| dc.description.abstract | In 2020, the Oklahoma City Convention and Visitors Bureau launched the “Modern Frontier” campaign to attract tourists, residents, and businesses to Oklahoma City. Surveying the history of what became the state of Oklahoma helps to contextualize this “Modern Frontier” campaign. Three commemorative moments occurred in the aftermath of these segregation laws, the Dust Bowl, and the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act. In 1939, 1948, and 1957, respectively, white boosters (mis)used historical events and constructed historical narratives that celebrated white settlement at the expense of Indigenous peoples and African Americans. I argue that white Oklahomans used a hegemonic settler memory of nostalgia and progress to make Native people (at times) strategically visible and make Black people absent from Oklahoma history. However, the attempt to assert this hegemonic settler memory was met with Native and African American resistance. Ultimately, these three moments suggest that Oklahoma identity and community were under intellectual construction during the mid-century. The degree of a community’s inclusion in the popular memory of place correlated to a group’s relative access to power. Commemorations of the past became moments that shaped the memory landscape of Oklahoma, mobilizing usable histories for the purposes of celebration and tourism. But something else happened that the white boosters did not intend: these commemorations provided the context in which Black and Native Oklahomans negotiated their belonging as historical actors in the popular memory of Indian Territory and Oklahoma. | en_US |
