This is not just the story of my grandmother, Stella Whiteturkey Fugate, known to the US Government as Delaware Roll Number 31156, and holder of Certificate of Homestead Allotment Number 16480. It is a Lenape story, a tale that spans both the past and the present.
Stella Whiteturkey Fugate, early 1900s; Courtesy of Joe Baker
On February 8, 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Act, named for its author, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts. Also known as the General Allotment Act, the law authorized the US president to break up reservation land, which was held in common by the members of a tribe, into small allotments to be parceled out to individuals. Thus, Native Americans registering on a tribal “roll” were granted allotments of reservation land. The purpose of the Dawes Act and subsequent acts extending its initial provisions was purportedly to protect Indigenous property rights, particularly during the land rushes of the 1890s. However, the results were devasting for Native communities and caused the loss of vast acreage of tribal lands.
The Lenape, whose ancestral land was situated within what we know today as the states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, were subject to the Dawes Act. Two centuries of European encroachment ultimately led to the forced removal of the Lenape from the Delaware Valley and Hudson River Valley to the frontier. The Lenape were given the name “Delaware” by Sir Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, in 1610, and it is the name used in all Lenape treaties and among most tribal members today.
Beginning in 1829 and ending in 1831, the Delaware tribe moved to the junction of the Kansas River and Missouri River in present-day northeastern Kansas. Following the Civil War, white encroachment and railroad speculation increased, and the Delawares were pressured to cede their lands in Kansas and relocate to Indian Territory. The lands were selected to be in as compact a form as possible and included an area equal to 160 acres for each man, woman, and child. Given that a total of 985 Delaware were removed to lands within the boundary of the Cherokee Nation, Delaware tribal members also became citizens of the Cherokee Nation (dual enrollment).
My family, the Simon Whiteturkey family, was among those Delaware families that were removed to Indian Territory in 1867. Thus began the complex and violent story of a family whose allotment lands were discovered to have vast pools of oil just below the ground’s surface.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Stella, Pearl, and Bess before boarding the train in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to go to finishing school in Missouri in the early 1900s; they attended for only a year before the “Reign of Terror” murders in Osage. Courtesy of Joe Baker
Baker walking on ancestral lands in Dewey, Oklahoma, 2018; Courtesy of Joe Baker
See related authors
Joe Baker