determine, and defended by the Freedmen on the ground that it was the price of a treaty the nations accepted and cannot now unpick. The question is live and this article does not resolve it, because the State has not, the courts have divided, and the nations themselves are not of one mind.

The railways

The rights of way taken in 1866 brought the railways, and the railways were negotiated rather than simply seized. The nations bargained hard over routes, terms and land, several took shares in the companies, and some made a great deal of money. What they could not bargain away was the consequence: a railway brings a town, a town brings a population that the treaties had excluded, and by the 1880s there were more non-citizens living in the territory under permit, lease and licence than there were citizens of some of the nations hosting them.

The land runs

The unassigned land in the middle of the territory, ceded in 1866 and never given to anyone, was thrown open to non-Native settlement on 22 April 1889. The district was claimed in a single afternoon: the line was drawn, the signal was given at noon, and by evening Guthrie and Oklahoma City had gone from empty prairie to towns of several thousand people camped on lots.

The run was improvised and it was repeated, four more times over the following decade, before the Realm gave it up for lotteries and sealed bids after the disorder of the later ones. It has left the State with a founding story that it has not known what to do with for fifty years: the runs are the origin of half the towns, the source of the nickname of its regiment and its universities, and a straightforward account of taking country from people who had been promised it in perpetuity. The anniversary is still kept in some towns and has quietly lapsed in others.

The commission that came to allot

In the 1890s the Realm sent a commission to the Five Nations with instructions to break their communal territory into individual holdings, on the theory then general that communal title kept people poor and that a nation divided into freeholders would cease to be a nation.

It failed, and the manner of its failure made this State. The nations refused, in writing, in concert and repeatedly, over six years; they had constitutions, lawyers, newspapers and money, and they used all four. The commission’s final report recommended against allotment: it concluded that the title was good, that the governments were competent, that no lawful means existed to compel a division without abrogating treaties the Realm had no intention of admitting it would abrogate, and that the resulting litigation would be ruinous and would probably be lost, Brearley being what it was.

What the commission did instead was enrol. It compiled, nation by nation, a roll of citizens, and mapped the boundaries of each nation’s territory. The rolls were contested at the time, are imperfect, and remain the legal foundation of citizenship for most of the nations to this day. The maps are the boundaries the State’s own statutes use.

So Oklahoma-Sequoyah has no allotment map, no checkerboard of individual Native holdings sold off to neighbours within a generation, and no century of heirship litigation dividing a quarter-section among three hundred descendants. The treaty land is whole and contiguous, and it is the single largest divergence between this State and any other place the Realm dealt with its nations.

The Sequoyah Convention

By the turn of the century statehood for the territory was inevitable and its shape was not. The settler west wanted one State on its own terms. The Realm wanted one State for reasons of economy. The nations wanted two.

In August 1905 delegates from the Five Nations and the smaller nations of the east met at Muskogee, sat for six weeks, and drafted a constitution for a proposed State of Sequoyah. It was the work of experienced men from governments that had been running for sixty years, and it was a serious instrument: a bicameral legislature, a supreme court, a bill of rights, provision for the nations’ continued internal government, prohibition of the liquor traffic, and a schedule of counties drawn on the nations’ own boundaries. It was submitted to the people of the territory in a referendum and carried overwhelmingly.

The bill of 1906

A bill to admit Sequoyah was brought in and was defeated in the Commons on 14 March 1906 by eleven votes.

The arguments against it were the ordinary ones and one that was not. The ordinary ones were economy, the difficulty of two small polities where one would do, and the unwillingness of a ministry to create a polity whose politics nobody could predict. The one that was not ordinary was raised by the member for a western constituency and was never satisfactorily answered: that admitting Sequoyah would place a permanent constitutional wall down the middle of a single economic region, and that the settler population already living inside the proposed State, some of it a majority in its own districts, would be governed by a polity in which it could never form a government.

The division list survives, is published, and is read aloud at Muskogee every year on the anniversary. Eleven votes is the closest the Realm has come to admitting a polity governed by and for its Native nations, and the margin is taught in every constitutional course in the country.

The compromise and admission

What followed was not a ministry’s gift. The bill’s defeat left the Realm needing a State and the nations able to make one impossible, and the settlement was negotiated over eighteen months between the nations, the settler territorial government and commissioners of both Houses, and then carried at New Westminster by members of every party with no ministry willing to own it. The Admission Act passed on an unwhipped division.

Its terms are the State:

• One State under both names, neither half of the name to be used alone in any instrument.
• A tricameral legislature, the third chamber delegated by the nations and holding consent, not advice.
• No allotment, then or afterwards, and the nations’ territory guaranteed as it stood on the commission’s maps.
• Muskogee as treaty capital, seat of the House of Nations, the Treaty Courts, the compact offices and the treaty archive.
• Guthrie as capital of the State, as neutral ground between the two halves and the two metros.
• Entrenchment: the treaty provisions of the State constitution amendable only by two-thirds of the House of the People, a majority of the Senate and the concurrence of the House of Nations.
• Nation courts to retain criminal jurisdiction over all persons on treaty land.
• A trust obligation on the Realm over nation assets held in trust, which the following twenty years tested to destruction.

The State was admitted on 16 November 1907.

The first legislature

Its first legislature, meeting at Guthrie in 1908, passed a law segregating railway carriages, waiting rooms and schools in its first session, and followed it within two years with a franchise test aimed at Black voters.

This is the ugliest fact about the compromise State and the article states it without arrangement. A polity whose founding instrument was a negotiated guarantee against being governed without consent used its first months of self-government to place a third of its people outside the consent of anybody. The two things were done by the same men in the same building in the same year.

The segregation laws stopped at the treaty line. They required House of Nations consent to operate on treaty land, that consent was refused, and it was refused every time it was sought for the next forty years. The practical result was a map on which a Black passenger’s carriage changed at a county boundary, and it is the first occasion on which the consent power was used for something its drafters had not been thinking about.

Oil

Oil was found in quantity just before statehood, and the knowledge that it was there is a large part of why the terms of 1907 were fought over so bitterly by everybody.

The Glenn field came in south of Tulsa in 1905 and made that town. The Cushing field, west of it, came in a few years later and for a decade set the price of oil for the whole Realm, which is why a small town on the plains is still the Realm’s pricing point and holds its strategic storage. And the Osage mineral estate in the north-east proved to be the richest ground per acre anywhere on earth. Its leases were auctioned in the open air under an elm outside the Nation’s council house at Pawhuska, in sales that ran into millions of pounds in an afternoon, with the bidders in the shade and the Nation’s officers on the steps.

Derricks were drilled on the lawn of the capitol at Guthrie in the 1920s, at an angle, to reach under the building, and one of them is still there.

The Osage killings

The Osage mineral estate is owned by the Nation as a whole and has never been divided. What was divided was the income: each citizen on the roll at the time of the settlement received a headright, an equal share of the royalties, and headrights are inheritable.

That single provision made murder profitable. Through the late 1910s and early 1920s Osage citizens were shot, poisoned and blown up for their headrights, by men who had married into the Nation or who stood to inherit through those who had. The number of dead has never been settled and is certainly in the dozens. The killings were possible because they happened alongside a guardianship system under which the courts appointed white “guardians” over competent Osage adults on the ground that they could not manage their own money, and the guardians controlled the accounts, the wills, the doctors and, in several proven instances, the poison.

Local officers did not investigate, were bribed, or were themselves involved. Private detectives hired by the Nation were murdered. What broke it was federal: the Bureau of Federal Investigation, founded in 1908 and until then an obscure service of the Home Office, was called in at the insistence of the Osage council and the House of Nations, and its investigation ran for three years and produced convictions. It is the Bureau’s founding case, made the service’s reputation, and is the reason the Realm has a federal criminal investigation service at all in anything like its present form.

The guardianship system was abolished in 1925, by an Act of the State legislature carried under the threat of a Parliamentary bill that would have done it less politely, and the accounts were audited for the first time in their history.

The money took much longer. The Nation sued for the losses of the trust years and the litigation ran for two generations, but in 1971 it won outright: the Royal American Supreme Court found the Realm’s conduct of the trust a breach of a Crown obligation and found no defence of limitation available against it. The judgment was paid in full, with interest calculated from the year of each failure, over the following decade. It is the largest sum the Realm has ever paid a nation, it is the only such case anywhere in the Realm to have been paid in full rather than compromised, and the Osage regard it as a debt discharged rather than a favour received.

Greenwood

The Greenwood district of north Tulsa was the wealthiest Black community in the Realm: a self-contained quarter of shops, theatres, surgeries, hotels, newspapers and schools, built by people who had come to the territory for a place of their own and prospered in the oil years.

On the last two days of May 1921 it was destroyed by white mobs, with the assistance and the weapons of the city and state authorities, after a false allegation against a young Black man. Thirty-five city blocks were burned. The number killed has never been agreed and the mass graves found in the present century suggest the higher estimates. Thousands were left homeless in a single night, insurance claims were refused on riot exclusions, and the city’s immediate response was a building ordinance that would have made rebuilding impossible, struck down in the courts by Greenwood’s own lawyers.

It was rebuilt anyway, and it was destroyed again more slowly. A motorway was driven through the middle of the district in the 1960s, taking the commercial heart of it for an interchange, and Tulsa now officially calls that the second destruction.

The State’s reckoning has been late and partial in every part. A commission reported in the present century and its recommendations were not acted on. Survivors’ claims are live in the courts. The graves have been found and are being excavated. Compensation was eventually paid, decades after the commission and to far fewer people than the commission named.

The Dust Bowl

The drought of the 1930s fell hardest on the western counties and the panhandle, where deep ploughing of ground that should never have been broken met four years without rain. The topsoil left in storms that darkened the sky as far as the eastern seaboard, farms failed in their thousands, and a great migration went west to California, where the arrivals were resented, named after the State they came from, and are remembered in both polities.

Treaty land came through it comparatively well, for a structural reason: land held communally had not been cut into small holdings whose owners had to plough every acre every year to survive, and the nations’ grazing leases had kept more of the western grass unbroken.

The wars

Enlistment from Oklahoma-Sequoyah has been far above the Realm’s average in every conflict, and enlistment from the nations has been higher still, which is remarked on in every generation and explained differently by each. Fort Sill is the Royal American Army’s artillery school and the reason Lawton exists. The 61st of Foot, the Oklahoma-Sequoyah Light Infantry, was raised at statehood, is nicknamed the Sooners, wears blue facings, belongs to the 9th Division and carries the motto One Fire, given in Cherokee.

Signallers working in Nation languages were used in both great wars, and unlike elsewhere the Realm acknowledged them at the time rather than classifying the fact for forty years, which the nations attribute to the House of Nations having a standing means of objecting to being kept secret.

Fort Sill has a second history. The Chiricahua Apache were held there as prisoners of war for twenty-seven years, from 1894, having been brought from the south-west after their surrender; children were born into captivity and old men died in it, and the imprisonment was never authorised by any conviction of any offence. When it ended in 1913 some went back west and some stayed, and their descendants are one of the thirteen nations that hold seats in the House of Nations today. That a nation sitting in a legislature was, within living memory of its grandparents, a body of prisoners without trial on a military reservation in the same State, is the fact the article would most like to leave out and does not.

The middle of the century

The federal government made the modern State as much as oil did. Tinker, the great air depot east of Oklahoma City, arrived with the second war and has outlasted every oil bust since. The Civil Aviation Authority of America established its headquarters and its academy at Oklahoma City in 1956, so that every air traffic controller in the Realm is trained in this State. One of the Realm’s thirteen Royal American Reserve Houses sits in the same city. And the Arkansas River navigation, completed from the Mississippi to the head of navigation near Muskogee, gave a landlocked plains polity a working port for barge traffic.

The revival

The Native political revival of the 1960s and 1970s took an unusual form here, because the institutions the movement demanded elsewhere already existed.

It was therefore aimed inward. Younger Nation citizens argued that their own delegates had grown comfortable, that consent was being given as a matter of course by men who dined with the ministers whose bills they were approving, and that a chamber which had not refused anything in twenty years was not exercising a power but performing one. The campaigns were fought in Nation elections rather than in the streets, several long-serving delegates were turned out, and the standing orders were rewritten to require that a consent motion be reported back to the nation’s own council before it was moved.

The refusal of the dam in 1968 came out of that generation, and so did the litigation that produced the 1971 judgment.

The bombing

On the morning of 19 April 1995 a lorry bomb destroyed the Pershing Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing a hundred and sixty-eight people, nineteen of them children, most of them in the nursery on the second floor.

It was done by home-grown anti-federal militants who hated the Realm’s government in the abstract and had no demand beyond that. The date was chosen for its anniversary: 19 April is the day the first shots of the Four-Year War were fired in 1775, which the men who did it understood as a licence and which the Realm has had to live with as a date ever since.

The State’s response is the thing most often remarked on. The trials were ordinary criminal trials in ordinary courts. The law was barely changed at all, deliberately, and the restraint was deeply unpopular at the time: a Premier and a Prime Minister were both accused of weakness for declining the emergency powers that were drafted and never introduced. It is better regarded now, and it is invoked whenever emergency legislation is proposed anywhere in the Realm.

The memorial stands on the footprint of the building, and it is a State occasion rather than a national one; the bombing, the trials in the city and the restraint that followed are described in the article on Oklahoma City. The Realm has largely let Oklahoma-Sequoyah own its own grief, which is a contrast with May Day eleven years later, and the contrast is noticed here more than elsewhere.

The present century

Five things have dominated the State’s recent politics. Wind has become the largest industry by installed capacity, and has raised in a new form every question the oil years raised. Earthquakes caused by the injection of oilfield wastewater went from unknown to routine in a decade and produced litigation that is still running. The aquifer continues to fall on a published schedule. Nation enterprise has become the largest employer in the eastern counties, which has reversed the direction in which the two halves of the State look for work. And the rural hospitals have been closing at a rate the State has not answered, so that parts of the west are further from a maternity ward than they were in 1950.

The treaty settlement

The nations

Thirteen nations hold seats in the House of Nations: the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee and Seminole, removed here in the 1830s; the Osage, whose reserved country in the north-east is the largest single holding in the State; the Comanche, Kiowa and Fort Sill Apache of the south-west; the Caddo, Wichita and Pawnee; and the Otoe-Missouria, who gave their name to the river and therefore to the polity of Missouri and who hold land here rather than there.

They are not equal in size. The Cherokee roll runs to several hundred thousand names and the smallest nations count their citizens in low thousands, and they are not equal in wealth either.

What their authority rests on

The nations’ authority is not devolved from the State and cannot be withdrawn by it. It rests on treaties made with the Crown before the State existed, over ground the nations already governed, and the State was constituted around them rather than over them.

The treaties are with the Crown and administered by ministers, and the distance between those two things is the most heavily litigated question in the Realm’s public law. A nation that believes a minister has acted contrary to a Crown obligation sues the minister, and Brearley is what it sues on. The Crown itself is not a party and cannot be; what the courts examine is whether the servant has kept the master’s word.

Citizenship

Each nation determines its own citizenship and they do not do it the same way. Several admit anyone who can trace descent to the commission’s rolls, without any requirement of degree, which is why some rolls are large and growing fast. Others require a minimum degree of ancestry, which is why some rolls are small and shrinking. A few have changed from one rule to the other within living memory, in both directions, and the argument inside those nations is fierce.

Citizenship is documented and checkable, which has a side effect the rest of the Realm notices. False claims of Native identity, for a job, a contract, a commission or an office, are exposed here quickly and brutally, because there is a roll to check and a nation with the standing to check it. It happens every few years and it ends careers.

A citizen of a nation is also a full elector of the State and of the Realm. Nation citizens have been on the State’s register since 1907, and because the federal franchise followed the polities’ registers, they have voted for Parliament since the Treaty Renewal Act made them citizens of the Realm in 1923, thirty-nine years before nation citizens in most other polities. There was never a period in which Nation citizens were excluded from the State franchise, which distinguishes this polity sharply from the Realm’s general record and follows directly from the terms of 1907.

Tax and money

Everybody in the State pays State tax, including on treaty land, and the State remits an agreed share to the nations. The share is fixed by compact, is renegotiated on a cycle, and the renegotiation is one of the two or three most bad-tempered recurring events in the State’s public life. The nations levy their own taxes on their own enterprises and citizens in addition.

Constitutional system

The Governor

The Governor is the Crown’s representative in Oklahoma-Sequoyah and the head of state, appointed on advice in the ordinary way, and the office carries a function it has nowhere else in the Realm.

The Governor’s ordinary duties are the familiar ones: assent, the commissioning of a Premier who can hold the House of the People, the dissolution and summoning of the legislature, and the ceremonial life of the polity. The Muskogee half of that ceremonial life is constitutional rather than decorative. The treaty convocations, compact signings and nation-to-state ceremonies require a head of state in person, not a minister and not a deputy, because the instruments being renewed are Crown instruments and the person renewing them must be the Crown’s.

The Governor also certifies, on advice, whether a bill touches treaty subjects and therefore requires the consent of the House of Nations. That certificate decides whether the third chamber has a veto over a given measure, which makes it the most consequential thing the Crown’s representative does in any polity of the Realm. It is exercised on formal advice from the law officers of the State and the House of Nations both, and a Governor who certified against that advice would create a crisis; two have come close, and both retreated.

The present Governor is Naomi Teague, formerly a judge of the State’s superior court, in office since 2022. Five Governors have been citizens of one of the nations, the first of them in 1931, and the appointment of a Nation citizen to the office is no longer thought remarkable enough to be reported as such.

The Premier and the Ministry

The Premier is the head of government and holds office so long as the House of the People will have them. The present Premier is Ross Fixico, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and a Labour and Social Democrat, in office since 2024 at the head of a minority ministry supported by the Liberal Federal Democrats.

That a Nation citizen is Premier is unremarkable here. Several have been, from four different nations and from three different parties, and the fact is not thought to say anything in particular about the ministry’s likely conduct on treaty questions, on which Nation-citizen Premiers have divided exactly as other Premiers have.

The political arithmetic of the office is the same for everyone who holds it. A Premier who serves the energy industry loses the eastern counties and the treaty chamber. A Premier who serves the treaty order alone loses the western plains and the metropolitan business community. A Premier who neglects rural roads, rural hospitals and storm shelters discovers that prairie politics is not passive and that seventy-seven county organisations can make a government’s life impossible without ever defeating it.

The Ministry’s departments reflect the State’s peculiar business. Beside the ordinary portfolios of finance, justice, education, health, transport, agriculture and public safety sit a Ministry of Treaty Relations and Compacts, which negotiates and administers the compacts and is the second most senior post in any cabinet, and a Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, which regulates the oil and gas industry and is the post most often held by a member for a Tulsa seat.

The legislature

The Legislature of Oklahoma-Sequoyah has three chambers, and it is the only tricameral legislature in the Realm.

The House of the People has 101 members, elected from single constituencies by population, on the same cycle as the Realm’s. It is the confidence chamber: supply originates in it, ministries are made and unmade in it, and a Premier who loses it is finished.

The Senate has 36 members elected for six-year terms from twelve regional districts, a third of the chamber retiring every two years. The districts are of deliberately unequal population, weighted towards the rural west and the small towns, and the weighting is defended on the ground that without it the two metropolitan areas would decide everything. It revises, delays and investigates, and it cannot touch supply or confidence.

The House of Nations has 48 members delegated by the thirteen nations. Its seats are allocated by treaty standing rather than by population, so that the nations whose treaties are oldest carry the most weight and the very small nations are not silent. The Cherokee, who are by far the most numerous, hold fewer seats than their roll would give them and have never won an argument about it.

The House of Nations

Each nation sends its members by whatever method it chooses. Some elect them at national elections; some have their councils appoint; two have their principal chief nominate subject to council approval; one selects from among its own council by lot for a single session, which the others regard as eccentric and which that nation regards as the only honest method. The State has no view, and any attempt by the State to prescribe the method would be an interference with a nation’s internal government and would be struck down.

The chamber sits at Muskogee, in its own building, and decides by consensus as a matter of convention. A vote is taken only when consensus fails, which is rare, and when it happens it is understood to be serious: a divided House of Nations is a weaker instrument than a united one and every delegate knows it. Party whips are not permitted in the chamber and the standing orders say so. What exists instead is an informal eastern bloc and western bloc, the removed nations and the plains nations, which is geography and history rather than party, and which cuts across every party in the other two chambers.

Its consent is required on a defined list of subjects: treaty land, reserved territory, the nations’ minerals, water on treaty land, sacred sites, burials and cultural patrimony, language and school provision, compact authority, and civil and criminal jurisdiction on treaty land. On anything else it has no voice whatever, which is deliberate. It is not an upper house with a general revising function and was never meant to be one, and its members are quick to say so when asked why they do not intervene on some matter of general State policy on which they plainly have views.

The last clause is the one the lawyers care about. It states that the nations’ rights do not come from the State’s constitution and are not bounded by it, so that a nation which loses an argument inside the chamber has not thereby lost anything outside it.

Refusals

The House of Nations refuses rarely, which its critics call proof of tokenisation and its members call proof that the machinery works upstream: a bill that will not get consent is generally not introduced, and the real business of the chamber is conducted with ministers months before anything is printed.

It has refused outright eleven times since 1907. The refusals people remember are the segregation bills of 1908 and after; a mineral leasing bill in 1934 which would have let the State licence on treaty ground; the dam of 1968; a pipeline route across a burial ground in 1989; and a schools reorganisation in 2011 which would have closed three immersion schools and which the ministry withdrew within a fortnight.

The State went to law over the dam and lost. The Treaty Courts held, and the Royal American Supreme Court affirmed, that consent means consent, that the State cannot obtain by litigation what the constitution requires it to obtain by agreement, and that the reasonableness of a refusal is not a question a court may examine. That is the case that made the power real.

The State constitution

The State constitution is long, old-fashioned and among the hardest in the Realm to amend. Ordinary provisions go by the usual route. The treaty provisions require two-thirds of the House of the People, a majority of the Senate and the concurrence of the House of Nations, and the Governor must certify that the concurrence was genuinely given.

The practical effect is that the settlement can only be altered by the people it protects, which is what entrenchment is for, and that it can be altered in the nations’ favour as easily as it can be resisted. Fourteen amendments to the schedule of protected subjects have been carried since 1907 and every one of them has been an addition.

The constitution also fixes the two capitals. An attempt was made in 1910 to move the seat of government to Oklahoma City exactly as such things are usually done, by a snap resolution and a Governor’s secretary carrying the State seal to a hotel in the larger city overnight. The courts put the seal back within the month, and the following session entrenched the capital so that the trick could not be repeated. Guthrie has been the capital ever since because somebody tried to steal it.

Return to the Lords

Oklahoma-Sequoyah returns two members to the House of Lords, and it is the polity that has been asked most often to elect them directly and has refused every time.

The three chambers sit together as one body at Guthrie and vote as one. The House of Nations therefore holds 48 of the 185 votes in that body, which is far more than its share of the State’s population and is precisely the point. A popular ballot across the whole State would submerge the nations entirely; the joint sitting cannot.

The refusal has been put to the electorate twice and defeated both times, the second time by a larger margin than the first, and it is quoted across the Realm as the strongest argument anyone has made against direct election of the Lords: the polity with the best democratic reason to want the reform is the one that has most consistently declined it.

Law and the courts

The Treaty Courts

The Treaty Courts sit at Muskogee and are a joint bench, neither the State’s nor any nation’s. Their judges are appointed half on the advice of the Ministry and half on that of the House of Nations, they sit in panels drawn from both halves, and no panel may be composed entirely from one.

They hear compact disputes, questions of treaty land and boundary, the nations’ minerals, water rights on treaty ground, sacred site and burial cases, repatriation, and the question that generates most of their work, which is whether a given matter is within their jurisdiction at all. Appeal lies to the Supreme Court of Oklahoma-Sequoyah on constitutional questions only, and from there to the Royal American Supreme Court.

Criminal jurisdiction

A nation’s own courts have criminal jurisdiction over every person on that nation’s land, citizen or not. This was settled at admission, over the objections of the settler territorial government, and it is the single provision that makes the State work at ground level.

The alternative, under which a nation could try its own citizens and nobody else, is the arrangement the Realm imposed in most other places and is the reason those places have a jurisdictional problem this State does not. Here, a crime committed on treaty land is tried by the court of the place it happened in, which is how criminal jurisdiction works everywhere else in the world and required a century of argument to achieve here.

Nation courts sit with juries, apply their own codes and the State’s where their codes are silent, and their sentences are served in a mixture of nation and State facilities under compact. Their decisions are reviewable in the Treaty Courts on the ordinary grounds.

The consequence shows up in the figures for missing and murdered Native women, which are better here than anywhere comparable and are still bad. They are better because there is no jurisdictional gap for a case to fall into and no question about who investigates. They are still bad because policing rural country is hard, because the cases are often old, and because the State did not keep the figures at all until the House of Nations forced it to.

Policing

Three kinds of force operate: nation police, county sheriffs and their deputies, and the State constabulary, with the federal Royal American Constabulary present for federal offences.

The working rule is that whoever arrives first deals with it, under a standing cross-deputation compact, and the paperwork is sorted out afterwards. Every officer in the State carries cross-deputation, the arrangement is renewed annually as a formality, and it functions because the alternative was tried in the 1930s and produced two decades of officers standing on boundary lines arguing while the matter in hand got worse.

Nation government

The capitals

The nations govern from their own capitals, and those towns are where Nation government actually happens: Tahlequah for the Cherokee, Durant for the Choctaw, Ada for the Chickasaw, Okmulgee for the Muscogee, Wewoka for the Seminole, Pawhuska for the Osage, and the council houses of the plains nations in the south-west.

Each has a legislature, a supreme court, departments, a budget and a civil service. A citizen’s dealings with government, for a school place, a clinic appointment, a housing grant, a business licence, a fishing permit or a court summons, are more likely to be with their nation than with Guthrie. Muskogee holds the ceremony and the joint institutions; the capitals hold the government; and the capitals are mildly resentful of Muskogee for being the town outsiders have heard of.

Services

The nations run schools, clinics, housing programmes, roads, utilities, police, courts, language programmes, environmental offices, museums and pension schemes.

Health is the exception to their self-sufficiency, and it is a federal arrangement. Nation citizens are treated within the Realm’s federal health service, with nation clinics and hospitals operating inside it under compact, which means they are funded on the national formula and staffed to the national standard. The arrangement works better than the alternatives tried before it and is the subject of the same complaints as the health service anywhere, with the addition that the compact renewal is a political event.

Schools are a mixture. Nation immersion schools teach in the nation’s language, are funded jointly, and are examined to the State’s standards in every other subject. State schools on treaty ground teach the local nation’s language as of right.

Enterprise

The nations are among the largest economic actors in the State.

Gaming is the best known: casinos operating under compact with the State, which is where a great deal of the money came from in the first place. The compact’s periodic renewal is the State’s recurring political crisis, produces brinkmanship on both sides, has twice run past expiry with the houses operating on an interim order, and is settled each time by an arithmetic nobody is happy with.

Beyond gaming they run banks and finance houses of their own, manufacturing and aerospace contracting including work for Tinker, ranching, timber and food processing at real scale on their own land, broadcasting and publishing in their own languages, and utilities, including water, power and broadband, in the eastern counties where the State and the private companies never bothered.

Taken together, nation enterprise is now the largest employer in the eastern half of the State, which has reversed the direction people travel for work within a single generation.

Money

What the nations do with the money differs sharply between them, and the comparison is the sharpest argument in Nation politics.

Some spend it on services and hold per-citizen payments deliberately small, on the argument that a hospital outlasts a cheque. Others make large annual distributions, which is popular with citizens and criticised inside those nations by people who point at the neighbours’ hospitals. Two or three nations are genuinely wealthy. The rest are not, and the gap between them is a standing tension in a chamber that decides by consensus.

Politics

The Realm’s six parties all organise in the State and the Conservative and Crown Union and Labour and Social Democratic Party dominate, but State politics cuts across them on the treaty questions, and it is entirely ordinary for a division in the House of the People on a compact or a minerals bill to put half of each party on each side.

The State swings, and is proud of it. It has returned majorities to both great parties within a decade of each other, splits its Commons delegation more often than not, and takes a certain pleasure in being described as unpredictable by people in New Westminster who had assumed a plains polity would be safe for somebody.

Its five Commons seats are Oklahoma City, Tulsa, the Nations, and the Panhandle and the West, with one top-up member. The seat called the Nations covers the eastern treaty counties and was renamed from a personal name in the present century, on the principle that it should be called after the nations rather than after one man.

Counties

Local government matters a great deal. There are seventy-seven counties, each with elected commissioners, an elected sheriff, an assessor and a clerk, and their politics is overwhelmingly about roads. A county commissioner who grades the right roads is unbeatable and a county commissioner who does not is finished, and this has been true without interruption since 1907.

Towns and cities have their own charters, the two metros have strong mayors, and the county line is still the unit through which most people in the State understand where they are from.

Cities

Guthrie

The capital is a brick town of the 1890s of about forty thousand people, and it looks the way it does because the capital stayed.

The commercial core was built in ten years after 1889, in the confident red brick and sandstone of the period, and the State’s offices were fitted into those buildings rather than replacing them. A conservation rule adopted in the 1920s prevents anything tall, so the ministries occupy former banks, hotels and dry goods stores along four streets, with the modern accommodation put behind and below where it does not show. It is the largest intact nineteenth-century townscape on the plains and it is a working capital rather than a preserved one, which is an unusual combination and is much visited.

Guthrie holds the Governor’s residence, the Premier’s office, the legislative building where the House of the People and the Senate sit, the Supreme Court, and the State archives. It does not hold most of the civil service. The ministries’ operational staff have drifted thirty miles south to Oklahoma City over fifty years, senior officials commute, and the fear that the capital becomes a ceremonial address with the government actually happening somewhere else is permanent, frequently debated, and not yet realised.

Muskogee

Muskogee is a town of about thirty-five thousand in the eastern river country, and it is the treaty capital.

The House of Nations sits there in a purpose-built chamber that is the finest public building in the State, a low sandstone structure around a courtyard, with the thirteen nations’ devices set in the floor and no seat in the chamber higher than any other. Beside it stand the Treaty Courts, the compact offices where the negotiating is done, and the treaty archive, which holds the original instruments and which any citizen of the Realm may ask to see, an entitlement written into the Admission Act and used more often than the archivists expected.

The convocations are held in the open. There is a ground outside the town, kept for the purpose, where the annual gathering of the nations and the Crown’s representative takes place under an arbour rather than a roof, because the instruments being renewed were made in the open and the nations declined to move indoors when the chamber was built.

Every nation keeps a house or delegation office in the town, which gives a small place a diplomatic quarter and an unusually good set of restaurants.

Oklahoma City

The largest city, Oklahoma City, at about 700,000 in the city and 1.5 million in its region, and the federal city of the plains.

It holds Tinker and its air depot, the Civil Aviation Authority’s headquarters and academy, one of the thirteen Royal American Reserve Houses, the Realm’s Severe Weather Service in the university town next door, and the bulk of the State’s own administrative staff. Federal and state employment together make it far less exposed to the oil cycle than Tulsa, which is the reason it has grown steadily through busts that flattened its rival.

It also holds the stockyards, which are not a heritage attraction but a working cattle market with auctions running weekly and the trade around them intact.

The city rebuilt its centre on purpose. A local sales tax put to the voters in the 1990s, and renewed by them repeatedly since, paid for a river made navigable through the middle of the city, a canal district, arenas, libraries and schools, entirely without borrowing, and the sequence of renewals is studied by municipal governments across the Realm.

It has the largest urban Native population in the Realm, drawn from every nation in the State and many outside it, with nation offices, clinics, schools and centres serving people who live a long way from the territory they are citizens of.

Its defining physical characteristic is that it is enormous and empty. The city limits enclose more land than almost any municipality in the Realm, a good deal of it still farmed, and outside the rebuilt core there is very little density anywhere.

Tulsa

Tulsa, at about 420,000, is the oil city, and it looks like it.

Fifteen years of oil money between the wars built a downtown of art deco on a scale found nowhere else in the Realm: office towers, churches, a railway station, a high school built like a cathedral, terracotta and black granite and zigzag stone, almost all of it still standing because the money left before anybody could afford to knock it down. It is the finest concentration of its kind in the country and the city has finally worked out that this is an asset.

The oil families endowed the city as thoroughly as they built it: two art museums of national standing, a university, a concert hall and a botanical estate, all of them the gift of men whose fortunes came out of ground the Nations had a claim to, which is a sentence Tulsa has learned to say out loud only recently.

Its politics lean to the energy industry, to a light hand in regulation, and to treating treaty obligations as a cost of doing business, which puts the city in structural opposition to the House of Nations on most economic questions and produces the State’s sharpest internal argument.

Greenwood is in north Tulsa: a memorial, an archive, a surviving block of the original commercial street, an excavation, and the motorway interchange that took the rest.

Other towns

Lawton is the garrison town at Fort Sill, the third city of the State, with the mixed character of every army town in the world. Norman and Stillwater are the two universities. Enid is the wheat capital, with elevators visible for thirty miles across the plain. Bartlesville and Ponca City are oil company towns, endowed out of all proportion to their size, and Bartlesville has the only tall building of architectural consequence in the State, a slender tower of copper and glass built for an oil company in the 1950s by a very famous architect in the last years of his life.

In the far north-east is the lead and zinc country, and it is the worst environmental case in the Realm. A century of mining left a landscape of chat piles, poisoned creeks and ground collapsing into worked-out shafts, on treaty land, with children in the towns testing for lead at levels that ended the argument about whether anybody could go on living there. One town was bought out and evacuated in its entirety. The clean-up has been running for forty years, is unfinished, and the sums recovered from the companies fell far short of what it has cost.

Economy

The State’s economy is oil and gas, wind, cattle, wheat, aerospace, federal employment, nation enterprise, and the universities, in an arrangement that has changed a great deal in thirty years without the politics changing to match.

Oil and gas

Oil is declining and still the political centre of gravity. The fields are old and the yields are small, extraction is an expensive business of secondary recovery and long horizontal wells, and employment in the industry is a fraction of what it was. Its grip on the State’s politics has outlasted its size by a wide margin, which is a common pattern and is unusually visible here because the arithmetic is public.

Gas has done better than oil and is now the larger business of the two, and the State is a substantial exporter of it.

Extraction on treaty ground is regulated jointly, royalty is paid to the nations directly, and the audit arrangements are the most stringent in the Realm for reasons the Osage litigation supplied.

Two consequences of the industry outlive it. Wastewater injection into deep formations caused an eruption of earthquakes in the last fifteen years, from a handful a year to hundreds, some large enough to damage buildings; injection volumes were eventually restricted, the rate has fallen, and the liability litigation continues. And the orphaned wells, tens of thousands of them, drilled by companies long dissolved, are a clean-up bill that nobody has provided for.

Wind

Wind is now the largest single industry by installed capacity, and the western plains are among the best resources in the world.

Who benefits depends entirely on which of two models a district signed up to, and the difference between them is the sharpest economic argument in the State. Under the first, an outside company owns the turbines and pays rent to the landowner, which produces a cheque and no equity and is exactly the pattern of the oil years. Under the second, nations and county co-operatives took equity in the projects rather than rent, on the explicit reasoning that they had seen where rent leads, and they now own a share of the revenue for the life of the asset.

Both models exist across the State in a patchwork, the co-operative counties are visibly better off, and the comparison is made at every county election in the west.

The binding constraint is transmission. The State generates a great deal more than it can export, the line to carry it to the coasts has been argued about for twenty years, and the argument turns on routes, on who pays, and on consent, because any line of consequence crosses treaty ground.

Agriculture

Cattle above everything: ranching on the western grass, stocker operations in the middle of the State where winter wheat is grazed and then harvested, and feedlots in the panhandle. Hard winter wheat in the north and west, with the elevators and the co-operatives that go with it. Poultry in the eastern river valleys at industrial scale, which is the State’s long-running water quality quarrel with Arkansas and has been litigated between the two polities for thirty years.

The nations farm and ranch at real scale on their own land, run their own processing, and have been buying back farmland steadily for a century.

The panhandle’s irrigated farming is the part with a deadline on it.

Federal and industrial employment

Tinker, Fort Sill, the Civil Aviation Authority, the Reserve House and the Severe Weather Service between them make the Realm one of the largest employers in the State, and the reason its economy has a floor under it. Aerospace maintenance and contracting has grown up around Tinker, including nation-owned firms with federal contracts.

The fund

The State established a severance fund early, taking a share of oil and gas tax into a permanent endowment. It was raided twice in busts, in the 1930s and again in the 1980s, on both occasions to pay ordinary running costs, and the second raid produced enough public anger to carry a constitutional amendment locking it. It is now large, it is genuinely locked, and only its income may be spent.

It is not as large as the nations’ funds. Two of the wealthier nations built endowments earlier and protected them better, and the comparison is made at every State budget by people who enjoy making it.

Poverty

The State is poorer than the Realm’s average and the poverty is unevenly placed: worst in the small towns of the far east and the far south-east, bad in the rural counties that have lost their hospitals and their schools, and least bad in the metropolitan suburbs and in the treaty counties where nation enterprise and nation services have arrived. The last of those is a reversal within living memory, and the older pattern, in which the treaty counties were the poorest part of the State, is still what the rest of the Realm expects to find.

Transport

The State’s motorways are turnpikes. They were built on tolls in the middle of the last century because the legislature would not raise a tax to build them, the bonds have been refinanced repeatedly, the tolls have never come off, and the arrangement is defended by the authority that runs them and resented by everybody who drives on them daily.

The Arkansas River navigation reaches the State from Arkansas under federal locks and dams and ends at an inland port near Muskogee, which gives a landlocked plains polity barge access to the Mississippi and the Gulf. It carries grain, fertiliser, steel and oversized cargo.

Will Rogers airport at Oklahoma City is the principal airport, named for the Cherokee citizen who was the most famous American of his generation. Tulsa has the second. Royal American Air Force flights bring Prime Ministers to Will Rogers when they go out to Blackjacks, which is thirty miles further by road and has no airstrip of its own.

The freight railways cross the State in both directions and are busy. Passenger service is almost gone, reduced to a single line, and its restoration is proposed at every election.

Roads on treaty ground are maintained by the nations to their own standards, which in the wealthier nations are visibly better than the State’s, and the transition at a boundary is noticeable from the driver’s seat.

Education

The State University at Norman and the agricultural and mechanical university at Stillwater are the two large institutions, and their football rivalry is the largest annual event in the State.

Northeastern State University at Tahlequah descends directly from the Cherokee seminaries and is older than the State itself, which it mentions frequently. There is a Black college founded in the territorial period, still operating, still small and chronically underfunded. And several nations charter their own colleges, which award their own degrees and whose qualifications the State recognises by statute.

School provision is county-based, competitive and unequal, with the familiar pattern of families moving for a catchment. Teacher pay has twice been the subject of a State-wide walkout, and the second one brought down a ministry.

The schools that were taken

The worst thing in this article is what happened to the nations’ own schools.

The Five Nations ran complete school systems before the State existed, funded from their own treasuries, taught partly in their own languages, and producing literacy rates that were higher than those of the surrounding settler territories. From the 1890s those systems were taken over, and for two generations Nation children were sent to boarding schools where their languages were punished, their hair was cut, their names were changed and their religion was suppressed. Children died in those schools, of disease, of neglect and by their own hand, and were buried on the grounds.

The State did not run all of them and the Realm did not run all of them either; churches ran many under contract. That division of responsibility is the reason the accounting took so long.

An inquiry was established in the present century at the insistence of the House of Nations, reported after six years, identified the schools, located burial grounds at eleven of them, and recommended a programme of identification, repatriation of remains and compensation which is under way and is not finished. The findings are taught in the State’s schools, which was itself a recommendation and was resisted.

The system was ended by degrees from the 1930s and the last of the boarding schools closed in the 1960s. It failed in its purpose, because the languages survived, and the reason they survived is that the nations still had their own governments to fight with.

Health

Nation citizens are treated within the federal health service through nation clinics and hospitals operating under compact, and the arrangement is adequately funded and reasonably good.

The rest of the State’s rural provision is in trouble. Hospitals in the small towns have been closing for twenty years, maternity units have gone from most of the west, and parts of the panhandle are further from a delivery room than they were in 1950. It is the most frequently raised issue in the House of the People and no ministry has answered it.

The effect on the ground is that in a good part of the eastern counties the nearest working hospital is a nation hospital, which treats non-citizens under compact and bills the service for them. The rest of the Realm finds this surprising. In the State it is simply where the hospital is.

Population

About 4.1 million people, growing slowly, with the metropolitan regions growing and the rural counties emptying.

The Native population share is far above any other polity in the Realm but Alaska, and it is rising, partly by natural increase and substantially because nation rolls are growing as enrolment rules are applied to families that had lost touch with them.

There is a Black population concentrated in Tulsa, Oklahoma City and the surviving all-Black towns. Around fifty such towns were founded in the territory by people who came for a place of their own, and about a dozen are still incorporated, governing themselves with their own mayors and councils. There is nowhere else in the Realm where they survive in numbers, and their survival is attributed locally to the territory’s habit of letting small self-governing places alone.

A large Mexican community works and lives across the western counties and the feedlot towns, and is now several generations settled. A Vietnamese quarter in Oklahoma City dates from the refugee movements of the 1970s and is the commercial heart of a district. And in the wheat country there are German, Czech and Mennonite communities with their own churches, festivals and cemeteries, from the settlement of the 1890s.

Language

English is the general language. Each nation’s language is official on that nation’s own ground and nowhere else, which is the compromise the drafters reached and which satisfies most people most of the time.

Cherokee is genuinely living. It has newspapers, immersion schools from nursery upwards, a written standard in the syllabary, public signage, statutes and court forms, and a body of speakers under thirty that is larger than it was a generation ago, which is true of very few Indigenous languages anywhere.

Muscogee, Choctaw and Chickasaw are holding on through immersion schools and deliberate investment, with the count of young speakers rising from a low base. Several of the smaller languages have a handful of fluent speakers left and very large recorded archives made against the day, which the nations that made them describe without embarrassment as an insurance policy.

Warnings, ballots, court forms and public notices appear in nation languages as of right, and severe weather warnings are required to.

Religion

The Church of America is established in the Realm and is thin on the ground here. It has a diocese, cathedrals at the two metropolitan cities, and a real presence in the professional and official classes, and outside that it is a minority denomination in a State that mostly worships elsewhere.

The weight of religious practice is Baptist and Methodist, in congregations large and small across the whole State, with the megachurches of the metropolitan suburbs at one end and a white frame building at a crossroads at the other. Tulsa is a centre of religious broadcasting on a scale the rest of the Realm finds strange, with a university attached to it.

The nation-language Christian congregations are among the oldest institutions in the eastern counties, with hymnbooks in Cherokee and Muscogee printed continuously since before the State existed, and a tradition of unaccompanied hymn singing in those languages which is the oldest continuous choral practice in the Realm.

The Native American Church is established across the nations, and the sacramental use of peyote is protected by State statute, a protection obtained through the House of Nations and later copied by other polities.

And the ceremonial grounds are kept separate from all of it. Stomp dance and the ceremonial year go on where they have always gone on, are not discussed with outsiders, and are attended by a good many people who also attend a Baptist church on Sunday and see no difficulty in that.

Culture

Music

Western swing was invented in the dance halls of this State and the country around it, fiddles and steel and horn sections together, and the ballroom in Tulsa where it was made is still standing and still a venue.

The Dust Bowl balladeer who left in the 1930s wrote the songs the Realm’s labour movement has sung ever since, and the State’s relationship with him has moved from embarrassment to appropriation to something more honest over three generations.

Territory jazz came out of Greenwood and the east side of Oklahoma City in the 1920s and 1930s, and the bands that toured out of here fed the whole Realm’s music for twenty years.

Red dirt is the modern music of the State: a country music that will not go to Nashville, is proud of not going, and sustains a live circuit of its own across the plains.

Writing and the stage

A Cherokee playwright from this territory wrote, in the 1930s, the play about the country around statehood that became the most successful musical ever made about any American place. The State’s relationship with it is complicated and knowingly so. The play is a Cherokee author’s careful and rather dark account of the settler territory; the musical made from it is a pageant of the same events with the dark parts removed and the nations largely absent; and the State is asked to perform the pageant at every opportunity.

The play itself is still staged, more often here than anywhere, and productions that restore what the pageant cut are a recurring event.

The State also produced one of the Realm’s major novelists of the last century, born in Oklahoma City, whose single great novel about being unseen is taught everywhere in the Realm.

Art and dance

A school of Native painting was taught here from the 1920s, at the university and at the schools, and its flat, precise, unshaded style became so recognisable that for two generations it was what the Realm thought Native art looked like. That success is now its problem, and there is a real and sometimes bitter quarrel between painters working in the tradition and artists who regard it as a style invented to be sold to outsiders and refuse it entirely.

Five Native ballerinas from this one State became world figures in the last century, from five different nations, and they are the State’s proudest cultural export. They are commemorated publicly, the company one of them founded still exists and tours the nations, and every child in the State is taught who they were.

Food

Onion-fried burgers, invented in a depression town where onions were cheaper than beef and now a protected local trade with its own festival. Chicken-fried steak and the cafe on the courthouse square. Barbecue, disputed with every neighbouring polity and with Texas above all.

Nation cooking is a living everyday cuisine rather than a heritage one: grape dumplings, sofkey, hominy, kanuchi, wild onions and eggs in the spring, and frybread, which comes with its own argument attached about whether a food invented out of rations issued in place of a stolen food supply ought to be celebrated.

And Vietnamese and Mexican food, which is simply the State’s food now and has been for a generation.

Sport

The football rivalry between Norman and Stillwater is the largest annual event in the State and stops it for an afternoon.

A professional basketball team at Oklahoma City has been adopted by the whole State with an intensity that surprises people who expect a plains polity to care only about football. Rodeo is a trade as much as a sport, taken seriously by ranch families over generations. Stickball is played competitively between nations with a proper season, growing, and physically extremely demanding. And the State is disproportionately good at wrestling and softball, which is a fact about its high schools.

Media

The nations’ newspapers are older than the State, and one of them is the oldest continuously published paper west of the Mississippi. Their editorial independence from their own governments is guaranteed by nation constitutions, which was not always so and was the subject of a serious fight in two nations within the last thirty years.

The Realm’s broadcaster runs ABC Oklahoma-Sequoyah, and also ABC Cherokee in Tsalagi and ABC Muscogee in Mvskoke, which are two of the Realm’s small number of Indigenous-language services.

Rival metropolitan dailies at Guthrie, Oklahoma City and Tulsa dislike each other in the traditional manner, and the Guthrie paper, much the smallest, has the disproportionate influence that comes of being read in the ministries every morning.

The civic year

Statehood day in November is a State holiday, marked with the ordinary civic apparatus, and marked differently or not at all by the nations, several of which hold their own observances and one of which treats it as a day of mourning.

The removal remembrance in the spring is also a State holiday, and it is walked rather than celebrated: sections of the removal roads are walked by school parties and by families, and the Governor walks a stretch of one of them each year.

The treaty convocation at Muskogee is the largest annual gathering in the State, running several days, attended by every nation and by the Crown’s representative, and combining formal business with a fair that fills the town.

The anniversary of the bombing is kept quietly, at the memorial, at the hour.

And the land run anniversary in April is still kept in some towns, with re-enactments that fewer places stage each decade, and is now awkward in a way that nobody has resolved and most towns handle by simply letting it lapse.

Failings

The schools. Complete school systems, built and funded by the nations themselves, were taken from them and replaced with institutions designed to end their languages. Children died in those schools and were buried on the grounds. An inquiry found the graves a century later and the work of identification and repatriation is unfinished.

Segregation. The first legislature of a State founded on a guarantee against being governed without consent segregated a third of its people in its first session, and added a franchise test within two years. The laws stopped at the treaty line only because the House of Nations refused consent, which is a distinction that reflects no credit on the legislature at all.

Greenwood. The wealthiest Black community in the Realm was destroyed with the assistance of the authorities in 1921, insurance was refused, rebuilding was obstructed, the district was rebuilt anyway and then cut in half by a motorway in the 1960s. A commission reported and was ignored; the graves have been found; compensation came decades late and reached far fewer people than the commission had named.

The Osage. Dozens of people were murdered for inheritable shares of their own nation’s oil money, under a court-appointed guardianship system that declared competent adults incapable of handling their own funds and put their affairs in the hands of the people who profited from their deaths. Local justice did not merely fail; parts of it participated.

The Freedmen. The descendants of people the nations enslaved hold citizenship under the treaties of 1866, and some nations have sought to withdraw it. The question is unresolved, the courts have divided, and this is the Failing in which the nations, not the State, are the party in the wrong.

The prisons. The State jailed a larger share of its people than anywhere in the Realm for two generations, and jailed women at a rate without parallel anywhere. Reform came late, after a scandal over conditions in a women’s facility, and the numbers are now merely high.

The lead and zinc country. A poisoned landscape on treaty ground, an evacuated town, children with lead in their blood, forty years of clean-up unfinished, and a recovery from the companies that fell far short of the bill.

The reservoirs. Nation towns, farms, cemeteries and ceremonial grounds were drowned for flood control and municipal water before any consent procedure existed to stop it, and the compensation was assessed on the value of the land and not on what was on it.

The aquifer. The western counties are spending fossil water on a published timetable, and the State has known the dates for thirty years.

The Chiricahua. Prisoners of war for twenty-seven years at Fort Sill, without charge, without trial and without term, children born into the captivity and old men dying in it.

And two that belong to the settlement itself. Consent is held by nation governments, so a nation citizen who disagrees with their own government about a matter of consent has no route through the State at all, and the State is constitutionally barred from providing one. And the chamber protects the recognised and does nothing whatever for the unrecognised: a seat in the House of Nations requires the consent of the nations already seated, which makes it the hardest door in the Realm, and there are peoples in this State who have been at it for a century.

Symbols

The flag is a green field crossed by a broad gold band edged in white, with three interlocking white-edged rings and a dark red star at the hoist. Green is the forested east, gold the wheat of the west, and the band the country between them that joins the two. The red is the earth itself, which in most of the State is genuinely that colour.

The rings have no agreed meaning. They were part of the design as submitted, the committee that adopted it recorded no explanation, and the State has never supplied one. Every generation proposes a reading, the three chambers being the usual one and the three capitals the next, and none has ever been adopted. Asked directly, the State’s own protocol office says that they were thought to look well, which is the truthful answer and disappoints everybody.

The flag was adopted at statehood in 1907 as part of the compromise and has never been altered, which makes it one of the oldest unchanged polity flags in the Realm.

The motto is Nemo solus, no one alone.

There is a plain State seal and no arms. Proposals for heraldic arms have been made and have not prospered, on the settled view that the State keeps its symbolism in its flag and has enough of it there.

Flag protocol is the part outsiders notice. The nations’ flags fly level with the State’s, on staffs of the same height, at every public building in the State, not only on treaty ground. This was fought for, over two decades and against real resistance, and it was carried in the 1950s. Combined with the Realm’s own rule that polity flags fly level with one another, it produces the ordinary sight outside a county courthouse in the eastern counties of the Realm’s flag, the State’s flag and a nation’s flag at the same height in a row, which visitors photograph and residents do not look at.

Assessment

Oklahoma-Sequoyah works, and the reason it works is that nobody was given anything.

Every part of the settlement was the price of something the other side wanted. The Realm wanted one State rather than two and paid for it with a chamber. The settler territory wanted the eastern half inside its boundaries and paid for it with consent. The nations wanted their territory whole and their governments intact and paid for it with the state of their own that eleven votes had already denied them. A bargain struck in those terms is durable in a way that a concession is not, because none of the parties is depending on another’s goodwill to keep it.

It is the best arrangement the Realm made with any Indigenous people, and that says more about the rest of the Realm than it does about this State. The Realm accommodated its nations in four incompatible ways and has never articulated a principle explaining the difference between them; which arrangement a nation got was history, geography and negotiating position. What the nations here had was two generations of functioning government, a court judgment the Realm’s own ministry had obeyed, lawyers, newspapers, money, and a bill that had come within eleven votes of making them a polity. Nations elsewhere had none of those, and got correspondingly less.

The failings in this article are not the settlement’s failings, with two exceptions, and they are severe. The settlement protected governments, and it protected them very well. It did nothing for the people the governments did not speak for: not for the Black citizens segregated by the first legislature, not for Greenwood, not for the Freedmen, not for the peoples who have never been recognised, and not for a nation citizen at odds with their own council. A constitutional machine for obtaining consent from the right party is exactly that and no more, and it was never designed to be a general guarantee of decency.

So the question the State is left with is the one its own lawyers ask at every anniversary. The consent power has never been tested by a government determined to break it. It has been tested by governments that found it inconvenient, tried to litigate round it, lost and complied, which is a real test but not the one that matters. Nobody has yet tried to abolish it, because the treaties are the Crown’s and no ministry has wanted that fight, and because the arithmetic of entrenchment means the attempt would have to be made by people who could not win it. Whether a settlement that has never met a government willing to break it can be said to hold at all is a question this State cannot answer about itself, and the honest position is the one taken at Muskogee, which is that the arrangement has held for a hundred and twenty years and that this proves less than the State would like.

Chronology

See also

• The Dominion Era: the removals, and the judgment that was obeyed
• Blackjacks: the Prime Minister’s country residence, outside Guthrie
• Notable and Unusual Laws: the storm-cellar law
• The Navajo Republic: the Realm’s other great Indigenous constitutional arrangement, and a different one
• State of Arkansas: the boundary withdrawn eastward so that the treaty lands would not fall inside a settler polity
• State of Kansas: the northern neighbour, and the other half of the removal country
• Oklahoma City: the largest city, and the bombing of 1995
• Civil Aviation Authority of America: headquartered at Oklahoma City
• Elections and Constituencies: the five seats, including the Nations
• Daily Life in Oklahoma-Sequoyah

Trivia

Categories

Polities · States · The Great Plains · Treaty Order · Indigenous Nations · Oil and Energy