“The sun sits low on the western horizon behind the First Americans Museum and the skyline of Oklahoma City. Image by Lori Duckworth

OKLAHOMA CITY – A visit to the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City casts America’s current preoccupation with immigration in a peculiar light.

The perspective of this multi-faceted museum is from the 39 Native American tribes in modern-day Oklahoma. All but four of those tribes are not here of their own choice. Immigrants to these shores pushed them here into the middle of the continent from across North America.

A towering arch frames the entrance to the First Americans Museum, where many design elements are symbolic. Image by Tom Adkinson

The museum celebrates their cultures, their histories, and even their foods. It is in the city’s New Horizons district.

Its campus is not far from Oklahoma’s downtown, which is full of attractions such as NBA basketball, minor league baseball, an Olympic-caliber whitewater kayaking and canoeing facility, and a manmade canal where excursion boats glide past a sculpture depicting the Oklahoma land rush of 1889. That’s when two million acres once reserved for Native Americans opened to immigrants from many states.

A Native American dancer performs in the semi-dome main section of the First Americans Museum. Image by Ben Winters

Members of the Wichita tribe were early inhabitants near the river that Oklahoma City now sprawls across. They built arched houses from river grasses, and that design inspired the museum’s semi-dome core. The building’s 10 stone columns represent the distance traveled each day when tribes were forcibly removed to Indian Territory.

The museum’s signature exhibition is OKLA HOMMA, which addresses the diversity of the 39 tribes. It is the culmination of more than a decade of consultation with the tribes, elders, and scholars. Among its features is the 270-degree Origins Theater, where visitors absorb four tribal origin stories that were scripted, narrated, and animated by Native Americans.

Visitors inspect items in the WINIKO area of the museum that connect to the 39 tribes that live in Oklahoma. Image by Chuck Choi

Another major area is WINIKO: Life of an Object. “Winiko” is a Caddo word meaning “everything on earth, in the universe and beyond.” It is a showcase of Native-made artifacts and art, some of which was once taken from Native lands and now returned.

The museum website observes the irony this way: “(Objects) left Oklahoma when non-Native institutions were rapidly acquiring materials from our so-called ‘vanishing’ tribal cultures. It is poignant that, 100 years later, an all-Native curatorial team has led the process of returning these objects to our state.”

Paintings from various Native American artists fill a wall in the OKLA HOMMA exhibition area. Image by J. Pat Carter

The aptly named 39 Restaurant is a memorable Oklahoma City eatery. Just as with artifacts and programming, the menu at 39 is diverse. It features selections from across the continent such as green chile and sweet corn hummus, bison burgers, braised rabbit, Kickapoo venison chili, and acorn squash stuffed with smoked turkey.

A Native American presenter pauses after completing a program at the First Americans Museum. Image by Tom Adkinson

Complementing all that is inside the museum is a semi-circular earthen mound that rises behind the museum. Guided walks explain the mound-building civilizations that thrived in North America centuries before Europeans immigrants arrived.

Trip-planning resources: FAMOK.org and VisitOKC.com

(Travel writer Tom Adkinson’s book, 100 Things To Do in Nashville Before You Die, is available at Amazon.com.