The State of Sequoyah: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Quest for an Indian State

What strategies have Indian tribes used to preserve their distinctive cultures and protect their political sovereignty? This, of course, has become a central question in the past half century for historians of Indigenous North America. In The State of Sequoyah, distinguished historian Donald L. Fixico examines an important yet previously neglected episode in this history, when the leaders of the Five Tribes of Southeast North America—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole Nations—pursued a strategy of pan-Indian solidarity by attempting to create what would have been the forty-sixth state in the Union. That state would have been named for Sequoyah (the creator of the Cherokee syllabary), and its boundaries would have encompassed the lands of the Five Tribes in what had been Indian Territory.The Indian statehood movement developed through a series of intertribal meetings, culminating in a convention held in the town of Muskogee on August 21, 1905. Delegates drafted a state constitution and adopted a state seal combining the five tribal seals arranged within a five-pointed star. On 7 November 1905, residents of Indian Territory voted in favor of statehood for Sequoyah by a six-to-one margin. However, their proposal was ultimately defeated. In 1906, the United States Congress rejected the bill for Sequoyah statehood and instead passed a law following President Theodore Roosevelt’s preference for combining Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory into a single state. Tribal governments were dissolved in accordance with the Dawes Act and the Curtis Act, and in 1907, the people of the Five Tribes became Oklahomans.In older accounts and in historical sources, this sequence of events was treated as another sad chapter in the nostalgic narrative of Indian decline and pathos. That is to say, the failure of the Sequoyah movement was seen as the result of a general lack of political acumen among Indians, who were supposed to be riven by factional infighting. In Fixico’s telling, however, this story takes on a more profound significance. Drawing on manuscript sources, government documents, local historical newspapers, and an extensive body of secondary literature, Fixico combines ethnohistory with political history and legal history. The result is an engaging, brisk narrative written with a storyteller’s ear, using jargon-free prose that is compelling and, at many points, entertaining. Key players, such as Pleasant Porter, the Muscogee Principal Chief who served as chairman at the Muskogee convention, emerge as fully drawn characters and skilled statesmen.Although Fixico is focused primarily on telling a story, by the end of the book a clear underlying argument emerges. The book’s protagonists are the leaders of the Five Tribes and their allies, while the antagonists are white men looking to profit by obtaining Indian lands. Fixico makes clear that responsibility for the failure of the Sequoyah movement rests with white speculators, filibusterers, and their enablers in the US government.Fixico’s fast-paced narrative might leave readers with unanswered questions about the internal political dynamics within (and the external political-diplomatic relationships between) each of the tribes that appear in this story. Furthermore, Fixico could have made his implicit arguments even stronger by explicitly questioning the analytical value of old categories such as so-called “full-bloods,” “mixed-bloods,” “traditionalists,” and “progressives.” However, this highly readable, stimulating book ought to serve as a provocation for scholars to seek out other episodes where the quest for sovereignty led tribes to pursue the strategy of pan-Indian activism. It should also provide teachers with a ready means to help undergraduate students reexamine the foundations of modern society in the United States.