Issue link: http://maconmagazine.uberflip.com/i/1512887
62 maconmagazine.com | DECEMBER 2023/JANUARY 2024 Josh Rogers, CEO of NewTown Macon, had different reasoning. "I had a cursory understanding (at best) of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. I really wanted to understand the Nation's history in hopes we could build a new relationship between Macon and the Nation." Why Tulsa/Okmulgee? For some, looking for comparisons between Macon and Tulsa (Tallasi) might be a stretch. With a population of roughly 412,000, Tulsa is almost three times the population of Macon- Bibb County. That said, for the 2023 Intercity Tour, Tulsa and Okmulgee were a natural fit because of the upcoming decision to create Georgia's first national park on the ancestral homelands of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Muskogee, Oklahoma, population 37,000, lies 49 miles southeast of Tulsa and is the capital of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the same nation that was forcibly driven off their lands in Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama to so-called "Indian Territory," now Oklahoma. Also removed were the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations. If you look around, remnants of Native American nations are everywhere in the Southeast — Muscogee County, Ocmulgee, Ogeechee, Oconee, and Chattahoochee Rivers, to name a few. The names Tallahassee (Tullahassee), Florida's capital, and Tulsa (Tulsey or Tulsee) are derived from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation's native language Mvskoke, also called the Creek language. The land on the Ocmulgee River, which is now Macon, was the capital of the Nation and its 60-plus cities before they were forced to leave because of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, creating what's commonly called "The Trail of Tears," which people of the Nation refer to as, "The Trail of Misery." Rogers said of The Trail of Tears, "that, together with the horror of Greenwood, were almost too much to bear." We will get to Greenwood in a moment. A troubled past Several dynamics still swirl around Tulsa today that started long before Oklahoma became a state. When the five nations were moved to "Indian Territory," gone were the lush lands of their ancestors, the flowing waters of streams and rivers, deer, and other animals to hunt and fish. They arrived with what little they could carry. In the early 1800s, explorer Brig. Gen. Zebulon Pike wrote that the Great Plains, including "Indian Territory," were a "Great American Desert." In 1819 Stephen Long, an Army civil engineer and explorer, asserted that the Great Plains were unfit for agriculture, although several Native American peoples had been farming there since the last Ice Age. The "Indian Territory" was subjected to several Indian Appropriation Acts. The first, in 1830, commonly called the "Indian Removal Act," gave President Andrew Jackson the power to allocate land west of the Mississippi to Native American nations who agreed to give up their homelands. In the Indian Appropriation Act of 1871, the government reneged and no longer recognized any group of Native Americans as an independent nation. Native Americans were deemed "wards" of the federal government. The 1889 Indian Appropriation Act opened "Indian Territory" to settlers, but the barn door had PAGES ABOVE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT At Ocmulgee Mounds National Park in Macon, Georgia; ancestral homelands of the Muscogee (Creek) people. Photo by Mac Stone/Open Space Institute. | On Great Plains lands held by MCN in Okmulgee, Oklahoma; photo by an Intercity Tour member. | Archival photo of Williams Dreamland Theatre in the Greenwood District, sacked in the Tulsa Race Massacre. Photo courtesy of The Tulsa Historical Society and Museum. | Archival photo of The Roxy Theatre, now defunct and listed on Historic Macon Foundation's Fading Five. The theater building once thrived in a historically Black neighborhood called Tybee at the edge of Downtown Macon. In the 1960s, the city of Macon demolished most of Tybee in the name of urban renewal, though the theater building still stands. When Tybee residents rebuilt the neighborhood nearby, they named it Greenwood Bottom in honor of the Greenwood District in Tulsa. Photo courtesy of The Washington Memorial Library.