The World's Richest Indian: The Scandal over Jackson Barnett's Oil Fortune
Abstract
This is first biography of Jackson Barnett, the Native American who gained unexpected wealth from oil found on his property. The book explores how control of Barnett's fortune was violently contested by his guardian, the state of Oklahoma, the Baptist Church, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, among others. Barnett's case came to national prominence as an example of Bureau of Indian Affairs mismanagement of Indian property. Litigation over Barnett's wealth lasted two decades and stimulated Congress to make long-overdue reforms in its policies towards Indians. Highlighting the paradoxical role played by the federal government, Barnett's story comprises many of the major agents in 20th-century Native American history. As well as a biography, this book is also a study of early-20th-century Indian policy and administration.
... The most famous individual trust case was that of Jackson Barnett, "the world's richest Indian". Barnett's allotment was in the center of an oil field that produced 17% of all oil marketed in the U.S. One of the wells on Jackson's property became the first in the world to produce 1,000,000 barrels of oil per year and Barnett's income was over $47,000 per month (Thorne, 2003). Two hearings had testimony from Barnett, his wife, his attorney, the Secretary of the American Indian Defense Association, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and other representatives of the Indian Service, the Secretary of the Interior, the Attorney General, a legal representative from the Treasury Department, and a state senator (Survey of conditions. ...
The Bureau of the Census initiated the American Community Survey (ACS) in 2005. It will revolutionize the use of census data by providing annual updates to statistics that in the past were collected only every 10 years. Statistics will be published for areas of 65,000 people or more every year. The Bureau of the Census will distribute data for areas of between 20,000 and 64,999 in "3-year period averages." The first 3 year average will appear in 2008 covering 2005–2007. Subsequent data will be issued annually for the following three year periods. (e.g., 2006–2008, 2007–2009) Statistics for areas smaller than 19,999 will be published in 5-year period averages, the first to be published in 2010 covering 2005–2009. Subsequent data to be issued annually will cover 2006–2010, 2007–20011, … This paper provides background information about ACS, similarities and differences between it and the decennial census, the interpretation of statistics based upon period averages, relationships among ACS and other Bureau of the Census Surveys, and the expected future of the survey.
... 12 Notions of indigenous "dependency" and of Indians as "wards," enshrined in the famous Marshall Supreme Court cases of the 1830s, relied on economic dependency as an indicator ofpolitical subordination . Tanis Thorne has shown how the oil-based individual wealth of a Creek man, Jackson Barnett, became a matter of national interest in the 1840s (Thorne 2003), while Alexandra Harmon has outlined the double binds whereby Gilded Age policymakers expected Indians to abandon communal living for capitalism but subsequently criticized individual wealthy Indians as selfish and overly acquisitive (Harmon 2003). In the gaming context, Katherine Spilde has identified an emergent stereotype of the "rich Indian" among gaming critics. ...
"Indigeneity at the Crossroads of American Studies." Published as a special joint issue with American Studies, Volume 46, No. 3/4, Fall 2005.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, many California Indian tribes had moved back into the mainstream of the state's social, cultural, political, and economic life. Many gaps in the scholarship remain, leaving much to be done. But future studies of Native Americans in California promise to make contributions across the profession, while shedding further light on how the state became one of the most vibrant and important centers of Indian Country in modern America. In particular, New Indian historians emphasize cultural adaptation, or how Native peoples negotiated the social and cultural changes that came with contact and subsequent relations with Euro-Americans. Yet even prior to World War II, these forces of American Indian migration, urbanization, and activism in California were intricately linked.
Indian Resilience and Rebuilding provides an Indigenous view of the last one-hundred years of Native history and guides readers through a century of achievements. It examines the progress that Indians have accomplished in rebuilding their nations in the 20th century, revealing how Native communities adapted to the cultural and economic pressures in modern America. Donald Fixico examines issues like land allotment, the Indian New Deal, termination and relocation, Red Power and self-determination, casino gaming, and repatriation. He applies ethnohistorical analysis and political economic theory to provide a multi-layered approach that ultimately shows how Native people reinvented themselves in order to rebuild their nations. Fixico identifies the tools to this empowerment such as education, navigation within cultural systems, modern Indian leadership, and indigenized political economy. He explains how these tools helped Indian communities to rebuild their nations. Fixico constructs an Indigenous paradigm of Native ethos and reality that drives Indian modern political economies heading into the twenty-first century. This illuminating and comprehensive analysis of Native nation’s resilience in the twentieth century demonstrates how Native Americans reinvented themselves, rebuilt their nations, and ultimately became major forces in the United States. Indian Resilience and Rebuilding, redefines how modern American history can and should be told.
The Color of the Landbrings the histories of Creek Indians, African Americans, and whites in Oklahoma together into one story that explores the way races and nations were made and remade in conflicts over who would own land, who would farm it, and who would rule it. This story disrupts expected narratives of the American past, revealing how identities-race, nation, and class-took new forms in struggles over the creation of different systems of property. Conflicts were unleashed by a series of sweeping changes: the forced "removal" of the Creeks from their homeland to Oklahoma in the 1830s, the transformation of the Creeks' enslaved black population into landed black Creek citizens after the Civil War, the imposition of statehood and private landownership at the turn of the twentieth century, and the entrenchment of a sharecropping economy and white supremacy in the following decades. In struggles over land, wealth, and power, Oklahomans actively defined and redefined what it meant to be Native American, African American, or white. By telling this story, David Chang contributes to the history of racial construction and nationalism as well as to southern, western, and Native American history. © 2010 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
How have discourses of sexuality shaped depictions of native identity, and how have ideas about kinship been central to these ongoing struggles over the character and contours of native peoplehood? This book is the first study of its kind in its exploration of the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of sexual order and shifting forms of Native American political representation. Offering a cultural and literary history that stretches from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, it demonstrates how U.S. imperialism against native peoples over the past two centuries can be understood as an effort to make them "straight"-to insert indigenous peoples into Anglo-American conceptions of family, home, desire, and personal identity. It shows how attempts by non-natives to cast native cultures as a perverse problem to be fixed or a liberating model to be emulated both rely on the erasure of indigenous political autonomy; reciprocally, it illustrates how native writers in several periods, in response, have insisted on the coherence and persistence of native polities by examining the ways traditions of kinship and residency give shape to particular modes of governance and land tenure.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government sought to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into American society through systematized land allotment. In Sustaining the Cherokee Family, Rose Stremlau illuminates the impact of this policy on the Cherokee Nation, particularly within individual families and communities in modern-day northeastern Oklahoma. Emphasizing Cherokee agency, Stremlau reveals that Cherokee families' organization, cultural values, and social and economic practices allowed them to adapt to private land ownership by incorporating elements of the new system into existing domestic and community-based economies. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources, including Cherokee and United States censuses, federal and tribal records, local newspapers, maps, county probate records, family histories, and contemporary oral histories, Stremlau demonstrates that Cherokee management of land perpetuated the values and behaviors associated with their sense of kinship, therefore uniting extended families. And, although the loss of access to land and communal resources slowly impoverished the region, it reinforced the Cherokees' interdependence. Stremlau argues that the persistence of extended family bonds allowed indigenous communities to retain a collective focus and resist aspects of federal assimilation policy during a period of great social upheaval. © 2011 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
The conundrum of Progressive Era reform flowering simultaneously with the institutionalization of Jim Crow, the establishment of the Asiatic Barred Zone, and the introduction of European immigration restriction fascinates historians, even as it agitates them. From a contemporary, post-civil-rights-era perspective there is something deeply disturbing—and disappointing—about progressivism and racial and ethnic bigotry apparently going hand in hand. Was progressivism inherently racist and ethnically chauvinistic, or are we dealing simply with a case of practically minded politicians bowing to bigotry to achieve political results? An investigation of the ethnic and racial side of Robert M. La Follette Sr. hardly promises to answer this question fully. The progressive movement remains well-nigh impossible to pin down in exact analytical terms. Still, it may be argued that La Follette was an unusually uncompromising politician who proved willing, at least during the latter part of his career, to sacrifice practical results for idealistic principles. If La Follette's progressivism was of a purer strain than that of many a result-oriented pragmatic politician, was it less bigoted?
Opposing narratives of Alexander Posey's death quickly set the ambivalent tone of his legacy. In short, his drowning in his beloved Oktahutche ("Sand Creek"), or North Canadian, river at the age of thirty-five has been seen either as a type of return to a part of the natural world with which he had a close affinity or as a just punishment for his work for the Dawes Commission and his speculation in the sale of Indian land allotments.1 Posey's friends, family, and supporters "romanticized [Posey] as a literary artist snatched from life before he had achieved the greatness he was destined for" (Littlefield, Alex Posey 5). Others believed—and some continue to believe—it was no accident that he drowned in the Oktahutche, the home of Tie-Snake, a member of the Creek underworld associated with chaos and known to lure people to drowning (see Womack, Red on Red, 133). Both interpretations of Posey's life and death have some basis in truth. However, like most absolute and oppositional views, each fails to fully capture the complexity of Posey and his ever-evolving vision for his people's future. Although Posey considered himself a progressive, due to his belief that the Creeks' best means of survival was appropriating aspects of Euroamerican culture for their own ends, his Fus Fixico letters (fictionalized letters to the editor written in Creek-English dialect, published in epistolary installments between 1902 and 1908 in Indian Territory newspapers) illustrate that he was, in fact, highly critical of U.S. Indian policy and sympathetic to the arguments of conservative Creeks who advocated resistance to allotment and maintenance of traditional Creek social and political systems.
The complexity and evolution of Posey's political thought can be discerned through a historicized consideration of an aspect of the Fus Fixico letters that has not yet received sustained scholarly attention: the letters' brief but significant references to the plans of some members of the conservative Creek faction, the Snakes (and other conservative groups in Indian Territory, such as the Cherokee Kee-too-wahs), to emigrate to Mexico, where they hoped to secure lands and live free of the U.S. government's paternalistic policies.2 These groups aimed to escape the forced transition from communal to private land ownership and the dissolution of their tribal governments (as mandated by the 1898 Curtis Act and carried out by the Dawes Commission), as well as the incorporation of Indian Territory (along with Oklahoma Territory) into the state of Oklahoma.3 Initially, Posey dismissed the plan as far-fetched and unrealistic, but he finally endorsed emigration based on his contention that staunch Creek traditionalists could not survive in what was to become Oklahoma. His evolving views of emigration to Mexico correspond to his growing understanding of the increasing difficulty of life in the Creek Nation for conservative Creeks who opposed the changes sweeping Indian Territory at the turn of the twentieth century. Further, his ultimate endorsement of emigration for staunch traditionalists exemplifies his contention that only certain Creeks—namely those who embraced allotment and participation in U.S. social and political systems—could survive within the United States.
In this article I first introduce my critical approach to Posey's life and work in conjunction with an overview of the Fus Fixico letters, as situated in their historical and cultural context. I position my argument in relation to the ideological framework outlined by Creek/Cherokee writer and theorist, Craig Womack (one of the most significant Posey scholars), and throughout the article I draw upon the groundbreaking historical and archival research of Daniel Littlefield. Following an introduction to the letters and an outline of my central arguments, I analyze Posey's conception of transformation, as it manifests in the Fus Fixico letters, as an alternative to both traditionalist resistance and the assimilationist view that full participation in U.S. society requires the wholesale abandonment of American Indian cultural norms. I follow this discussion with an exploration of the letters' references to emigration plans vis-à-vis Posey's vision for transformation. Finally, by way of conclusion, I offer some thoughts about the implications of Creek...
Land had always been the issue central to North American politics and economics. Throughout this century both the US and Canadian national governments have proceeded with the most insidious and mercenary neocolonial policies imaginable. The energy-rich western reservations of the various Indian tribes are now faced with a political and economic turning point which is at least as vast in its implications as those of the reorganisation of the 1930s or even the 19th century transition to reservation status. The colonialism is radioactive: what it does can never be undone. -J.Sheail