The Stand Watie Monument, the Lost Cause, and Oklahoma Cherokee Memory of the Civil War

In 1921, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in honor of Stand Watie and the Cherokee soldiers he led, inscribed: “Only full blood indian[sic] Brig. Gen. in the Confederate army. This brave Cherokee with his heroic regiment rendered inestimable services to the Confederate cause of Ind. Terr. Born in Ga. Dec 12, 1806, died in Cher. Nat. Sept 9, 1871. A tribute to his memory by Okla. Div. United Daughters of the Confederacy. ‘Lest we forget.’”

In 2020, amidst a cascading list of monument removals around the country, the Cherokee Nation took down the Stand Watie monument. In places like my hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana, monument removals generally came with reflections on how our memory of the past no longer aligns with that of the era who erected these Lost Cause memorials, but such was not the case in Tahlequah. In explaining his decision to remove the monument, Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. noted that it was not erected by the Nation and that the Nation did not even own the land it sat on at the time of its erection. He added that “The days of Cherokees leaving it to others to tell our story are over.”[1]

Allison Herrera and Cherokee Nation, KOSU, 2020

 

Whose memory the Stand Watie monument honored is complicated, and following that thread shows how communities change their memory, so it better matches their present sense of justice. Studies of Civil War memory often focus on the Lost Cause as an example of how memory evolves to suit the needs of its people after defeat, but it is not the only such instance. Tracing Cherokee memory of the Civil War from the war’s end through the 20^th century into the present offers an alternative example of a rewritten history that stems from a sense of justice rather than intent to deceive.[2]

The Oklahoma Cherokee fought on both sides of the war and fractured along existing conflict lines over assimilation. Many believed the safest way to preserve their society was to adopt parts of their colonizer’s culture, including plantation style agriculture with African slaves.^[3] When war broke out amongst their white neighbors, Cherokee leaders argued over which side to support. The US government had broken many treaties and promises over the years, but to side against them and lose would surely risk annihilation. The Confederate South fought explicitly for white supremacy, but siding with the Confederacy and winning meant having better bargaining power in the future and maintaining their social and economic system that had come to rely on slavery. Cherokee leaders ultimately allied with the Confederate South, though many individuals chose to join the Union army.^[4] Their memory of the war, accordingly, is different from the South’s.

Photograph of Stand Watie, c. 1865

 

Like all other forms of Civil War memory, the needs of the present drove perceptions of the past. Jeff Fortney’s 2012 article Lest We Remember explains that Civil War memory was not politically useful for Oklahoma’s Cherokee because it called attention to examples of native disunion in a time when unity was badly needed to combat forced assimilation. Fortney concludes that Cherokee memory as a whole is best defined as “self-silencing.” Forgetting the war left room for reconciliation and unity to face more important issues, like the most aggressive Reconstruction of any Civil War area in which much of Five Nations land was sold off to white settlers.^[5]

The Oklahoma Cherokee’s memory of the past thus served to smooth over internal divisions to support a more unified whole. What Fortney calls self-silencing looks to me like a strategic choice better explained under Blight’s Reconciliationist framing: a deliberate decision about what not to say in public, made in the interest of social cohesion.[6] For white Americans, Reconciliationist memory agreed to honor soldiers from both sides and avoid reckoning with the legacy slavery and the struggle for racial equality. The Cherokee people of Oklahoma made an analogous bargain: as Fortney explains, “Rather than point fingers and cast condemnation against those who supported opposing sides, all of the Five Tribes united toward rebuilding homes, farms, and lives.”[7] In not bringing up past divisions in favor of focusing on the ongoing catastrophe of Reconstruction that continued in Indian Territory well into the twentieth century. Cherokee veterans and their descendants worried about the erosion of Native sovereignty and forced Americanization. [8]  Bringing up who fought for which side and what that side stood for was not politically productive to either conversation. Accordingly, Five Nations people referenced less the war’s causes or the battles and more its aftermath. Reconstruction gave the federal government an excuse to further erode the Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty, literally telling it who it must count as citizens.^[9] Rather than discuss the battles, these stories tend to be about the political pressure to take sides during the war and the loss of land and identity afterwards with the inundation of white settlers after the war. These are Civil War memories, shaped by the experience of a people for whom the war’s aftermath never really ended.

Both Unionist and Lost Cause memories held a place for Native stories, but as it supported GAR and UCV goals.^[10] Confederate memorial groups used a mythic imagining of the “noble savage” to bolster their cause.^[11] For Cherokee veterans and their descendants, this meant that they had a place within the Lost Cause, but a prescribed one that was far less flexible as a tool for social and political progress even in relation to whites.

The Stand Watie monument highlights how the UDC used Native memory to bolster the Lost Cause. The myth of the vanishing Indian works in tandem with the moonlight-and-magnolias memory of the Lost Cause as a romanticized and irretrievable past and Stand Watie’s image offered the white settlers of Indian Territory a unique local connection to the Lost Cause. The Stand Watie monument is thus a monument to the Lost Cause, but it also was, in part, a monument of Cherokee memory. A 1914 committee of three UDC women, all Cherokee, sought (and failed) to exhume Stand Watie’s body and rebury it in Indian Territory, and their division later erected the 1921 monument.^[12] For Cherokee women, joining the UDC may have offered the same social and class benefits it offered to white women who sought membership, and perhaps that outweighed the cost of participating in a white supremacist organization for these individuals. Moreover, given that the Cherokee Nation intentionally made life difficult for freedmen descendants to discourage them from trying to claim membership, the white supremacy aspect may have strategic. The connection to Stand Watie would have offered these women a way to stake their claim in the UDC, and just being a member of the organization came with political access from all the events involving local and state politicians, a unique opportunity for women to engage in the political sphere.

The monument was not requested by the Cherokee Nation, but it was not wholly imposed either. Cherokee veterans typically memorialized the war with veterans from their side of the war, and even if they politely did not mention it in political debates, communities noted whether an old veteran had marched with Sherman or fought with Lee.[13] The inscription is true: Stand Watie did lead a regiment of Cherokee soldiers for the Confederacy, and in the 1920s, Cherokee descendants would not have balked at the reminder that most people fought with the South and in effect fought to preserve slavery. In that sense, the monument may not have been requested, but it did not unfairly represent Cherokee memory either. What may well have been an imposition was the choice of Watie specifically. He was a divisive figure as one of the signers of the Treaty of New Echota that led to the Trail of Tears. Watie was exiled from Cherokee lands for two years because of tensions between “Confederate Cherokee” and “Union Cherokee” before Reconciliationist memory was established.^[14]

 

It was right to remove the Stand Watie monument, but it was a missed opportunity to grapple with the real, more complicated legacy of the Civil War, the Lost Cause, and the Cherokee of Oklahoma. Like the 1920s Cherokee who adopted a Reconciliationist memory to shore up cohesion against federal attacks to their national sovereignty, the people of 2020 have altered their memory of the war to better fit the current fight for racial justice.[15] They are not alone: Historian Annette Gordon-Reed recalls that as a child, she thought Native Americans and Black people surely were allies against their mutual white oppressor, but that was not always the case, and certainly not the case for the Cherokee of Oklahoma who had a direct interest in preserving slavery.[16] The assumption that there ought to have been an alliance “displays very well the contingent nature of history, and how difficult it can be, when considering the history of a given time and place, to keep in mind that our view is colored by the knowledge of how things turned out.”^[17]  For freedmen, the Cherokee’s former slaves, and their descendants, that natural alliance was sorely missing.[18] Freedmen descendants only won the right to full membership in 2017.[19]

 

The Stand Watie monument is gone but its legacy has yet to be fully acknowledged. Though the debate over whose memory the monument honors is complicated, it must not be simplified for a more coinvent narrative that glosses over those most hurt by its presence.

 

[1] Chuck Hoskin, Jr., “Chief Chat: Why I removed Confederate monuments from the Cherokee Capitol Grounds.” Indian Life, July-August 2020, 8. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints.

[2] Native American memories are rarely included in works on Civil War memory for a variety of reasons beyond academic oversight. Firstly, the sheer number of different nations and tribes, each with their own unique experiences of the war, needs in each subsequent generation, and the resulting memories shaped to meet those needs make it impossible to define a single “Native” memory. Secondly, some historians chose not to focus on native memory of the war to decenter white historical events in Native histories. Native nations had been battling the federal government socially, politically, and militarily long before the war and long after; from this point of view the Civil War was not a unique moment of conflict but an episode in the longer struggle. But not studying these memories means losing valuable insights both for the larger understanding of how historical memory operates and failing to provide clarity for communities today. Thus, I attempt to remedy the two major reasons native memory is usually not included in Civil War memory studies by specifically labeling which native memories are analyzed and put into proper context about the native perception on the war and Reconstruction. Gary W. Gallagher, The Enduring Civil War, Reflections on the Great American Crisis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020.; Frank Towers and Jewel L. Spangler, eds. Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Fordham University Press, 2021.

^[3] Michael F. Doran, “Negro Slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68, no. 3 (1978): 335–50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2561972.

^[4] Troy Smith, “Nations Colliding: The Civil War Comes to Indian Territory.” Civil War History 59, no. 3 (September 2013): 279–319. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2013.0054.

^[5] Jeff Fortney, “Lest We Remember: Civil War Memory and Commemoration among the Five Tribes.” American Indian Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2012): 525–44. https://doi.org/10.5250/amerindiquar.36.4.0525.

[6] Sarah Elliott’s findings concur. Sarah Elliott, “Remembering the Civil War in Indian Territory: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Birth of a State, 1861-1965.” Ph.D., The University of Mississippi, 2024.

[7] Fortney, Jeff. “Lest We Remember: Civil War Memory and Commemoration among the Five Tribes.” American Indian Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2012): 525–44. 532.

[8] Reconstruction in Indian Territory long outlasted Reconstruction of the South and was the only region the Federal government permanently reallocated land to former slaves, and later parcels of land were sold off to Black and white Americans from outside the nation altogether. The Federal government mandated that the Five Nations give full membership rights to their freedmen, with some conditions, symbolizing both a rare moment of protection against racism and an all-too-common instance of eroding Native sovereignty by dictating to a nation the rules of its own citizenship. Violence against the Black freedmen who stayed was common. Unlike the Jim Crow South, the Five Nations people did not want to keep freedmen as forced labor; Five Nations members used violence to pressure freedpeople into leaving the territory out of fear that their ethnic and cultural heritage would be lost through intermarriage. Given that the threats to the Five Nations came from without the community, early memories of the Civil War used the same intentional Reconciliationist framing that David Blight described between northern and southern whites towards the end of the century.

One way state and federal governments forced native nations to Americanize was to seize young children from their parents and send them to boarding schools to educate them in white ways. In Oklahoma and the Five Nations, the history of boarding schools is a little more complicated. The Cherokee had long had native-owned boarding schools before the Civil War, sending the children of elite, often from mixed white and native race families. These schools typically taught in both Cherokee and English, and though the purpose was to teach children white ways, often through violent means, the parents at the very least had voluntarily sent their children to school. In 1907, Oklahoma took control of many native nations’ schools; this, combined with the new compulsory education laws in America, meant more Cherokee children than ever were now being brought up away from their culture and communities. Even then, Cherokee parents had comparably more options than other nations’ parents, and some were able to choose their children’s school based on whether it was bilingual, its religious denomination, or its proximity to home. The generational trauma inflected long after the last boarding school closed is not ameliorated just because some parents had choices and some schools allowed children to speak in their native tongue. The mental and physical scars from being raised in isolation from friends and family, intentionally taught to change their cultural identities, and abuse from teachers and staff were just as real and lasting for Cherokee children as any other native children. Julie L. Reed, Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History. The University of North Carolina Press, 2026.; David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. 1995. 2nd ed. University Press of Kansas, 2020.; Alaina E. Roberts, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

^[9] Khal Schneider, “Distinctions That Must Be Preserved: On the Civil War, American Indians, and the West.” Civil War History 62, no. 1 (March 2016): 36–54. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2016.0011. 53.; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters. 110-111.

^[10] For many white Union veterans, who met together as the Grand Army of the Republic, westward expansion after the war was a continuation of their service. Thus, Cherokee were cast in the role of the Vanishing Indian, quietly leaving so the land could be settled by ‘real’ Americans. Indian Territory GAR camps were often named for Native Americans, but in the same way one might use Greco-Roman names to harken back to a mythic past. Lindsey Peterson, “The Expansionist Cause: Union Civil War Commemorations as Weapons of Colonization in the American West.” Dissertation, The University of Southern Mississippi, 2022.

^[11] The UDC’s use of Confederate Five Nations memory mirrors the larger trend of the white South incorporating memories of a fading Native past, such as the Trail of Tears, into their larger historical memory of the region and its people. As Theda Perdue explains, by sympathizing with the wronged party, white southerners “abolished themselves of guilt for the actions of their ancestors and responsibility for the plight of Indians who remained.” Fortney, “Lest We Remember.”; Elliott, Sarah. “Remembering the Civil War in Indian Territory: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Birth of a State, 1861-1965.” Ph.D., The University of Mississippi, 2024.; Theda Perdue, “The Legacy of Indian Removal.” The Journal of Southern History (Houston, United States) 78, no. 1 (2012): 3–36. 23.

^[12] United Daughters of the Confederacy. Minutes of the Twentieth Annual Convention, 1913. Edwards & Broughton Printing Company, 1914. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008696825.

[13] “Beautiful Scenery.” The Cherokee Advocate. Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, Vol. 26, No. 15, Ed. 1, April 26, 1902. https://gateway.okhistory.org/ark:/67531/metadc1856108/m1/2/?q=reunion. 2.

^[14] Stand Watie often stood in opposition to other Cherokee leaders of the day, such as John Ross. Watie was among those who signed the Treaty of New Echota, leading to the Trail of Tears. The others of the Ridge Faction who signed the treaty were executed, but Watie escaped. Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Stand Watie (1806–1871).” Accessed October 10, 2025. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/stand-watie-14563/.; Oklahoma Historical Society. “Watie, Stand | The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.” Accessed January 10, 2025. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=WA040.

[15] Alaina Roberts has noticed that museums of Native American history in Oklahoma, the Five Nations’ region, rarely mention slavery in their exhibits. “Conversation with June 2025 Special Issue Editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts.” The Journal of the Civil War Era, July 10, 2025. https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2025/07/conversation-with-june-2025-special-issue-editors-joan-e-cashin-and-alaina-e-roberts/.

[16] By the time of the Civil War, slavery was not just economically but socially “critical to the Cherokees’ conception of their own national identity.” Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. Second edition. American Crossroads. University of California Press, 2015. 187.

^[17] Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth. New York, London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021. 82.

[18] Recent scholars have dedicated research to the history of the enslaved populations in native nations. Some, like Barbara Krauthamer’s Black Slaves, Indian Masters and Alaina E. Roberts’ I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land focus specifically on the history of slavery and its aftermath, but other works like Tiffany Lethobo King’s Black Shoals tackles Black and Native American historiographies more broadly, highlighting the shoal-like overlaps between two targets of settler-colonialism.

Each nation had its own cultural norms around slavery and legal presidencies for enslaved rights, and like anywhere else these norms and laws changed over the decades, but analysis of other Five Nations offers suggestions for how to interpret Cherokee memory. Caleb Gayle’s We Refuse to Forget follows the story of another Five Nations state, the Creek Nation, offers another example of the complicated relationship between the Five Nations and freemen. We Refuse traces the changes over time from the early years of non-chattel with opportunities to become a full equal, to a more Americanized version of caste slavery, to federal intervention and the forced acceptance of freedmen into the nation, to the 1979 reversal excluding freedmen descendants from citizenship. The 1979 reversal is an example of enduring Civil War memories; Creek resentment over Reconstruction-era infringement on native sovereignty and the right to define citizenship was not forgotten.

[19] Oaster, B. “Toastie.” “7 Questions about Freedmen Answered.” High Country News, October 11, 2021. https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-communities-7-questions-about-freedmen-answered/.