The American Indian Exposition, held annually during the first full week in August at the Caddo County Fairgrounds in Anadarko, Oklahoma, is one of the oldest and largest intertribal gatherings in the United States. Sponsored by fifteen tribes (Apache, Arapaho, Caddo, Cheyenne, Comanche, Delaware, Fort Sill Apache, Iowa, Kiowa, Osage, Otoe-Missouri, Pawnee, Ponca, Sac & Fox, and Wichita), representatives from up to fifty other tribes participate in any given year. [1]
The Exposition began with the All-Indian Fair first held in 1924. It was the successor to the Craterville Park Indian Fair, which had been held from 1924 through 1933 near Cache, Oklahoma. A group of people calling themselves the Southwest Indian Fair (SWIF) had met after the Caddo County Free Fair in 1935 to discuss their dissatisfaction with the Craterville Park demonstrations of Indian culture, which they felt was too ethnocentric and white-oriented. They felt that the Indian participants were treated as merely figureheads. The leaders of SWIF wanted to separate the dance performances from the county fair, and wanted the Caddo County Free Fair board to give them creative and management freedom over the production. [1] In 1935 it was incorporated as the American Indian Exposition with the stated purpose of "promoting and retaining Indian cultural life, handicrafts, arts, crafts, and farming a seend livestock skills by providing a yearly showcase".
The Exposition features a week-long program of dance contests, parades, pageants (Indian Princess, Beautiful Baby), sporting events such as softball as well as arts and crafts contests. The fairgrounds also provides camping accommodations for the participants. Nearby is the Southern Plains Indian Museum, the American Indian Hall of Fame, and Indian City USA.
No expositions were held in 1942-45 nor 2020-21.
The title "Miss American Indian Exposition," came into existence in the 1930s, when a young woman, Imogene Carter, was selected to represent the AIE. The event has been reintroduced many times, and the requirements have undergone several changes. In 2015, the AIE Board retired the title until it could reassess the qualifications and other requirements. In January, 2016, AIE reinstated this aspect of the program. It opened competition to any young American Indian woman who wished to enter. Previously, competition was limited to actual tribal princesses. To promote education, the title holder would be expected to serve as a mentor for young women, and the winner each year would receive a scholarship. The winner of the 2016 competition is Marquela Pewewardy, who is 17 years old and whose mother is Kiowa and whose father is Comanche. [lower-alpha 1] She plans to enroll in Oklahoma University, when she graduates from Elgin High School. [2]
The Indian Territory and the Indian Territories are terms that generally described an evolving land area set aside by the United States government for the relocation of Native Americans who held original Indian title to their land as a sovereign independent state. The tribes ceded land they occupied in exchange for land grants in 1803. The concept of an Indian Territory was an outcome of the U.S. federal government's 18th- and 19th-century policy of Indian removal. After the American Civil War (1861–1865), the policy of the U.S. government was one of assimilation.
Comanche County is a county located in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. As of the 2020 census, the population was 121,125, making it the fifth-most populous county in Oklahoma. Its county seat is Lawton. The county was created in 1901 as part of Oklahoma Territory. It was named for the Comanche tribal nation.
Caddo County is a county located in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. As of the 2020 census, the population was 26,945. Its county seat is Anadarko. Created in 1901 as part of Oklahoma Territory, the county is named for the Caddo tribe who were settled here on a reservation in the 1870s. Caddo County is immediately west of the seven-county Greater Oklahoma City metro area, and although is not officially in the metro area, it has many economic ties in this region.
Anadarko is a city in Caddo County, Oklahoma, United States. The city is fifty miles (80.5 km) southwest of Oklahoma City. The population was 5,745 at the 2020 census. It is the county seat of Caddo County.
Kiowa or Ka'igwu people are a Native American tribe and an indigenous people of the Great Plains of the United States. They migrated southward from western Montana into the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in the 17th and 18th centuries, and eventually into the Southern Plains by the early 19th century. In 1867, the Kiowa were moved to a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma.
A land run or land rush was an event in which previously restricted land of the United States was opened to homestead on a first-arrival basis. Lands were opened and sold first-come or by bid, or won by lottery, or by means other than a run. The settlers, no matter how they acquired occupancy, purchased the land from the United States Land Office. For former Indian lands, the Land Office distributed the sales funds to the various tribal entities, according to previously negotiated terms. The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 was the most prominent of the land runs while the Land Run of 1893 was the largest. The opening of the former Kickapoo area in 1895 was the last use of a land run in the present area of Oklahoma.
Quanah Parker was a war leader of the Kwahadi ("Antelope") band of the Comanche Nation. He was likely born into the Nokoni ("Wanderers") band of Tabby-nocca and grew up among the Kwahadis, the son of Kwahadi Comanche chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, an Anglo-American who had been abducted as a eight-year-old child and assimilated into the Nokoni tribe. Following the apprehension of several Kiowa chiefs in 1871, Quanah Parker emerged as a dominant figure in the Red River War, clashing repeatedly with Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie. With European-Americans hunting American bison, the Comanches' primary sustenance, into near extinction, Quanah Parker eventually surrendered and peaceably led the Kwahadi to the reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
The Comanche Wars were a series of armed conflicts fought between Comanche peoples and Spanish, Mexican, and American militaries and civilians in the United States and Mexico from as early as 1706 until at least the mid-1870s. The Comanche were the Native American inhabitants of a large area known as Comancheria, which stretched across much of the southern Great Plains from Colorado and Kansas in the north through Oklahoma, Texas, and eastern New Mexico and into the Mexican state of Chihuahua in the south. For more than 150 years, the Comanche were the dominant native tribe in the region, known as “the Lords of the Southern Plains”, though they also shared parts of Comancheria with the Wichita, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache and, after 1840, the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho.
The Plains Apache are a small Southern Athabaskan group who live on the Southern Plains of North America, in close association with the linguistically unrelated Kiowa Tribe. Today, they are centered in Southwestern Oklahoma and Northern Texas and are federally recognized as the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma.
The Indian City USA Cultural Center, formerly known as Indian City USA, was an outdoor museum in Anadarko, Oklahoma.
Comanche history is the story of the Native American (Indian) tribe which lived on the Great Plains of the present-day United States. In the 17th century the Eastern Shoshone people who became known as the Comanche migrated southward from Wyoming. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Comanche became the dominant tribe on the southern Great Plains. The Comanche are often characterized as "Lords of the Plains." They presided over a large area called Comancheria which they shared with allied tribes, the Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Wichita, and after 1840 the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. Comanche power and their substantial wealth depended on horses, trading, and raiding. Adroit diplomacy was also a factor in maintaining their dominance and fending off enemies for more than a century. They subsisted on the bison herds of the Plains which they hunted for food and skins.
Stephen Mopope (1898–1974) was a Kiowa painter, dancer, and Native American flute player from Oklahoma. He was the most prolific member of the group of artists known as the Kiowa Six.
David Emmett Williams was a Native American painter, who was Kiowa/Tonkawa/Kiowa-Apache from Oklahoma. He studied with Dick West at Bacone College and won numerous national awards for his paintings. He painted in the Flatstyle technique that was taught at Bacone from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Susie Peters was an American preservationist and matron at the Anadarko Agency, who worked to promote Kiowa artists. Born to white parents in Tennessee, she moved to Indian Territory with her family prior to Oklahoma statehood. While working as a matron for the Indian Agency, she discovered the talent of the young artists who would become known as the Kiowa Six and introduced them to Oscar Jacobson, director of the University of Oklahoma's art department. She was honored by the National Hall of Fame for Famous American Indians and both adopted by the tribe and given a Kiowa name in 1954. In 1963, the Anadarko Philomathic Club created an annual art award in her name. She was inducted into the Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame in its inaugural year, 1982.
Josephine Myers-Wapp was a Comanche weaver and educator. After completing her education at the Haskell Institute, she attended Santa Fe Indian School, studying weaving, dancing, and cultural arts. After her training, she taught arts and crafts at Chilocco Indian School before joining the faculty of the newly opened Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She taught weaving, design, and dance at the institute, and in 1968 was one of the coordinators for a dance exhibit at the Mexican Summer Olympic Games. In 1973, she retired from teaching to focus on her own work, exhibiting throughout the Americas and in Europe and the Middle East. She has work in the permanent collection of the IAIA and has been featured at the Smithsonian Institution. Between 2014 and 2016, she was featured in an exhibition of Native American women artists at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe.
Southern Plains Indian Museum is a Native American museum located in Anadarko, Oklahoma. It was opened in 1948 under a cooperative governing effort by the United States Department of the Interior and the Oklahoma state government. The museum features cultural and artistic works from Oklahoma tribal peoples of the Southern Plains region, including the Caddo, Chiricahua Apache, Comanche, Delaware Nation, Kiowa, Plains Apache, Southern Arapaho, Southern Cheyenne, and Wichita.
Alice Littleman was a Kiowa beadwork artist and regalia maker, who during her lifetime was recognized as one of the leading Kiowa beaders and buckskin dressmakers. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Southern Plains Indian Museum, and the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Riverside Indian School (RIS) is a Bureau of Indian Education-operated boarding school in unincorporated Caddo County, Oklahoma, with an Anadarko address, for grades 4-12.
Clara Williams Archilta, was a Kiowa-Apache-Tonkawa painter and beadworker from the San Ildefonso Pueblo tribe. A self-taught artist with no formal art training, Archilta is known for her watercolor painting and her pictorial beadwork.
Blockhouse on Signal Mountain is located along Mackenzie Hill Road within the West Range of the Fort Sill Military Reservation inceptively declared as Camp Wichita during May 1868 within the current administrative division of Comanche County, Oklahoma. The blockhouse was established in 1871 pursuant to the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867.