Member-only story
Two Kinds of Robbery
Being a relation of how Indian land was stolen twice, first the homelands and then the reservations.
Woody Guthrie was born in 1912 — -five years after Oklahoma statehood shredded the treaties with the Five Tribes, all of which promised their land in Indian Territory would never become part of a state without the consent of tribal government. Woody was born and raised in Okemah, not far from where I grew up in Bristow. By the time I came along, only the elders carried the stories of Indian Territory, but when Woody was a kid, the theft was still fresh.
I’ve wondered if that theft inspired in some part Woody’s ballad about a bank robber named Pretty Boy Floyd, in which he claimed that he’d seen lots of funny men,
Some’ll rob you with a six-gun; some with a fountain pen.
The Five Tribes were robbed with fountain pens. They were my folks, the Cherokee, along with the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole. All had signed treaties that were presented as offers they could not refuse, but all of those treaties promised that the new lands in Indian Territory would be theirs as long as the grass would grow and the rivers would run or oil would be discovered, whichever came first.
