State of Sequoyah

Starting in 1890, when Congress passed the Oklahoma Organic Act, the land that now forms the State of Oklahoma was made up of two separate territories: Oklahoma Territory to the west and the Indian Territory to the east. The Indian Territory had a large Native American population. The territory had been reduced by required land cessions after the Civil War, land runs, and other treaties with the United States. In the 1900 US Census, Native Americans composed 13.4 percent of the population in the future state. By 1905, the Five Civilized Tribes comprised about 10% of the Indian Territory's total population of around 600,000 people. Despite having been previously exempt from the 1887 General Allotment Act, the Curtis Act of 1898 allowed Congress to set a date (March 4, 1906) for the breakup of tribal governments and communal lands in the territory. Until 1903, the Five Civilized Tribes and other tribes in Indian Territory had generally opposed all local and national efforts for statehood, whether they were single or joint with Oklahoma Territory. That changed as the termination deadline approached. == Constitutional convention ==

The desire of tribal leaders to retain their historic authority and for the territory to be admitted as a single state, apart from Oklahoma Territory, culminated in July 1905 with the Cherokee Chief W.C. Rogers and Choctaw Chief Green McCurtain calling for a constitutional convention that August. The convention met in Muskogee, on August 21, 1905. The new state was to be named for the Cherokee statesman Sequoyah, who invented the tribe's written language. General Pleasant Porter, Principal Chief of the Creek Nation, was selected as president of the convention, while Creek journalist Alexander Posey served as Secretary. The elected delegates decided that the executive officers of the Five Civilized Tribes would also be appointed as vice-presidents of the convention. These were: • William C. Rogers, Principal Chief of the Cherokees • Green McCurtain, Principal Chief of the Choctaws • John Brown, Principal Chief of the Seminoles • Charles N. Haskell, a non-Native selected to represent the Creeks (as General Porter had been elected president) • William H. Murray, an intermarried white appointed by Chickasaw Governor Douglas H. Johnston (who opposed the convention) to represent the Chickasaws The convention, which met as a whole on August 21 and 22 and September 5 to 8, However, on Election Day, voters in the territory approved the constitution and statehood petition by 56,279 in favor to 9,073 against. Following this success, Porter, Posey, Haskell, Murray, and the four congressmen brought the proposed constitution to Washington, D.C. to lobby for its passage. Republicans Arthur P. Murphy of Missouri and Porter James McCumber of North Dakota introduced statehood bills to the House and Senate, respectively. Murray, however, known for his eccentricities and political astuteness, predicted their efforts would fail: == Annexation ==

Congress, however, did not support statehood for Sequoyah. President Theodore Roosevelt, long a proponent of annexation, spoke plainly in his Fifth Annual Message to Congress on December 5, 1905: Roosevelt proposed a "compromise" that would join Indian Territory with Oklahoma Territory to form a single state and resulted in passage of the Oklahoma Enabling Act, which he signed June 16, 1906. Although the State of Sequoyah never came into existence, its constitution made an important contribution to Oklahoma history as it formed the majority of the later Oklahoma Constitution. The delegates who wrote it, including Haskell and Murray, shared an underlying populist distrust of elected officials. The convention also catapulted Haskell, Murray, and others further into the public arena, securing for Indian Territory a solid seat at the debate at the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention. with Haskell as its first Governor and Murray as its first House Speaker. == Aftermath ==

Following Oklahoma statehood, Haskell and Murray had segregation enshrined into law. The five tribes, diminished in power, faced further marginalization and discrimination, both racially and politically during the first half of the twentieth century. Termination efforts continued against them until 1970, when Richard Nixon repealed the Termination Act of 1959. Following this, the tribes began to elect their own chiefs and governments independent of federal oversight, and built separate agreements with the state government in Oklahoma City to protect their autonomy. On July 9, 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States determined in McGirt v. Oklahoma that the reservations of the Five Tribes, comprising much of Eastern Oklahoma, were never disestablished by Congress and thus are still "Indian Country" for the purposes of criminal law. In late 2024, Sac and Fox writer and professor Donald Fixico theorized that the Five Tribes could revive the Sequoyah Movement for separate statehood following the McGirt decision. == In fiction ==

In the Southern Victory series by Harry Turtledove, Indian Territory is annexed by the Confederate States in 1862, later becoming the State of Sequoyah, where the Five Civilized Tribes are granted autonomy and special protections, similar to the historical Sequoyah proposal. After the state is annexed by the United States following the First Great War, a failed plebiscite to return the state to the Confederacy serves as a casus belli for the Second Great War. == References ==