CHITTO HARJO

The life of a Mvskoke (Muskogee/Creek) leader who fought against white predations on his people’s reservation.

The name Chitto Harjo, writes Mvskoke historian Fixico, means Crazy Snake, an appellation that centered Harjo in the middle of a Mvskoke band that took up arms to defend their territory. They were experiencing internal conflict as well: As followers of the Medicine Way, they rejected the Christianity imposed on them by outsiders, and though they had been slaveholders, the Mvskoke Snakes recruited their former chattel and their descendants to return to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma and join them. “Ex-slaves and Indian traditionalists working together frightened whites,” notes Fixico, and in time the Crazy Snakes were the object of legal repression that would see nearly a hundred of them, including Chitto Harjo himself, sentenced to imprisonment at Leavenworth for the crime of conspiracy. Harjo’s true crime was resisting a growing federal campaign to impose land allotment on individual Indigenous people, undermining Native ideas of communal ownership and replacing them with private property that could be bought and sold—and sold, for that matter, to whites. Under Harjo’s leadership, the Crazy Snakes allied with Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws in a group called the Four Mothers Society, with “the danger of allotments dividing their reservations and separating family members on differ­ent parcels of lands” providing common cause. Following a shootout with the National Guard of the newly established state of Oklahoma, Harjo fled the reservation and died of the lingering effects of a gunshot wound a couple of years later, in 1911. The Crazy Snakes endured, however, resisting the draft in World War I and allying with socialists and Black tenant farmers to fight for Native rights.

A strong contribution to the literature of Indigenous resistance.