Learning First American history, from First Americans, at new Oklahoma City cultural center
The First Americans Museum, 30 years in the making, features an all-Native curatorial staff, a 90-foot mound and a rectifying walk through history.
Before the arrival of Europeans to what is now called North America, there were as many as 18 million people living here.
By 1800, that number was closer to 1 million.
By 1907, when Oklahoma became a state, just 300,000 Indigenous people remained.
This is one of many stark realities that are too easy for settler Americans like me to forget as we fumble for the right words to describe the people who were here before us.
This is why visiting the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City is an experience that all Americans should have.
And it starts with the name.
Called the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum during its 30-year development, the museum opened in 2021 with a new name: the First Americans Museum, a powerful statement about its sweeping, honorable mission: to present the history of the people who were here first, with the reverence we give anything deemed “first.”
Growing up an hour from the Oklahoma-Missouri border, I was generally aware of Oklahoma’s Indigenous history, but I never put the pieces together about why my little hometown had a brown Trail of Tears marker on the highway outside of town or where that trail was headed.
A primer about why Oklahoma is home to so many Indigenous people: As part of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the territory of Oklahoma had been designated as a place where 125,000 Indigenous people would be resettled. (Of course, Euro-American settlers came anyway. This is why the Oklahoma University’s mascot is the “Sooner,” the speculators who led the rush to take that land as their own.)
To move these tribes, the government forced Muscogee, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole people along what is now known as the Trail of Tears between 1830 and 1850.
The northern route, where a third of the Cherokee travelers who were forced on this journey died along the way, went through Nashville and then down through the corner of Missouri where I lived as a child.
That’s why today, there are 39 tribal nations located in Oklahoma, even though many of these tribes have only been in Oklahoma for less than 200 years.
When all 39 of those tribal nations were planning to build the one of the largest Native history museums in the country on the banks of the North Canadian River, they decided to orient the building to include a mound inspired by the historic mounds found throughout the eastern half of the U.S.
Thanks to some impressive engineering work, the mound itself is incorporated into the museum, creating an almost complete circle with a large circular center in between the 90-foot grassy mound and the 175,000-square-foot museum complex, whose design intentionally did not include any right angles.
The entire museum acts as a cosmological calendar, tracking the sun throughout the year, so on the summer solstice, the sun crosses over the northern apex of the mound, and during the winter solstice, the sunset is visible through a tunnel in the mound.
Visiting the museum with my kids last month was a powerful experience from the minute we walked the Remembrance Walls that lead into the museum.
As we entered the building, I read the plaque out loud to the boys: “[These walls] represent the Indigenous people who have called this land home and recall the First Americans removed from their tribal homelands. We honor those who lost their lives along the perilous trail and celebrate those who survived.”
The bottom floor of the museum is filled with rooms that tell an empowered (and brutally honest) chronological story of the First Americans, starting with an immersive storytelling room, where visitors watch and hear illustrated versions of several traditional origin stories.
Every step of the way, my understanding about Native history was growing in complexity.
I paid particularly close attention to information about the Removal of Western tribes, including the Kiowa, Comanche and Apache tribes of what is now Texas, that took place in 1897.
Also in 1897, oil was discovered in the Osage Nation, whose residents, originally from the Ohio River Valley, had resisted Removal and were given the "least desired" land in northern Oklahoma that soon made them, for a time, among the wealthiest Americans.
I was fascinated to learn about the mound-building cultures all along the Mississippi River that thrived before European contact. They constructed giant earthen monuments from what is now West Virginia through Ohio, Louisiana and Illinois, a thousand years before the Egyptians.
The largest settlement, the city of Cahokia, outside present-day St. Louis, is estimated to have had between 40,000 and 75,000 inhabitants during the 12th century.
No Mississippian cultures survived the eighteenth century, but their mounds remain, a monument to just how complex and widespread these First American societies were before colonization.
The museum’s all-Native curatorial staff filmed interviews with Indigenous historians and elders to create a mix of educational material, from the facts and figures about life as a First American to stories from these First Americans themselves.
In one video, we heard from a woman whose grandmother had escaped not one but two of the bloody battles fought during the 19th century. In another, an elder tells the story of a song his mother used to sing to him and his effort to find out that the tune was an old bugle call that would have been used during Removal.
The first half of the bottom floor is about the history from pre-contact to today, and the second half is where visitors get to see a celebration of modern lives of First Americans. We learned about the importance and diversity of pow pows, fashion, music and traditional games.
It was humbling to learn that, despite this legacy of violence and displacement, one in nine First Americans serves in the armed forces, compared to 1 in 100 non-Indigenous Americans who choose to enlist.
It was interesting to learn that gambling, legal on tribal land since 1988, has long been part of many Native societies as a historical form of wealth distribution, which allowed chance to determine how excess resources were spread throughout the community.
The museum’s second floor is where visitors find exhibits built around physical artifacts and cultural objects, 135 of which are on long-term loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
The care and consideration given to these objects, including clothing, tools and toys, is profound.
The museum explores why these objects left Oklahoma in the first place, explaining the ways that collectors convinced First Americans to give up prized possessions as part of the assimilation effort to remove all aspects of Indigenous life.
Some objects, such as a football used in a ceremonial Shawnee game, are intentionally not on display, at the request of the tribal nation.
We spent more than two hours at the museum, and it felt like we had barely scratched the surface of all there was to learn there.
We didn’t get a chance to tour the National Native American Hall of Fame, which relocated from Montana after the museum opened, but that will be on our visit.
All the way home to Austin, I thought about those 100,000 First Americans who remained in 1907 and have, remarkably, grown to 2.7 million today, despite all the efforts to decimate every aspect of their lives.
That’s a remarkable story that is already being told. We just need to listen.
Thank you, readers, for your support! I hope you’ll make plans to visit the First Americans Museum soon. It’s a worthy destination on its own, but it’s also an easy stop if you’re traveling from Texas to anywhere in the Midwest.
I’ll be back next week with another story from The Invisible Thread.
Take good care,
Addie