Sequoyah
The United States Government’s and people’s relations with the continent’s indigenous people have been a long and complicated part of America’s history. The occupation of lands which were formerly used by numerous tribes is but one part, the relocation and/or assimilation of those occupants has been another. One approach was the creation of so-called reservations where the Native Americans would retain sovereignty and some of their customs and traditions.
The State of Sequoyah was a similar idea, albeit it was one proposed by Native Americans themselves, in which they would create a state which would be conceived and governed with the needs and desires of the tribes occupying it in mind. In 1898 the federal Curtis Act was passed which mandated the end of tribal governments and communal lands in the Eastern Oklahoma region known as the Indian Territory, to take effect in 1905.
In response, the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole) which occupied the Territory proposed the State of Sequoyah, to have a Native written constitution and Native government, with all of the rights and privileges of a state. The tribes met in Constitutional Convention in 1905 and created a government with individual counties for each member tribe. This proposal passed in a referendum overwhelmingly and was sent to Congress.
The heavily Republican Congress introduced the legislation which met heavy opposition as the political leanings of most of the tribes was Democratic. The legislation was defeated in Congress. The defeat led the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, to prepare and present a compromise in which the five Native counties and the Indian Territories as a whole would be incorporated with the rest of the Oklahoma Territory into a new state, to be known as Oklahoma. Congress passed the Oklahoma Enabling Act, which led to Oklahoma becoming the 46th State of the Union.
The Sequoyah Constitutional Convention was used as the basis for the state constitution for Oklahoma, which need to be completed quickly and passed by the people of the territory quickly to comply with the proposal put forth by Roosevelt. Both the Sequoyah Convention and the Oklahoma Constitution contain numerous safeguards for the rights of the people against the infringement of elected government which exceed those of many preceding states.