American Indian Landowners, Leasemen, and Bureaucrats: Property, Paper, and the Poli-Technics of Dispossession in Southwestern Oklahoma

Abstract

Abstract:Drawing from a combination of archival and ethnographic evidence, this article examines historic and contemporary land tenure issues within a single county in southwestern Oklahoma. Specifically, we look at the way in which bureaucratic control has created a system that, while originally and ostensible intended to protect the “rights” of American Indian landowners, in fact functions to restrict, undermine, and redirect “access” to those lands, often to the economic benefit of non-Indian farmers and ranchers. We consider how the leasing system administered by the Anadarko Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs generates a “bundle of powers” that creates profound barriers to American Indian access to their own property. At work in the BIA’s bundle of powers over access to this land are a host of actors and institutions, both contemporary and historic, that have worked together to shape the social relations that give rise to the current alienation from and dispossession of Oklahoma’s Native-owned lands from their intended beneficiaries. Indeed, this tenuous situation is reflective of complexities attending continual retrenchments and revisions of federal Indian land policy—periodic reassertions of bureaucratic authority and control that reposition actors in perennially shifting sociolegal relationalities. We seek if not to disentangle these relationships, then to at least render them visible and thus open to debate and intervention.