Indian Territory Reimagined: Ora Eddleman Reed's Twin Territories

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Twin Territories was a newspaper in Indian Territory from 1898 to 1905 that included the latest regional news, historical information about various tribes, and the column "What the Curious Want to Know." It also incorporated a variety of photographs of American Indian women, portraits of officials, and landmarks. The newspaper actively sustained a national audience. Ora Eddleman Reed understood her role as an editor in Indian Territory in part as a responsibility to correct inaccurate, dangerous representations of Natives people in the US. In addition to countering stereotypes of women, Twin Territories troubled visions of a backwards civilization, offering instead a portrait of Cherokee people as members of a burgeoning capitalist economy. While concentrating on a particular vision of Indian Territory as a modern, developing space, I seek to place Twin Territories in context as an Indian Territory newspaper of the turn of the twentieth century and to study its key features, including the advice column, its short fiction, and the photographic column, "Portraits of Indian Girls." Such representation is all the more complicated by Eddelman Reed's connection to the Cherokee community.