This Land Press

Thirty years ago, a petite woman with curly blonde hair approached Greg Saunders at a bike race just west of Austin, Texas. At 22 years old, Saunders, a Tulsa native, was proving himself as one of the best road cyclists in the country. The woman told Saunders her name was Robin Morton, and that she was putting together a professional cycling team from the U.S. th…

Sitting down to speak with Oklahoma City photographer Yousef Khanfar about his art leads almost inevitably to one name: Georgia O’Keeffe. The love of the desert, the commitment to a task, and the accumulation of silence create resonance between their art forms. For O’Keeffe, it was the high desert around Santa Fe, but for Khanfar, it was the vast dese…

Cherokee Nation has what seems to be an unusual fixation with lawyers and writing—at least for an outsider looking in. Cherokee museums are dense with detail about treaties, newspapers, and literacy. Sequoyah, a silversmith who invented the Cherokee syllabary in the 19th century, is arguably their greatest hero. And, most telling of all, their judi…

Horse Thief performs “I Am the Bear” for This Land Live, our musical performance series sponsored by Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat Beer.…

Summer in Oklahoma isn’t for the faint of heart. Between the heat, the never-ending hours of sunshine, and the kids climbing the walls at home, it’s easy to start filling your calendar with trips to the nearest lake and evenings alone with your air conditioner.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But between road trip ideas, activ…

Kim Doner is a professional illustrator who rehabilitates wildlife out of her house in her spare time.…

Editor’s note: The following news analysis article represents a deeper level of commitment to community news coverage. Look for more in-depth reporting in the future.
Inside the square glass castle of Tulsa’s City Hall last week, the grandson of a Tulsa Race Riot survivor, James L. Johnson, implored the Tulsa City Council to change the name of dow…

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Originally published on the blog The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 on March 18, 2013.

It is normal that we look upon an event as tragic as the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 with a need for answers. We want to single out someone culpable. We look for some trigger to the destruction. Who could have caused the outbreak? Who tried to cover up its very existence? It’s part of human n…

Native Americans within the uprooted “Five Civilized Tribes” found a new home in “Indian Territory”— Oklahoma. Decades later, these Indians would seek, unsuccessfully, to create an Indian state—“Sequoyah”—in order to hold on to sovereignty and self-governance. Instead, the federal government combined Indian Territory, which…

OK Sweetheart performs “Traitor” for This Land Live, This Land’s new music performance series sponsored by Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat Beer.…

Shaun Perkins forged the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry out of her father’s old machine shop as a tiny monument to the power of poetry in the daily lives of Oklahomans. The barn-red metal building is wedged between a centenarian oak, a fledgling Locust Grove vineyard, and Perkin’s own home, where she writes her poetry on the walls.…

On an oppressively hot evening last May, David Cornsilk addressed a room of so-called “black Indians” at Gilcrease Hills Baptist Church in northwest Tulsa. He wore a leather-braided bolo tie clasped by an emerald quartz. Though Cornsilk never formally studied law, his voice bellowed with the rhetorical ire of a white-shoed seasoned litigator.
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Questions have arisen regarding the May 15, 2013 cover image of This Land magazine which warrant an explanation. The cover is an illustration of a silhouetted figure of a Native American wearing a headdress, with the text “One Fire: The Cherokee Nation’s Identity Crisis” displayed over the figure’s face.
The cover image is…

May 21, 2008. Radisson Hotel, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Frank K. Berry U.S. Chess Championship. Two International Chess Masters sit at an ugly green table in a cramped room, taking a deep breath. Two deep breaths.
Both women were born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Both women scored an impressive 7.5 (of 9 possible) in the round-robin st…