For many Oklahomans, Lake Thunderbird is familiar landscape. A manmade body of water in the center of the state, this reservoir and the surrounding forests have drawn naturalists, boater, bicyclists, campers, fishermen, and...
A traveling salesman in 1923 conned the Osage community and the federal government into giving him thousands of dollars to start an American Indian Steamship Company - he almost got away with it., Truden, John. "The American...
Neal Evans and Ben Clark built their lives on the rugged landscape of western Oklahoma—Evans as a storekeeper and Clark as a guide. John Truden uses the lives of the Evans and Clark families to demonstrate evolving systems of...
The Native American Culture Group: Indigenous Community Organizing and Activism at a Federal Prison in 1970s Oklahoma, presented by John Truden, is part of “Perspectives in History,” the 2022 Oklahoma History Symposium. ...
In 1875 Colonel Ranald Mackenzie -- a White US Army officer stationed in southwestern Indian Territory--conducted an experiment on Comanches and Kiowas living at Fort Sill. Relatively little is known about the experiment's...
The relationships between Indigenous peoples, cowboys, missionaries, and the US Army can be seen through the lens of an 1884 shooting that was recorded in a German-language newspaper. John Truden annotates this newspaper story,...
On July 12, 1975, two performing Asian elephants reacted t a loud noise at the Carson and Barnes Circus's off-season camp near Hugo, Oklahoma, and fled into the surrounding dense forest. Several circuses first established...
On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, Richard (“Dick”) Wilson is a controversial figure. During his first year as tribal chairman, the highest elected position for the Oglala Sioux Tribe, his...
Settler colonialism is a system by which a group overwhelms an existing population and imposes its culture upon the original population. The ownership of land is a key aspect of settler colonialism, as opposed to colonialism,...
Between 1877 and 1885, a Southern Cheyenne chief named Stone Calf gathered a coalition of Southern Cheyenne women and men, cultural intermediaries, ranchers, missionaries, and U.S. soldiers together in northwestern Indian...
