From Native Sovereignties to Petro Citizens: Oil, Conservation, and Allotment in Indian Territory

• In Event: Unearthing Environmental Justice: Energy Development and Indigenous Communities

Abstract

This paper focuses on the origins of the petroleum-management state in the United States, arguing that settler governments operating at the local, state, and national level built the US petro-state at the confluence of oil extraction and the allotment of Muscogee Creek land amid the petroleum booms of the World War I era. Historians of both settler colonialism and energy and the environment have shown how both the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the administration of modern energy resources have been important functions of modern states. But the ways in which the origins of petroleum dependency in the United States were wrapped up in Indigenous land have been largely neglected. Ultimately, the creation of a state apparatus geared towards managing oil and the unpredictable geologic environments that bore crude was first rooted in how settlers and their governments administered oil-rich Native allotments in Indian Territory/Oklahoma. Settlers and their governments, Muscogee Creek allotees, and Creek Nation attorneys battled over how oil abundance would fit into the allotment of Creek land and the legal transition that Native allotees undertook from tribal subjects to US citizens. The legal and political contests over oil that ensued served to reinforce the dissolution of tribal land bases and governments. United States courts handled a great flurry of Indian Territory and Oklahoma oil-land cases during the 1910s and 1920s, wherein judges seized the opportunity to reiterate that Native peoples who owned allotments were now United States citizens vested with liberal individual property rights that trumped continued claims of tribal sovereignty. In this sense, for many Muscogee individuals, American citizenship was, at its origin, hydrocarbon citizenship.

Author

• MARK BOXELL, University of Nebraska at Omaha