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 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.
Rainmaking is a weather modification ritual that attempts to invoke rain.
Crow religion is the indigenous religion of the Crow people, Native Americans of the Great Plains area of the United States.
The Ghost Dance is a ceremony incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems. According to the teachings of the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka, proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits to fight on their behalf, end American Westward expansion, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples throughout the region.
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 an 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 Caddo people comprise the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, a federally recognized tribe headquartered in Binger, Oklahoma. They speak the Caddo language.
The Osage Nation is a Midwestern American tribe of the Great Plains. The tribe developed in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys around 700 B.C. along with other groups of its language family. They migrated west after the 17th century, settling near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as a result of Iroquois expansion into the Ohio Country in the aftermath of the Beaver Wars.
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 Quapaw or Arkansas, officially the Quapaw Nation, is a U.S. federally recognized tribe comprising about 5,600 citizens. Also known as the Ogáxpa or “Downstream” people, their ancestral homelands are traced from what is now the Ohio River, west to the Mississippi River to present-day St. Louis, south across present-day Arkansas and eastern and southern Oklahoma. The government forcibly removed them from Arkansas Territory in 1834. The tribal capital is Quapaw, Oklahoma.
The stomp dance is performed by various Eastern Woodland tribes and Native American communities in the United States, including the Muscogee, Yuchi, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Delaware, Miami, Caddo, Tuscarora, Ottawa, Quapaw, Peoria, Shawnee, Seminole, Natchez, and Seneca-Cayuga tribes. Stomp dance communities are active in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida.
Native American religions are the spiritual practices of the Native Americans in the United States. Ceremonial ways can vary widely and are based on the differing histories and beliefs of individual nations, tribes and bands. Early European explorers describe individual Native American tribes and even small bands as each having their own religious practices. Theology may be monotheistic, polytheistic, henotheistic, animistic, shamanistic, pantheistic or any combination thereof, among others. Traditional beliefs are usually passed down in the forms of oral histories, stories, allegories, and principles.
The Native American Church (NAC), also known as Peyotism and Peyote Religion, is a syncretic Native American religion that teaches a combination of traditional Native American beliefs and elements of Christianity, especially pertaining to the Ten Commandments, with sacramental use of the entheogen peyote. The religion originated in the Oklahoma Territory (1890–1907) in the late nineteenth century, after peyote was introduced to the southern Great Plains from Mexico. Today it is the most widespread indigenous religion among Native Americans in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with an estimated 250,000 adherents as of the late twentieth century.
The peyote is a small, spineless cactus which contains psychoactive alkaloids, particularly mescaline. Peyote is a Spanish word derived from the Nahuatl peyōtl, meaning "caterpillar cocoon", from a root peyōni, "to glisten". Peyote is native to Mexico and southwestern Texas. It is found primarily in the Sierra Madre Occidental, the Chihuahuan Desert and in the states of Nayarit, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and San Luis Potosí among scrub. It flowers from March to May, and sometimes as late as September. The flowers are pink, with thigmotactic anthers.
"John Wilson the Revealer of Peyote" (c.1845–1901) was a Caddo medicine man who introduced the Peyote plant into a religion, became a major leader in the Ghost Dance, and introduced a new peyote ceremony with teachings of Christ. John Wilson's Caddo name was Nishkû'ntu, meaning "Moon Head."
Daniel C. Swan is an American cultural anthropologist and museum curator whose work has focused on documenting and interpreting the cultural history of the Americas. He has specialized particularly on the histories, social organizations, and cultures of Native North American peoples in Oklahoma, USA. His research on the history, significance, and artistic forms of the Native American Church has led to research and exhibition collaborations with artists and elders in a diversity of American Indian communities, both in Oklahoma and elsewhere in the Western United States. In addition to his work on American Indian topics, he has organized exhibitions and museum catalogs about cultural diversity in the American West and in the Western Hemisphere more broadly.
Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Area is a statistical entity identified and delineated by federally recognized American Indian tribes in Oklahoma as part of the U.S. Census Bureau's 2010 Census and ongoing American Community Survey. Many of these areas are also designated Tribal Jurisdictional Areas, areas within which tribes will provide government services and assert other forms of government authority. They differ from standard reservations, such as the Osage Nation of Oklahoma, in that allotment was broken up and as a consequence their residents are a mix of native and non-native people, with only tribal members subject to the tribal government. At least five of these areas, those of the so-called five civilized tribes of Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole, which cover 43% of the area of the state, are recognized as reservations by federal treaty, and thus not subject to state law or jurisdiction for tribal members.
On the eve of the American Civil War in 1861, a significant number of Indigenous peoples of the Americas had been relocated from the Southeastern United States to Indian Territory, west of the Mississippi. The inhabitants of the eastern part of the Indian Territory, the Five Civilized Tribes, were suzerain nations with established tribal governments, well established cultures, and legal systems that allowed for slavery. Before European Contact these tribes were generally matriarchial societies, with agriculture being the primary economic pursuit. The bulk of the tribes lived in towns with planned streets, residential and public areas. The people were ruled by complex hereditary chiefdoms of varying size and complexity with high levels of military organization.
Tall Chief was a hereditary chief of the Quapaw Tribe and a peyote roadman. He served in this position after his father, Lame Chief, died in 1874, until his own death in 1918 at around 78 years old.
Victor Griffin was the elected chief of Quapaw Tribe of Indians and a peyote roadman from Quapaw, Oklahoma. Griffin was commonly called either Victor or Vic, and rarely used his first name, William. He conferred with every U.S. president during his term as chief.
