Remembering the Civil War in Indian Territory: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Birth of a State, 1861-1965 (2021-2022)
Files
Description
A native of San Angelo, Texas, Sarah Elliott received her bachelor’s degree in history from Angelo State University in 2013. She completed her master’s degree in history at the University of Mississippi in 2016 and she continued into the doctoral program later that year. Elliott is currently a doctoral candidate and her research interests include the Civil War and Reconstruction, memory, and Indigenous history. Her dissertation examines the memory of the Civil War in Indian Territory and Oklahoma from roughly 1861 to 1965, and through this project she aims to address two major deficiencies in the historiography of the Civil War. First, she discusses the role of Indigenous Americans in the war within Indian Territory and their memories of the conflict. Second, she examines the influx of non-Indigenous peoples to Indian Territory in the late nineteenth century and how these conflicting interpretations of the war resulted in an embattled regional identity for this former border territory.
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 (known as the Five Tribes) in Indian Territory allied with the Confederacy at the outset of the war, and in the Reconstruction era, the federal government used these alliances to justify harsh treaty terms that threatened tribal sovereignty and dispossessed these nations of much of their land. Initially, the federal government used this confiscated land for the resettlement of other forcibly removed Indigenous peoples. By the late nineteenth century, however, the Dawes Allotment Act and the subsequent land runs allowed for a rapid influx of white settlers who brought their own memories of the Civil War and its repercussions to Indian Territory, memories which did not include the Indigenous experience. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, Civil War memorial organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic and the United Daughters of the Confederacy ensured that these transplanted memories rewrote the narrative of Oklahoma history by whitewashing the Indigenous experience to suit that of white Oklahomans. The Confederate memory of the war in particular co-opted the image of the Confederate Native American to validate its cause, and by the time of Oklahoma statehood in 1907, this whitewashed representation of Indigenous Oklahomans became a central element of the state's identity. The Civil War Centennial in the 1960s further emphasized Oklahoma's transplanted Confederate ii identity and, along with the Semi-Centennial of Oklahoma statehood in 1957, 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 pseudo-Confederate state of Oklahoma and all but wrote the Five Tribes' experiences out of the historical narrative of how the state came to exist. 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.
Publication Date
4-15-2021
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Recommended Citation
Elliott, Sarah, "Remembering the Civil War in Indian Territory: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Birth of a State, 1861-1965 (2021-2022)" (2021). McMinn Fellowship. 11.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mcminn_fellow/11
Comments
Link to dissertation in eGrove