“Texoma” is the interstate region of the United States, split between Oklahoma and Texas. The name is a portmanteau of Texas and Oklahoma. This region also served as the first terminus of the United States government’s policy of forced removal of Native American/First Nation people from their ancestral lands further north and east in present-day Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Carolina.
Beginning in 1830 through President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act authorizing the U.S. government to extinguish any Native American land claims, an estimated 60,000 Native people were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and upwards of 10,000 died over the next decade through these policies. Frequently referred to as a “Trail of Tears,” historians today collectively define these actions as advanced by the U.S. government as genocide. According to historical accounts, tribal members “moved gradually” over a period of 8-10 years from their ancestral lands, suffering from exposure, disease, and starvation en route to newly designated Native American/Indian reservations, principally located and surrounding this Oklahoma region. Today, the Texoma and southeastern Oklahoma region have few vestiges of their history, though the Tribal Nations of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole remain.