For Muscogee citizens, who make up the country’s fourth-largest Native American tribe, it was alsosomething deeply personal, a thoroughly American moment that rippled across time, connecting ancestors forced to leave their
“The impact is not only going forward,” Ms. Harjo said. “It’s going backward, all the way through the trail to Georgia and Alabama, where it resounds. It goes out in all directions.”
It brought feelings of relief, joy and vindication, mixed with older pains.
“It made me cry,” said Jason Salsman, the tribe’s press secretary. “It was a powerful moment, one I wasn’t ready for. It brought out emotions you didn’t know would be there. It was just a promise kept. We know the history of promises that have been broken. I still get chills thinking about it.”
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, which has 86,100 enrolled members, stretches across three million acres of rolling hills, grasslands, small towns and cities across 11 counties in eastern Oklahoma. Sprinkled across that land are more than a dozen ceremonial grounds where citizens meet to tend sacred fires and participate in stomp-dance ceremonies.
“We experienced genocide, assimilation, colonization, conversion policy by the government,” said Amos McNac, 77, a justice on the Nation’s Supreme Court and heles-hayv, a medicine man. “We’ve survived. We still have our culture and our tradition.”