Mapping Tribal Nations: Muriel Hazel Wright's Intervention in the Termination-Era American History Textbook

How did American historians teach the history of Indigenous dispossession as Cold War-era federal Indian policy advocated for liquidating reservations? “Mapping Tribal Nations” examines cartographic representations of American Indians across twenty-five American history textbooks published between 1945 and 1960. During this period, the federal policy of termination aimed to dissolve treaties and sell tribal assets, including land. This study is significant because it demystifies (1) how historians visualized U.S. national power by erasing tribal nations from maps in U.S. history textbooks, and (2) how historian Muriel Hazel Wright (Choctaw) designed maps to reinforce tribal national power in her Oklahoma history textbook. From extensive research at Harvard’s Historical Textbooks Collection, I found that termination-era U.S. history textbooks narrated the nineteenth-century growth of the American nation by mapping settlers’ movement across land, marking U.S. states but omitting tribal land claims. I argue that Muriel Wright intervened in the dominant textbook representation of American Indians: her textbook’s maps depicted the Five Tribes’ residence on land throughout the nineteenth century as key to their own projects of nation building. My poster reveals Wright’s intervention by juxtaposing her textbook’s maps with maps from termination-era editions of two widely adopted U.S. history textbooks: David Saville Muzzey’s A History of Our Country (1955) and Thomas Bailey’s The American Pageant (1956). I display select captions and quizzes from the texts that prompted student engagement with each map.

Grounded in my research at the Oklahoma Historical Society, my poster centers maps from a workbook housed in the Muriel Wright Collection. Wright designed the workbook to accompany her 1951 edition of The Story of Oklahoma – a textbook that thousands of middle school students studied across the state in the decades after its 1929 publication. The workbook periodically directed students to “Name as nations and color the country of each of the Five Civilized Tribes.” On completing their workbook, students would hold a visual record of tribal nations’ land claims throughout the century prior to Oklahoma statehood (1907). While some U.S. history textbooks illustrated tribes on pre-Revolutionary War maps, their maps elided the nineteenth-century history of the United States’ expropriation of tribal nations’ land. These maps framed Indigenous peoples’ absence as a prerequisite to expanding U.S. national power. Wright instead emphasized the Five Tribes’ presence, mapping their land claims before and after 1830s removal to Indian territory. By asking students to “name as nations” the Five Tribes, her maps prompt recognition that the tribes’ national formations predated removal: from Indian territory, they continued to build their nations under the pressures of ongoing settlement.

Wright, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, argued against terminating Choctaw land claims in the 1950s. As nascent termination policy aimed to dismantle nations’ land bases and U.S. history textbooks erased dispossession, she crafted maps to teach Oklahoman students to understand tribal nationhood as linked to a long history of land claims. This study of Wright’s textbook contributes to historians’ ongoing effort to understand the contours of American Indian resistance to dominant cultural narratives under termination.