The Ponca Tribe today has about 4,200 members with many still settled in Ponca City. Chris Littlecook, a Title IX officer at Ponca City High School and involved member of the Ponca Tribe, says leaving his impact on the future of the tribe is important.

“I like seeing the kids be successful, I feel like I’ve done what I wanted to do when I moved back, which is to help tribal members.”

Just before the Trail of Tears, the Ponca Tribe was primarily located in Nebraska after migrating from the Great Lakes area. They had entered the Northern Plains during the 1700’s.

The Ponca first came in contact with the U.S. government about 1804 in Nebraska, during the Lewis and Clark expedition.

In 1817, they made their first treaty with the U.S. government.

“Which was basically let’s be friends with each other, that’s all it was, like a onepage treaty,” Littlecook said.

In 1825, the next treaty took away some of the Ponca land in exchange for protection and gave more power over the tribe to the U.S. government. In 1858, the Ponca lost more land, and gave the government rights to build roads and ports on Ponca land to increase protection.

One of the final treaties was negotiated in 1865.

“By that time the Ponca just had one little chunk of land that had their burial grounds on it and also had their fields… which the government considered a reward, which is kind of ironic,” Littlecook said.

The U.S. government then granted land to the Sioux triibe that the Ponca already occupied. By 1868, the Ponca were being outnumbered by the Sioux because of the advantages the Sioux had with weapons from the government.

During the next 10 years, the Ponca sent several delegations to Washington, D.C., to try to rectify the problems with their land.

The solution presented was to offer the Ponca tribe land in Oklahoma Territory. But when Ponca chiefs came to scout out the land in 1877, they found nothing acceptable. The government scout sent with the chiefs was upset that they did not want the land, resulting in the chiefs being stranded in Oklahoma and having to find their own way back to Nebraska in February.

By the time the chiefs made their way back to Ponca land in April, the government was already rounding up their people to send them to Oklahoma Territory.

“The first group was more willing because they just kind of knew it was inevitable,” Littlecook said.

But the second, and larger, group did not arrive in Oklahoma Territory until July. They would stay on the Quapaw reservation for about a year before relocating to the new location that is now a part of Ponca City.

“Within three years of coming here, based on the diseases they caught just by not being acclimated to this area, they lost probably about a third of the tribe,” said Littlecook.

The Ponca encountered thunderstorms, tornadoes and intense heat they were not accustomed to. And a lot of what the tribe was promised was not there once they settled.

“There weren’t any homes, a lot of them lived in tents which they weren’t used to,” Littlecook saud.

But that has not stopped the growth of the tribe.

“We like to look at it like, ‘we’re still here’, after everything that happened, we could have very easily not been here,” Littlecook said.

Zach Verdea is a reporter with Gaylord News, a reporting project of the University of Oklahoma Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication.