If there is one thing that conservatives are proud of in America, it is that rich people can do whatever they want with their money, so long as it is not criminal, and then maybe even if it is. But this rule did not apply to people of color. In particular, Native Americans were regarded by the white governments (federal, state, and county levels) as being childishly imbecilic and unable to decide what to do with their own money.
When the federal government sent the Five Tribes (including my tribe, the Cherokees) to what became Indian Territory and later Oklahoma, they guaranteed by treaty that the land belonged to the tribes. For example, a large part of what is now northeastern Oklahoma belonged to the Cherokee Nation.
The Cherokees, like the other Five Tribes, considered that they owned the land as a tribe, not as individual landowners. The white authorities did not like this. It was too communist. They decided they would force the Natives to become capitalists. With the Dawes Act of 1887 and later the Curtis Act of 1898, the Five Tribes were required to have their tribal land divided into individual allotments for each tribal citizen, including minors. This may not sound unreasonable in itself, but it was a solution in search of a problem. So why did the white federal government do it?
They did it for two reasons. First, when they divided up the land into allotments, of which my grandfather Edd Hicks got acreage in section 26N township 17E, the total acreage of the allotments did not add up to the tribal territory. That is, there was land left over—which the government could sell. Second, the government could then control what each tribal citizen did with their land. There were restrictions.
For Natives with one-sixteenth or less blood quantum, there were no restrictions. Edd was about one-quarter, but he registered as one-sixteenth so that he would have no restrictions. For Natives with one-half or more blood quantum, they were restricted from selling the allotment or anything pertaining to it, which would include mineral (oil) rights. Their allotments had to be managed by guardians, as if the Natives were children who did not know how to take care of themselves.
Guardianship, as you might expect, was considered necessary for minor orphans. They really did not know how to manage their land. Guardians were supposed to take care of the land until the orphans grew up, then let them have it. The guardians could charge a reasonable service fee for the work. The national average for guardianship was 3 percent of the value of the property. In Oklahoma, it was on the average of 20 percent and in some cases 80 percent. Meanwhile, the orphans in many cases received no money at all from the sale of oil from their land. The guardians who practiced this method were known as grafters, and in Oklahoma in the early twentieth century this was a term of pride. Sixty thousand Native minors in Oklahoma owned $129 million in property. Some of the guardians had 200 to 300 wards. Two Creek children had land that was worth $250,000. They lived—and died—in an orphanage that was mysteriously dynamited. Then the guardian handled their probate. Guess who got the money.
The crusading reformer Kate Barnard, who ran the Department of Corrections and Charities, and who was one of the few honest people in the Oklahoma government, found out about it during her routine inspection of the living conditions of orphans. She found some Creek Indian children living in a tree, drinking from a stream, and living on handouts. She vividly described having to take scissors and cut out matted filth from their hair. These kids were millionaires, but they didn’t know it because their guardian, who had sixty other wards, did not tell them. He just kept the oil money. Kate spent the last part of her life trying to bring the grafters to justice. While she had been popular for her crusades to improve conditions in orphanages and prisons, she met with hatred from Oklahoma and county governments when she tried to rescue the Native orphans from grafters. This broke her health and she died without having finished her work. You can read all about it in the wonderful new biography by Connie Cronley (A Life on Fire: Oklahoma’s Kate Barnard).
In other cases, oil executives hired people to kidnap the minors and take them someplace where no one would recognize them. It was not, as far as I have heard, violent kidnapping. According to Cronley’s book, one of the oil executives who did this was Thomas Gilcrease, best known as the benefactor of the museum that bears his name in Tulsa. It is hard to, even today, think of any name more revered in Tulsa even by progressives than that of Thomas Gilcrease. But he hired someone to take a rich Creek orphan to England and get him to sign his oil rights to Gilcrease. More about Gilcrease in a later essay.
But it was not long before the federal, state, and local governments figured out that all they had to do was declare adult Natives to be mentally incapacitated in order to appoint guardians for them, who would decide what to do with the land. This was fairly easy to do, since state and county officials all believed that all Natives, even adults who were successfully running their farms, were mentally incapacitated. If Edd, who was smart enough to be on school boards and could raise any crop and any kind of livestock, would have been deemed incompetent if his land had oil on it.
This is the plot of the 1949 movie Tulsa (“the lusty, brawling saga of a city of adventure”), starring Susan Hayward, Robert Preston, and Chill Wills. Jim Redbird, the rightful Muskogee owner of oil land, played by Pedro Armendáriz, was declared mentally incompetent by a judge. When he looked at the oil extraction and cracking on his land, for which he was receiving no money, and which spilled flammable pollution all over the ground, he touched a cigar to the hydrocarbons and burned up the oil rigs. This is one of the few early movies that shows Natives fighting back against white oppression. Perhaps oblivious to the fact that this movie was showing white Oklahomans engaging in criminal acts, Tulsans welcomed Hayward and Preston to their city and celebrated the opening of the movie. Tulsa grew as “the miracle city” directly because of the discovery of oil, and almost all of its early twentieth century philanthropists were oil men. To what extent the most famous of them might have profited from illegal acquisitions from the Muskogee Creek tribe, and to what extent the artistic culture of Tulsa is still dependent on that money (aside from Gilcrease), is something that few people, if anybody, knows anymore.
And this is exactly what happened to a Creek Native named Jackson Barnett. The reason this essay is on this blog is that racism has no scientific basis. See part two, to be posted soon.
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