The Oklahoma Investigation in Detail
The report Zitkála-Šá co-authored on conditions in Oklahoma — Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery — is a document that is significant both as a piece of investigative journalism and as an example of the specific kind of harm that the federal system was inflicting on Native people in the early twentieth century.
The “Five Civilized Tribes” of Oklahoma — the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muskogee (Creek), and Seminole — had been assigned individual allotments of land in the process of Oklahoma’s incorporation as a state. When oil was discovered on those lands in the early twentieth century, the allotted lands of Native individuals became extremely valuable. The legal mechanisms for managing these resources were administered by a system of guardians appointed by Oklahoma courts — guardians who were, in many cases, more interested in enriching themselves than in protecting the interests of the Native individuals they nominally represented.
The report documented specific cases of exploitation: Native individuals who had been declared legally incompetent and placed under guardianship, whose guardian then sold or otherwise disposed of their oil-rich lands at below-market prices; Native children who had been declared incompetent and whose estates were being systematically drained by guardians; cases in which forged documents, bribery of court officials, and outright fraud had transferred Native property to non-Native ownership.
The scale of the exploitation was enormous. The Oklahoma system was described at the time as one of the worst examples of systematic theft of Native resources in the country. The report put specific numbers, specific names, and specific cases on record in a way that made it harder for authorities to ignore.
Zitkála-Šá’s contribution to the report — her investigation, her writing, her ability to present the evidence in language that was accessible to a general audience — was central to its impact. The report was submitted to Congress and contributed to hearings and investigations that eventually produced some reform of the Oklahoma guardianship system.
It did not produce full justice. The resources that had been stolen were not returned. But the investigation and the report were a real intervention in a real ongoing harm, and they represent one of the most consequential specific achievements of Zitkála-Šá’s political career.