Land Acknowledgment for Our Events

OS4CA's events take place across Oklahoma, on the Reservations of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the Cherokee Nation, and the Osage Nation. The boundaries of these three Nations meet in the Tulsa area, and each is a living, sovereign government with its own constitution, courts, language, and traditions. Wherever an OS4CA event is held within these Reservations, we gather as guests, and we offer this acknowledgment to honor the people whose homeland it is.

Mvskoke (Muscogee/Creek) Nation

In their own language, the people of this Nation are the Mvskoke. Their homeland once stretched across what is now Georgia and Alabama, and their society was built on a confederacy of tribal towns, each with its own governance and ceremonial grounds. In the 1830s, following an 1832 treaty and the removal policies of the United States government, Mvskoke families were forced west on the Trail of Tears. Thousands died along the way. The survivors rebuilt their government, ceremonies, and language in Indian Territory. The Lochapoka people rekindled their ceremonial fire beneath the Council Oak Tree in what is now Tulsa, carrying the name of their ancestral town Tallasi, from which Tulsa takes its name.

After the Civil War, the Treaty of 1866 forced the Nation to give up the western half of its lands. Allotment and the Curtis Act of 1898 followed, abolishing tribal courts and governments. Yet in 2020, in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the United States Supreme Court affirmed that the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation was never disestablished. Today the Nation governs itself under a constitution ratified in 1979, with its capital in Okmulgee, and sustains the Mvskoke language and traditions for future generations.

Cherokee Nation

The Cherokee homeland lay in the southern Appalachian region of the Southeast. In 1821, Sequoyah completed the Cherokee syllabary, and literacy spread quickly across the Nation. In 1827 the Cherokee adopted a written constitution with legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix was soon printed at the capital, New Echota. In 1835, a small group of Cherokee leaders signed the Treaty of New Echota. In 1838, United States troops forced roughly fourteen thousand Cherokee men, women, and children from their homes and onto the 900-mile Trail of Tears. Thousands died in the internment camps and along the way.

The survivors joined the Western Cherokee in Indian Territory, and in 1839 the two branches signed a constitution reuniting the Nation, with Tahlequah as its capital. In the decades after, the Curtis Act and the legislation preparing for statehood dismantled the Nation's government, and the federal government appointed its chiefs. In 1971, the Cherokee elected a Principal Chief for the first time in nearly seventy years, and they ratified a new constitution in 1976. Today the Cherokee Nation is the largest tribal government in the United States, with more than 450,000 citizens, a 7,000-square-mile Reservation across fourteen counties, and an immersion school keeping the Cherokee language alive.

Osage Nation

The Osage people, the Wahzhazhe, once held millions of acres across what is now Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Beginning with the Treaty of 1808, a series of treaties with the United States took their lands, and by 1864 the Osage had been moved to a reserve in southeastern Kansas. In 1872 they relocated again, to Indian Territory. With the proceeds from the sale of their Kansas lands, the Osage purchased nearly 1.5 million acres from the Cherokee Nation. That land was not a gift. It became their permanent home, and it remains the Osage Nation Reservation today, coextensive with Osage County.

When the Allotment Act of 1906 divided the surface of the Reservation among individual Osage, the Nation reserved its mineral estate in common. The oil beneath the land brought wealth, and with it, in the 1920s, the Reign of Terror, in which Osage people were murdered by those seeking to take these rights. The investigation became the first major homicide case of the young Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Osage Nation continues to govern itself under the constitution its citizens ratified in 2006, from its capital in Pawhuska, with about 25,000 citizens and a deep commitment to revitalizing the Wahzhazhe language.

Our Commitment

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, the Cherokee Nation, and the Osage Nation, and to let those relationships shape the work we do. To the citizens and governments of all the Nations of Oklahoma, thank you for welcoming us onto your land.