A surprising fact emerges from the Tulsa World on April 13, 2026, one in which every word emigrates from some distant place then finally, sunburned and muscles aching, lands with other immigrant words in a single assertion, blinking neon:
Cherokees are feeding hungry children in Oklahoma with money from the federal government.
If this sentence doesn’t seem especially newsworthy, perhaps it will take on a different cast as we examine each word in turn. Cherokees claim pride of place as the sentence’s subject. I classify it as an immigrant word since the Cherokee people themselves are immigrants to Oklahoma from the southern Appalachian Mountains. They did not choose to leave their lush, mountain landscape and verdant valleys but were marched to the Oklahoma prairie at gunpoint. But the second word in our surprising sentence sighs, drums its fingers and taps its toe on the floor, waiting its turn to be heard, so we will move forward. Are. Perhaps one of the simplest words in the language, the present tense of the verb “to be” ensures that we speak of current events, not historical tales buried in times past. The calendar pages marking nearly two hundred years have been discarded, shredded, and incinerated since Cherokees were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands.
And so our analysis progresses to word number three: feeding. Feeding only happens if you have food, and this has not always been true of the Cherokee, four thousand of whom died on the trek to Indian Territory from Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama, many from starvation, constituting the loss of about one-fifth of their total population. Many more perished in the same way once resettled in Oklahoma, then even more following allotment and the endless sequence of federal treaties that burst like party balloons and lasted approximately as long. But now in their pinging, smokey casino in Catoosa, Cherokees daily relieve the back pockets of iron-creased jeans of their green dollars and silver coins. The slouchy handbags of grey-headed women suffer a similar fate. Today’s trail of tears slithers like a black snake behind the round-shouldered figures whose slot machines did not deliver today, not the removed Cherokees. The Cherokees have wealth. The Cherokees have power, you will say. And you would be correct.
Since our discussion is firmly rooted in the present and not the past, the task remains to discover how this reversal came about. Surely we shall find the answer as we consider the rest of our surprising sentence. The next word is hungry. Oklahomans have known hunger in the wake of oil busts, tech busts, and farmland exhausted by mineral extraction, chemical fertilizers, tornadic winds and the blistering sun. Hungry is no stranger to the present tense in Oklahoma. Like the parade of children on Halloween, hunger wears innumerable costumes, from a passing yen for corned beef and cabbage to the nagging sensation that follows every meal eventually, even when we overeat. In this case, however, hungry refers to a situation underway long enough to have settled on annual tax returns like dust on a piano no one ever plays. It indicates a condition permanently etched with the acid of poverty into the unbending steel of family history. It means, in this particular sentence, there hasn’t been enough food since we don’t know when, which is why we eat lunch for free at school.
So yes, we’re talking about children, our fifth word. And not just Indian children. In this surprising sentence, no qualifications apply. If you are hungry enough to eat lunch for free at school and if you live on the Cherokee reservation, you may receive from the Cherokee Nation forty dollars each month for food while school is out. If it’s the Muskogee reservation you call home, or the Chickasaw, or the Otoe-Missouria, the same forty-dollar monthly payment is due you from those tribes. But you may ask, I thought you said not just Indian children. What about hungry white children and children of other ethnicities who do not live on a reservation but live instead in Tulsa, Broken Arrow, Claremore, Ada, Collinsville, Tonkawa, Billings, or Peckham? And this is where we need our seventh word, Oklahoma—presuming that we may leap over the sixth word, in, since the named location implies it.
The state of Oklahoma, which comprises all these cities and more, took it for granted in 1907 that admission to the union automatically dissolved reservations in the former Indian Territory. In the required high school course in Oklahoma history my children learned that there are no reservations in Oklahoma. Mistakenly, as it turns out, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, who decided in 2020, one hundred and thirteen years after Oklahoma statehood, that the U.S. Congress who created those reservations had never disestablished them when Oklahoma became a state. So, in fact, everyone living in the entire eastern half of Oklahoma lives on an Indian reservation.
Since we have come this far and have already begun to consider both entities—the state of Oklahoma and the federal government—we might as well take the final phrase of our surprising sentence all in one gulp: with money from the federal government. Why would the federal government, not known for its magnanimity toward Native nations, give away enough money to pay every hungry child in the former Indian Territory forty dollars per month in June, July, and August? The reason is that after several pilot programs begun nearly a century after the Indian Removal Act, the U.S. dared in 1964 to dream of a Great Society. Instead of handling pervasive poverty like the crack in your grandmother’s china that you push to the back of the shelf, people decided to do something about it. Hungry folks have been receiving food stamps ever since, even though our dreams of ending hunger in the U.S. have since become nightmares.
But why is USDA assistance flowing from Native nations and not the state of Oklahoma, you may inquire, since our strange immigrant words barely conceal this glaring incongruity. It is because, in its infinite wisdom, the state of Oklahoma, who previously and mistakenly presumed that its reservations didn’t exist, has refused federal SNAP dollars to feed its hungry children over the summer. I suppose this decision should not surprise us, since Oklahoma competes for last place among the fifty states of our union for common education funding per student, and correlatively, ranks dead last in the nation for educational outcomes, demonstrating precisely where children rank in priority for the governors and legislators of Oklahoma.
Certainly none of this surprises the Cherokee Nation and the other Native tribes in Indian Territory, with their hard-earned expertise in mending the torn garment of Oklahoma statecraft as long as the rivers run. Stepping into this gap is only the most recent of the tribes’s initiatives that model humane and responsible government. And so Cherokees (and other Native tribes, and not the state of Oklahoma) are feeding hungry children in Oklahoma with money from the federal government.
Unfortunately, Oklahoma children living outside of Indian Territory in the western half of the state aren’t as lucky.