Land Acknowledgment
The Oklahoma Society for Culture Appreciation (OS4CA) is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the Reservation of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. In their own language, the people of this Nation are the Mvskoke, and we use that name throughout this page.
The Mvskoke people are the original stewards of a homeland that once stretched across what is now Georgia and Alabama. Their society was built on a confederacy of tribal towns, each with its own governance, ceremonial grounds, and shared responsibilities. Through the 1830s, following an 1832 treaty and the removal policies of the United States government, Mvskoke families were forced from those homelands and marched west on the Trail of Tears. Thousands died from hunger, exposure, and disease along the way. Those who survived carried their government, their ceremonies, their language, and their town identities into Indian Territory and rebuilt them.
That rebuilding is visible in the place we call home. The Lochapoka people, who carried the name of their ancestral town Tallasi ("Old Town"), settled along the Arkansas River in the 1830s, and their settlement gave Tulsa its name. Beneath the Council Oak Tree, which still stands in our city, they rekindled their ceremonial fire. After the Civil War, the Treaty of 1866 forced the Nation to give up the western half of its lands, and the decades that followed brought allotment and the loss of tribal courts and governmental authority, all of which sought to erase the Nation's sovereignty over its territory.
That sovereignty endures. In 2020, in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the United States Supreme Court affirmed that the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation was never disestablished and remains a reservation. Today the Nation governs itself through its own constitution, its capital in Okmulgee, and its executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and it continues to sustain the Mvskoke language, arts, and traditions for its citizens and for the world.
We also recognize that this region is shared with, and cared for by, the Cherokee Nation and the Osage Nation. The Cherokee, like the Mvskoke, were driven from their homelands in the Southeast and forced west on the Trail of Tears, a journey that took thousands of Cherokee lives. The Osage were pressed through a series of treaties to give up their ancestral homelands across Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas, and ultimately secured the lands of their present Reservation by purchase. Each of these nations carries a history shaped by removal and by resilience, and each remains a living, self-governing people whose cultures are inseparable from the land on which Oklahoma's cultural life takes place.
OS4CA exists to promote culture and the arts in Oklahoma, to share Oklahoma's art and culture with communities beyond our state, and to bring together divergent cultures through the arts. We cannot honestly pursue that mission without recognizing whose land we do it on. Our hope is to fulfill our mission in partnership with the Native nations of Oklahoma, creating opportunities for them to share their own histories, arts, and voices with the world, in their own words and on their own terms.
Acknowledging this history is only a beginning. We commit to continuing to learn, to listen, to build lasting relationships with the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and to let those relationships shape the work we do.
Mvto. (Thank you.)