February 15, 2022 • 23 mins
Eli Grayson is a citizen of the Muscogee creek nation. He sits in to tell us the history of the creek nation, how it relates to the history of Tulsa, and the value of passing the information down to the future.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Money Movers, Welcome back to Money Moves, the daily
podcast determined to give you the keys to the Kingdom
of financial stability, wealth and abundant. My name is Eli Grayson.
I'm Creek, Muscogee Creek, I Lemon calls it. My great
(00:23):
great grandmother, Susan Grayson, was a little girl on the
Trail of Tears. She was the orphan and her parents
had been killed in the Horseshoe Band battle and a
couple of years ago, maybe a little longer, five years ago,
so the Creeks were down there for ceremony to remember
(00:44):
the two hundred year anniversary commemoration of that massacre. And
one of our Muscogee artist's name, uh Scott Roberts, he
went there and he was allowed to take sand from
the area where the battle took place, and he took
(01:06):
the sand and he made seven of these bowls. And
because my family is actually documented, they have been there,
and my great great grandmother have been documented to be
an orphaned from that. He presented me with one of
the bowls that's made from the sand of Horseshoe Bend
down in Alabama. So any Southern boys, you're down there
(01:29):
in Alabama and you read about Horseshoe Bend that was
a massacre by the American militia, and you know, the
goal was to steal the land and to steal the
Blacks who were actually enslaved by the tribe. So it
wasn't just the land, and they wanted the property. They
also wanted the personal property, unfortunately of the Indians then,
(01:54):
and which you know leads to the horrific history of
my tribe m Skogee Creek nation, enslaving Africans as part
of their history. You know. So Indian people are pretty
much the only people that have to carry a identification
(02:16):
card saying who we are. And because of that, you
grow up knowing who you are, who your stories are.
And when you talk about our ancestors back four generations,
when I've mentioned Susan Grayson, my twice great grandmother, her
mother was a woman named Angelique. You know, she had
(02:38):
no last name, you know, but we know her name
and actually she was her father was a Mississippi Choctaw
and her mother was an enslaved African. You know, so
we we know stories as we go back, we hear
what they were like. And I asked people this all
the time who's your fourth grade grandmother? You know? And
(02:59):
and you know, nineting on at a hundred people if
they're not Indian, will tell me they don't know. But
if I asked another Creek, who is your fifth grade grandmother,
it's just rolled off the town, you know. And it's
because we have to know, We have to prove who
we are to the federal government. And it's also part
(03:20):
of the culture in telling our stories. We just don't
tell stories about events without telling the stories about the
names of the people in the events. So we placed
the names with with people in different situations that they
were in so we can remember them. I remember my
(03:41):
great great grandmother, Susan Grayson, because she was an orphan
on the Trail of Tears. She was actually on one
of the orphan wagons at that and we have a
lot of information about the orphan wagons and the human
Cargo company that was actually in charge to move them
out of Alabama to the Mescogee Creek Nation, this flock
(04:01):
of young uh Creek kids that had no parents, you know.
So and then her husband, Doc Grayson, who was actually
an enslaved person. He was actually born enslaved. You know.
She's an Indian Susan Grayson, but her husband is actually
a enslaved African named Doc Grayson. He had Indian ancestry,
(04:21):
but he was owned by the Grayson family, and that
Grayson family I'm a direct descendant of as well, you know.
So when I think about my fifth grade grandfather, he
was actually from lack Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland. Robert Grison immigrated
here in seventy five. He married my fifth grade grandmother, Snogi,
(04:42):
who was a Greek Indian. So the interesting thing about
those two, there are a ton of books that's been
written about those particular people, and so I get to
know more about them because historians and researchers and UH professors,
particularly from the Universe Georgia have written a lot about them.
(05:03):
UH Claudi of Son has wrote a book Black, White,
and Red, and it's all about that particular family, having
a white man having married an Indian woman. He's bringing
slaves in the tribe and then their kids inheriting those
slaves who family wealth, so to speak. But the kids
are actually marrying or having kids with some of the Africans,
(05:26):
and so you get this mixed race of Indian people
or Creek people that come through there. Now it's very
clear that the misinformation out there is the definition of
who is the Indian, and white people look at Creeks
or Cherokees and Chickasaw so to speak, and say, well,
they don't look like the Indian that we know what
(05:46):
an Indian look like. Well, we're not Navajo people, you know.
And so you know, we are a people who have
had Missegon nation with Europeans and Africans for five hundred years.
So we're mixed race people. We do have full bloods
in our tribe, but not many. Most of us are
(06:08):
have some European or some African mixture. And then we
have a whole population of black people who are actually
enslaved by us that are tribal members or should be so.
So the definition of an Indian, according to the federal
government is a person who is a citizen of a
federally recognized tribe. That person can be white, blond hair,
(06:29):
blue eye, chief of the Cherokee tribe. He's still classified
as an Indian. That person could be black and the
member of a tribe. That person is still classified as
an Indian, which is a legal word that is a
political status, not a genetic race. It's a political right
(06:50):
like being a Democrat of in a Republican or being
a Mississippian or Alabama. You guys in New York, you
know you're called a New Yorker. Well, that's what I'm
I'm talking about. But we have a legal status that
the federal government considered us as wards of the US
and our citizenship, and we don't never we really never
(07:11):
talked about this. There's the Five Civilized Tribes Citizenship Act
of nineteen o one one when the Five Tribes Creeks, Choco, Chickasaw, Cherokee,
and Seminole, and all of their citizens, whether they were black, white,
or red, received the American citizenship. So in for example,
(07:35):
there are enslaved people who were actually black people here
before Oklahoma statehood were not Americans, had no rights of
Americans can vote as Americans can live legally in the US.
They had to live within the Moscogy nation because their
citizenship was only within our tribal government under our laws.
(07:58):
So forth they were adopted Americans. I think about my grandparents,
my father's parents, both of them were born before statehood.
And Eli Grayson, who I'm named for, was born in
eighteen eighty seven. In nineteen o one, he's adopted as
(08:18):
an American citizen, you know. And it's strange because if
Congress wants to resind that act or men that act,
it would affect my citizenship today as an American. So
the tribal history is complicated, it's layered, um. But if
you can understand your history as being a citizen of
(08:42):
a state, then you can count understand your history Indian
people's history as men citizens of a tribe. There would
be no Tulsa without Indian history, you know. As a Creek.
I've said from day one, Tulsa is a validation of
our eighteen sixty six treaty. It's also a validation of
every treaty that came before that. But we we don't.
(09:05):
You know, the Americans have the bigger guns. What do
we want to do? They got cannons, we don't. So
the reality is they get the last say no matter
what we say or push back. We can fight in
the courts now, but it's you know, judges are appointed
these days by politicians, So occasionally you would get a
(09:27):
good judge that would look at the law and only
consider the law without the political implications. But that's where
you know. So we usually fight our battles today in
the courts, and we hope, you know, we're in a
up with a fair judge on most issues, but we
go in with the attitude that we may not win
(09:47):
this because uh judges are politically appointed. Um. But the
reason I said Tulsa is a validation of our treaty
is because the history of it, the way it began,
it didn't begin with us in a sense. It began
with us in the sense that we were here already.
We had a settled area. My family was in the
(10:09):
area since the eighteen twenties actually because the group of
macintosh is Periman's and Grayson's had left the Alabama area
because of what William Macintosh did, which is another story. So,
but the in the area, what had happened basically to
begin Tulsa was a discovery of all in the oast
(10:29):
Asian nation, and Tulsa today sits on three tribal reservations.
The oast Asian Nation is to the northeast, the Cherokee
Nation is to the oast Asian nations to the northwest.
The Cherokee Nations to the northeast, the Muskogee Nation is
all of the South and downtown Tulsa in the beginning
(10:53):
of Greenwood is actually within the Muskogee Creek Nation, and
the history with that after all was found to be
usable in an area of it was discovered in the
Old s Age Nation. There was a rush of white
people here squatting within the within the Muskogee Creek Nation,
(11:15):
and the Creek Nation tried its best to remove them
because they were here illegally and we had no walls.
So they came and they they settled. They started building homes,
They started using our forests to build homes, they started
using our rivers to fish from, they started using our
land to grow their food from. And we solicited the
(11:40):
federal government, the United States government, to remove her people
off our land, and that then happened. So in nineteen hundred,
they were able to these white people to solicit Congress,
lobby Congress to allow them to stay within the Muscogee
Creek Nation. Even though they wanted to stay here, they
(12:04):
didn't want to be under all laws. It would be
different if they said we are moved there and become
subjects of the Creek Nation. We might not have any rights,
but we'll follow their laws, will be part of their culture,
and we'll behave as if we were Creek. That's not
what they wanted. So they solicited Congress to stay where
(12:25):
they were, which is where we see Tulsa today downtown,
and Congress passed the Townsite Act of May of nineteen hundred,
six hundred and fifty four acres were taken from the
Muscogee Creek Nation taken and Congress said, well, we'll pay
you for it. But the way we're gonna pay you,
(12:46):
we're gonna plot it out, divide it up into plots.
They hired Gustin Dave Patton from Greenwood, Arkansas to do it.
They did it. They finished it in nineteen o two,
in the month of June. Each of those plots were
damned to be sold to white people who were squatting
there illegally. They were supposed to pay a fair market
(13:09):
value for each one of those plots because that first
sale was to go to the Creek Nation, and then
the Creek chief would issue a d to that plot.
So if you what had ended up happening, I'll show
you a little map. This is that map, and I
don't know if you want to get a close up
(13:29):
of it. But this is six dred and fifty four
acres right there by the way. It wasn't Tulsa, Oklahoma,
then it was Tulsa Creek Nation, Indian Territory. That's how
Tulsa began this history. And this is a plot map
that was finished and you see here Creek Nation in
(13:49):
the territory. All of this is signed off by the
Department of Interior. Each one of these lots, if it
had a value of faith ten thousand dollars. But each
one of the plots um the first and that was
supposed to be the first sale, and that ten thousand
dollars was supposed to go to the Creek Nation. That's
(14:11):
not what they did. They got together and figured that
the act only said the first sale. It didn't say
that it had to be market value. So they ended
up getting together and they knew they were the only
ones that could buy in here, and they would sell
these plots for a penny on the dollar, and that
(14:32):
penny on the dollar is what ended up going to
the Creek Nation instead of the fair amount fair market value.
And because it was an Act of Congress, the tribes
hands were tied and they had to actually accept the
money on this committee. It was a committee and that
act that actually did this, and they allowed one Creek
citizen to sit on that committee. All the other committee
(14:56):
members were actually the white squatters that actually came. So
that's how Tulsa began its history. Six d and fifty
four acres in the Town Site Act of nineteen hundred.
Tulsa wasn't the only town site. That was Bristow, Cowda, Wagner, Muskogee.
I can go down the list, you follow on and on, Oak, Muggy,
(15:19):
on and on and on. But Tulsa happened to be
the most prominent one because of where it was geographically
located within the Creek Nation but on the border of
three Indian nations. So this was this happened in the
hundred and so what happened in eighteen eighty nine, You
guys have heard about the land runs in Oklahoma Territory.
(15:41):
Oklahoma today is two territories. It's Oklahoma Territory in the
territory in the territories to the east. Oklahoma Territory is
the western part of the state. Before the Civil War,
it was one whole area called Indian Territory and the
five tribes of my tribe, the Muskogee Creek Nation, the
Chocta Nation, Chickasaw Nation, Cherokee Nation, Seminal Nation were the
(16:04):
only tribes in the entire Indian territory. But because they
were Indians, they were slavers of Africans long before the removal.
They brought their enslaved people here. When the Civil War
broke out, they decided to end this treaty relationship with
the United States and signed treaties with the Confederate States,
(16:27):
breaking their agreements with the Americans. And the one thing
that the Confederates actually promised them that they can have
a sovereign rights, enslavey black both and continue that. So
they went with those people, which was that running because
it was those people that stole their lands in Alabama
and Georgia. So but they went with that anyway, So
(16:50):
they lost the war. As the condition of surrender, they
ended up losing two thirds of their lands in western
and the western part of this state today that became
Oklahoma Territory. And the conditions of the treaties were simple.
The government can only move other Indians like the Comanche,
(17:13):
the Pawnee, the Shina, Rappahole, those tribes into that region
and freedman and not the freedman of our tribe. Black
people from Mississippi, black people from Alabama, black people from
Tennessee who have been freed. The treaty gave them the
right for the US to move them there, which is
(17:34):
ironic because it leaves the scheme of what the federal
government may have been up to at one time. Just
like they moved the Indians out of the Deep South,
there probably were a group of people thinking, we're gonna
move all the black folks out of the Deep South,
and we're gonna stick them out there where the Indians are.
Stuff you don't learn in your history unless you read
(17:55):
the treaties. But that didn't and that didn't happen because
so and after, at the end of the Civil War,
the Industrial Revolution happened and the use of oil and
gas came about. And one place in America where the
new oil and gas was was in Indian territory. And
(18:17):
they had stuck all these Indians out here, and before
they moved any black people from Mississippi out there, we
need to do something about this, courting to Congress. So
they ended up doing passing the Organic Act, which was
the Oklahoma we considered we called the land runs, and
I was in eighteen eighty nine, and I was when
(18:38):
officially the area became the Oklahoma Territory and the unassigned
lands were allowed to be the land runs. And those
lands were parts of the west that were not assigned
to certain Indian tribes. Oklahoma City in it area, all
of that where Langston University is located. So there was
(18:59):
land run to allow white people to run there. But
but that act, which it was part of the Dolls Act,
did not affect the five Tribes which were still in
the eastern part of the state. So Congress stand passed
the courts at because the Supreme Court said, they have treaties.
You just can't validate their treaties. You can't make them
(19:21):
give it up, on and on and on. So Congress
started holding these hearings here called the Conditions of Indians
and Indian Territory, where they were interviewing Indians and interviewing
former slaves of the tribes. Which was interesting because when
they interviewed a former slave of the tribe, they were
start out by saying, what is your nationality? And because
(19:45):
they were not Americans, they would say Creek. Our Cherokee
are choked because that was their nationality. Were you a
slave of the tribe, yes, sir, How were you treated?
So these testimonies go like this, and then it ends up, well,
don't you want to own your own land and not
be subject to the tribe. Because the way the system
(20:07):
was in these tribal governments, no one owned land. You
had a right to use it, but it was communal.
You went to the council, and the council you would say, Hey,
I'm getting married and I want to have a bunch
of kids and I need a thousand acres I need
for my hunting, for growing crops, stuff like that. They
would say, Eli, okay, fine, we'll give you this area.
(20:30):
You got it for two years to produce what you want.
Come back in two years to renew your lease. That's
the system, no matter if you were the chief or
a freeman. That's everybody was treated the same. No one
owned land, which is another reason why the enslavement of
Africans were important enough for the Indians to actually go
(20:52):
to war for because the the individual Indian didn't own property,
he only owned the African Prior to eighteen sixty six
and So unlike the plantations in Mississippi, where a white
man may have ten thousand acres and five black people,
and then he can go to New York to chase
(21:14):
bank and say I'm gonna put up five thousand acres
for collateral and one hundred of my enslaved people, and
I'll pay you back when I get my first crops
in they can do that in Indian territory because he
didn't own the property. They only owned the blacks. And
they did go and borrow against their enslaved people as
(21:35):
personal property. So but that was one of the issues
at the Civil War was that when they lost their
enslaved people, people instantly lost their wealth, you know. So
it's all about economics and and the conditions of well
and I would say this, and I keep saying this again,
the whole tribe to not enslaved black people. Just like
(21:58):
in Mississippi, only three percent of white people enslaved all
the blacks in the whole state, and yet all the
white folks in the whole state went fighting for those
three percent, you know. So when you think about it,
in the territory, you had a very small minority of
Indian wealthy Indian people who happened to be chiefs who
enslaved the black people, and they had enough influence to
(22:22):
where other Indians that didn't have a dog in the
fight to go to fight for them because they were
saying the Americans were then encroaching it, it's propaganda and
got them to bleed fight for me because I need
to keep my slave, even though you didn't have one,
So you can lose your life over something that I have,
kind of like what goes on to day. Thank you
(22:42):
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(23:04):
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podcasts from.
Hey, Money Movers, Welcome back to Money Moves, the daily
podcast determined to give you the keys to the Kingdom
of financial stability, wealth and abundant. My name is Eli Grayson.
I'm Creek, Muscogee Creek, I Lemon calls it. My great
(00:23):
great grandmother, Susan Grayson, was a little girl on the
Trail of Tears. She was the orphan and her parents
had been killed in the Horseshoe Band battle and a
couple of years ago, maybe a little longer, five years ago,
so the Creeks were down there for ceremony to remember
(00:44):
the two hundred year anniversary commemoration of that massacre. And
one of our Muscogee artist's name, uh Scott Roberts, he
went there and he was allowed to take sand from
the area where the battle took place, and he took
(01:06):
the sand and he made seven of these bowls. And
because my family is actually documented, they have been there,
and my great great grandmother have been documented to be
an orphaned from that. He presented me with one of
the bowls that's made from the sand of Horseshoe Bend
down in Alabama. So any Southern boys, you're down there
(01:29):
in Alabama and you read about Horseshoe Bend that was
a massacre by the American militia, and you know, the
goal was to steal the land and to steal the
Blacks who were actually enslaved by the tribe. So it
wasn't just the land, and they wanted the property. They
also wanted the personal property, unfortunately of the Indians then,
(01:54):
and which you know leads to the horrific history of
my tribe m Skogee Creek nation, enslaving Africans as part
of their history. You know. So Indian people are pretty
much the only people that have to carry a identification
(02:16):
card saying who we are. And because of that, you
grow up knowing who you are, who your stories are.
And when you talk about our ancestors back four generations,
when I've mentioned Susan Grayson, my twice great grandmother, her
mother was a woman named Angelique. You know, she had
(02:38):
no last name, you know, but we know her name
and actually she was her father was a Mississippi Choctaw
and her mother was an enslaved African. You know, so
we we know stories as we go back, we hear
what they were like. And I asked people this all
the time who's your fourth grade grandmother? You know? And
(02:59):
and you know, nineting on at a hundred people if
they're not Indian, will tell me they don't know. But
if I asked another Creek, who is your fifth grade grandmother,
it's just rolled off the town, you know. And it's
because we have to know, We have to prove who
we are to the federal government. And it's also part
(03:20):
of the culture in telling our stories. We just don't
tell stories about events without telling the stories about the
names of the people in the events. So we placed
the names with with people in different situations that they
were in so we can remember them. I remember my
(03:41):
great great grandmother, Susan Grayson, because she was an orphan
on the Trail of Tears. She was actually on one
of the orphan wagons at that and we have a
lot of information about the orphan wagons and the human
Cargo company that was actually in charge to move them
out of Alabama to the Mescogee Creek Nation, this flock
(04:01):
of young uh Creek kids that had no parents, you know.
So and then her husband, Doc Grayson, who was actually
an enslaved person. He was actually born enslaved. You know.
She's an Indian Susan Grayson, but her husband is actually
a enslaved African named Doc Grayson. He had Indian ancestry,
(04:21):
but he was owned by the Grayson family, and that
Grayson family I'm a direct descendant of as well, you know.
So when I think about my fifth grade grandfather, he
was actually from lack Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland. Robert Grison immigrated
here in seventy five. He married my fifth grade grandmother, Snogi,
(04:42):
who was a Greek Indian. So the interesting thing about
those two, there are a ton of books that's been
written about those particular people, and so I get to
know more about them because historians and researchers and UH professors,
particularly from the Universe Georgia have written a lot about them.
(05:03):
UH Claudi of Son has wrote a book Black, White,
and Red, and it's all about that particular family, having
a white man having married an Indian woman. He's bringing
slaves in the tribe and then their kids inheriting those
slaves who family wealth, so to speak. But the kids
are actually marrying or having kids with some of the Africans,
(05:26):
and so you get this mixed race of Indian people
or Creek people that come through there. Now it's very
clear that the misinformation out there is the definition of
who is the Indian, and white people look at Creeks
or Cherokees and Chickasaw so to speak, and say, well,
they don't look like the Indian that we know what
(05:46):
an Indian look like. Well, we're not Navajo people, you know.
And so you know, we are a people who have
had Missegon nation with Europeans and Africans for five hundred years.
So we're mixed race people. We do have full bloods
in our tribe, but not many. Most of us are
(06:08):
have some European or some African mixture. And then we
have a whole population of black people who are actually
enslaved by us that are tribal members or should be so.
So the definition of an Indian, according to the federal
government is a person who is a citizen of a
federally recognized tribe. That person can be white, blond hair,
(06:29):
blue eye, chief of the Cherokee tribe. He's still classified
as an Indian. That person could be black and the
member of a tribe. That person is still classified as
an Indian, which is a legal word that is a
political status, not a genetic race. It's a political right
(06:50):
like being a Democrat of in a Republican or being
a Mississippian or Alabama. You guys in New York, you
know you're called a New Yorker. Well, that's what I'm
I'm talking about. But we have a legal status that
the federal government considered us as wards of the US
and our citizenship, and we don't never we really never
(07:11):
talked about this. There's the Five Civilized Tribes Citizenship Act
of nineteen o one one when the Five Tribes Creeks, Choco, Chickasaw, Cherokee,
and Seminole, and all of their citizens, whether they were black, white,
or red, received the American citizenship. So in for example,
(07:35):
there are enslaved people who were actually black people here
before Oklahoma statehood were not Americans, had no rights of
Americans can vote as Americans can live legally in the US.
They had to live within the Moscogy nation because their
citizenship was only within our tribal government under our laws.
(07:58):
So forth they were adopted Americans. I think about my grandparents,
my father's parents, both of them were born before statehood.
And Eli Grayson, who I'm named for, was born in
eighteen eighty seven. In nineteen o one, he's adopted as
(08:18):
an American citizen, you know. And it's strange because if
Congress wants to resind that act or men that act,
it would affect my citizenship today as an American. So
the tribal history is complicated, it's layered, um. But if
you can understand your history as being a citizen of
(08:42):
a state, then you can count understand your history Indian
people's history as men citizens of a tribe. There would
be no Tulsa without Indian history, you know. As a Creek.
I've said from day one, Tulsa is a validation of
our eighteen sixty six treaty. It's also a validation of
every treaty that came before that. But we we don't.
(09:05):
You know, the Americans have the bigger guns. What do
we want to do? They got cannons, we don't. So
the reality is they get the last say no matter
what we say or push back. We can fight in
the courts now, but it's you know, judges are appointed
these days by politicians, So occasionally you would get a
(09:27):
good judge that would look at the law and only
consider the law without the political implications. But that's where
you know. So we usually fight our battles today in
the courts, and we hope, you know, we're in a
up with a fair judge on most issues, but we
go in with the attitude that we may not win
(09:47):
this because uh judges are politically appointed. Um. But the
reason I said Tulsa is a validation of our treaty
is because the history of it, the way it began,
it didn't begin with us in a sense. It began
with us in the sense that we were here already.
We had a settled area. My family was in the
(10:09):
area since the eighteen twenties actually because the group of
macintosh is Periman's and Grayson's had left the Alabama area
because of what William Macintosh did, which is another story. So,
but the in the area, what had happened basically to
begin Tulsa was a discovery of all in the oast
(10:29):
Asian nation, and Tulsa today sits on three tribal reservations.
The oast Asian Nation is to the northeast, the Cherokee
Nation is to the oast Asian nations to the northwest.
The Cherokee Nations to the northeast, the Muskogee Nation is
all of the South and downtown Tulsa in the beginning
(10:53):
of Greenwood is actually within the Muskogee Creek Nation, and
the history with that after all was found to be
usable in an area of it was discovered in the
Old s Age Nation. There was a rush of white
people here squatting within the within the Muskogee Creek Nation,
(11:15):
and the Creek Nation tried its best to remove them
because they were here illegally and we had no walls.
So they came and they they settled. They started building homes,
They started using our forests to build homes, they started
using our rivers to fish from, they started using our
land to grow their food from. And we solicited the
(11:40):
federal government, the United States government, to remove her people
off our land, and that then happened. So in nineteen hundred,
they were able to these white people to solicit Congress,
lobby Congress to allow them to stay within the Muscogee
Creek Nation. Even though they wanted to stay here, they
(12:04):
didn't want to be under all laws. It would be
different if they said we are moved there and become
subjects of the Creek Nation. We might not have any rights,
but we'll follow their laws, will be part of their culture,
and we'll behave as if we were Creek. That's not
what they wanted. So they solicited Congress to stay where
(12:25):
they were, which is where we see Tulsa today downtown,
and Congress passed the Townsite Act of May of nineteen hundred,
six hundred and fifty four acres were taken from the
Muscogee Creek Nation taken and Congress said, well, we'll pay
you for it. But the way we're gonna pay you,
(12:46):
we're gonna plot it out, divide it up into plots.
They hired Gustin Dave Patton from Greenwood, Arkansas to do it.
They did it. They finished it in nineteen o two,
in the month of June. Each of those plots were
damned to be sold to white people who were squatting
there illegally. They were supposed to pay a fair market
(13:09):
value for each one of those plots because that first
sale was to go to the Creek Nation, and then
the Creek chief would issue a d to that plot.
So if you what had ended up happening, I'll show
you a little map. This is that map, and I
don't know if you want to get a close up
(13:29):
of it. But this is six dred and fifty four
acres right there by the way. It wasn't Tulsa, Oklahoma,
then it was Tulsa Creek Nation, Indian Territory. That's how
Tulsa began this history. And this is a plot map
that was finished and you see here Creek Nation in
(13:49):
the territory. All of this is signed off by the
Department of Interior. Each one of these lots, if it
had a value of faith ten thousand dollars. But each
one of the plots um the first and that was
supposed to be the first sale, and that ten thousand
dollars was supposed to go to the Creek Nation. That's
(14:11):
not what they did. They got together and figured that
the act only said the first sale. It didn't say
that it had to be market value. So they ended
up getting together and they knew they were the only
ones that could buy in here, and they would sell
these plots for a penny on the dollar, and that
(14:32):
penny on the dollar is what ended up going to
the Creek Nation instead of the fair amount fair market value.
And because it was an Act of Congress, the tribes
hands were tied and they had to actually accept the
money on this committee. It was a committee and that
act that actually did this, and they allowed one Creek
citizen to sit on that committee. All the other committee
(14:56):
members were actually the white squatters that actually came. So
that's how Tulsa began its history. Six d and fifty
four acres in the Town Site Act of nineteen hundred.
Tulsa wasn't the only town site. That was Bristow, Cowda, Wagner, Muskogee.
I can go down the list, you follow on and on, Oak, Muggy,
(15:19):
on and on and on. But Tulsa happened to be
the most prominent one because of where it was geographically
located within the Creek Nation but on the border of
three Indian nations. So this was this happened in the
hundred and so what happened in eighteen eighty nine, You
guys have heard about the land runs in Oklahoma Territory.
(15:41):
Oklahoma today is two territories. It's Oklahoma Territory in the
territory in the territories to the east. Oklahoma Territory is
the western part of the state. Before the Civil War,
it was one whole area called Indian Territory and the
five tribes of my tribe, the Muskogee Creek Nation, the
Chocta Nation, Chickasaw Nation, Cherokee Nation, Seminal Nation were the
(16:04):
only tribes in the entire Indian territory. But because they
were Indians, they were slavers of Africans long before the removal.
They brought their enslaved people here. When the Civil War
broke out, they decided to end this treaty relationship with
the United States and signed treaties with the Confederate States,
(16:27):
breaking their agreements with the Americans. And the one thing
that the Confederates actually promised them that they can have
a sovereign rights, enslavey black both and continue that. So
they went with those people, which was that running because
it was those people that stole their lands in Alabama
and Georgia. So but they went with that anyway, So
(16:50):
they lost the war. As the condition of surrender, they
ended up losing two thirds of their lands in western
and the western part of this state today that became
Oklahoma Territory. And the conditions of the treaties were simple.
The government can only move other Indians like the Comanche,
(17:13):
the Pawnee, the Shina, Rappahole, those tribes into that region
and freedman and not the freedman of our tribe. Black
people from Mississippi, black people from Alabama, black people from
Tennessee who have been freed. The treaty gave them the
right for the US to move them there, which is
(17:34):
ironic because it leaves the scheme of what the federal
government may have been up to at one time. Just
like they moved the Indians out of the Deep South,
there probably were a group of people thinking, we're gonna
move all the black folks out of the Deep South,
and we're gonna stick them out there where the Indians are.
Stuff you don't learn in your history unless you read
(17:55):
the treaties. But that didn't and that didn't happen because
so and after, at the end of the Civil War,
the Industrial Revolution happened and the use of oil and
gas came about. And one place in America where the
new oil and gas was was in Indian territory. And
(18:17):
they had stuck all these Indians out here, and before
they moved any black people from Mississippi out there, we
need to do something about this, courting to Congress. So
they ended up doing passing the Organic Act, which was
the Oklahoma we considered we called the land runs, and
I was in eighteen eighty nine, and I was when
(18:38):
officially the area became the Oklahoma Territory and the unassigned
lands were allowed to be the land runs. And those
lands were parts of the west that were not assigned
to certain Indian tribes. Oklahoma City in it area, all
of that where Langston University is located. So there was
(18:59):
land run to allow white people to run there. But
but that act, which it was part of the Dolls Act,
did not affect the five Tribes which were still in
the eastern part of the state. So Congress stand passed
the courts at because the Supreme Court said, they have treaties.
You just can't validate their treaties. You can't make them
(19:21):
give it up, on and on and on. So Congress
started holding these hearings here called the Conditions of Indians
and Indian Territory, where they were interviewing Indians and interviewing
former slaves of the tribes. Which was interesting because when
they interviewed a former slave of the tribe, they were
start out by saying, what is your nationality? And because
(19:45):
they were not Americans, they would say Creek. Our Cherokee
are choked because that was their nationality. Were you a
slave of the tribe, yes, sir, How were you treated?
So these testimonies go like this, and then it ends up, well,
don't you want to own your own land and not
be subject to the tribe. Because the way the system
(20:07):
was in these tribal governments, no one owned land. You
had a right to use it, but it was communal.
You went to the council, and the council you would say, Hey,
I'm getting married and I want to have a bunch
of kids and I need a thousand acres I need
for my hunting, for growing crops, stuff like that. They
would say, Eli, okay, fine, we'll give you this area.
(20:30):
You got it for two years to produce what you want.
Come back in two years to renew your lease. That's
the system, no matter if you were the chief or
a freeman. That's everybody was treated the same. No one
owned land, which is another reason why the enslavement of
Africans were important enough for the Indians to actually go
(20:52):
to war for because the the individual Indian didn't own property,
he only owned the African Prior to eighteen sixty six
and So unlike the plantations in Mississippi, where a white
man may have ten thousand acres and five black people,
and then he can go to New York to chase
(21:14):
bank and say I'm gonna put up five thousand acres
for collateral and one hundred of my enslaved people, and
I'll pay you back when I get my first crops
in they can do that in Indian territory because he
didn't own the property. They only owned the blacks. And
they did go and borrow against their enslaved people as
(21:35):
personal property. So but that was one of the issues
at the Civil War was that when they lost their
enslaved people, people instantly lost their wealth, you know. So
it's all about economics and and the conditions of well
and I would say this, and I keep saying this again,
the whole tribe to not enslaved black people. Just like
(21:58):
in Mississippi, only three percent of white people enslaved all
the blacks in the whole state, and yet all the
white folks in the whole state went fighting for those
three percent, you know. So when you think about it,
in the territory, you had a very small minority of
Indian wealthy Indian people who happened to be chiefs who
enslaved the black people, and they had enough influence to
(22:22):
where other Indians that didn't have a dog in the
fight to go to fight for them because they were
saying the Americans were then encroaching it, it's propaganda and
got them to bleed fight for me because I need
to keep my slave, even though you didn't have one,
So you can lose your life over something that I have,
kind of like what goes on to day. Thank you
(22:42):
so much for tuning in Money Moves audience. If you
want more or a recap of this episode, please go
to the bank Greenwood dot com and check out the
Money Moves podcast blog. Money Moves is an I heart
radio podcast powered by Greenwood Exact to produced by Sunwise Media, Inc.
For more podcasts on I heart Radio, visit the i
(23:04):
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