Sequoyah and the Stakes of Statehood

Statehood fueled Indigenous dispossession throughout the nineteenth century, so why did Native leaders of Indian Territory organize the large-scale Sequoyah statehood campaign in 1905? The efforts of Five Tribes leaders to pursue statehood indicated their awareness of just how power ful the scale of the state was for securing rights, but in the end, the campaign’s failure also revealed the empty promises of such a pursuit.¹ Instead of forming the State of Sequoyah, the United States violated its own protocols for dissolving Indigenous lands when forcibly admitting Indian Territory as the eastern half of the state of Oklahoma in 1907