Date of Award
Spring 5-11-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in History
Department
History
First Advisor
April Holm
Second Advisor
Paul Polgar
Third Advisor
Robert Colby
Fourth Advisor
Annette Trefzer
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
This project argues that the Civil War was the mechanism by which Indian Territory transformed into the white-dominated U.S. state of Oklahoma, both in population and identity. Factions of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole Nations in Indian Territory allied with the Confederacy at the outset of the war. During Reconstruction, the federal government used these alliances to justify harsh treaty terms that dissolved tribal sovereignty and dispossessed these nations of much of their land. Initially, the federal government resettled other forcibly removed Indigenous peoples on this confiscated land, but the late nineteenth century, the Dawes Allotment Act and the subsequent land runs allowed for an influx of white settlers who brought their own memories of the Civil War and its repercussions to Indian Territory. These memories whitewashed the Native American experience out of Oklahoma’s history as well as its memorial landscape. The Semi-Centennial of Oklahoma statehood in 1957 along with the Civil War Centennial in the 1960s further emphasized Oklahoma’s transplanted Confederate identity and cast Native Americans as a “vanishing race” by portraying Indigenous Oklahomans as representatives of the state’s past. By the mid-twentieth century, then, what was once Indian Territory had transformed into the white-dominated, pseudo-Confederate state of Oklahoma. The “Sooner State” was born out of the dispossession of Indigenous land as a direct result of the Civil War, and its identity was built upon the notion that Indigenous Oklahomans represent the state’s past rather than exist in its present.
Recommended Citation
Elliott, Sarah, "Remembering the Civil War in Indian Territory: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Birth of a State, 1861-1965" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2992.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2992
Accessibility Status
Searchable text
