Indianz.Com > News > Gaylord News: Tribes reclaim ancestral and sacred lands
‘We are still here’: Tribes reclaiming out-of-state ancestral homelands
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
Gaylord News
Muscogee (Creek) Nation citizen Galen Cloud complained about traffic during the 10-hour drive from Okmulgee, Oklahoma, to his tribe’s homeland near Oxford, Alabama – before recalling how his ancestors had to walk that distance against their wills.
“You think about it and you’re filled with madness, and then you just feel the pain and then you just hate to imagine what all they went through, just to get here,” Cloud said.
He was headed to Oxford, where city and tribal officials have worked to protect nearby lands of the Arbeka people, whose ceremonial town was located there pre-removal, according to RaeLynn A. Butler, Muscogee Nation’s Historic and Cultural Preservation Department manager.
The Arbeka site is just one of the projects – from Alabama to Michigan to Kansas – where tribes are increasingly buying back or being gifted back property in their ancestral homelands, either to build economic sustainability or to manage cultural preservation sites.
Cloud, a Muscogee National Council representative, said that if someone went looking for Muscogee people on the tribe’s ancestral homelands in Alabama or Georgia today, they wouldn’t find many “because we all are here in Oklahoma now.” The tribe and several of its ceremonial tribal towns were forced to move to Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma in 1907.
“It’s really important that we go back and let people know that we are still thriving. We are still here,” Cloud said. “There are still people who think that we still live in houses without running water.”
Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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