Indian Territory was never actually a territory. Residents never went through the process of petitioning the government to achieve territory status, but the United States government took a fair amount of legal control anyway. One of the things that the government did was establish the boundaries of the area known as Indian Territory in 1889. Soon after these boundaries were set, the Organic Act of 1890 further reduced Indian Territory due to Oklahoma Territory being formed and then reduced even more when the Oklahoma Territory Organic Act was passed. In the end, Indian Territory was a little larger than the eastern half of modern Oklahoma. These two territories were known as the Twin Territories until they joined together later to become the state of Oklahoma (Everett).
Since Oklahoma was Indian Territory before it was anything else, Native Americans have had a large part in the history of the state. The residents of Indian Territory tried to become a state themselves and not include Oklahoma Territory into the state. The movement by people in Indian Territory towards statehood began after the Civil War. The United States government redid a large amount of treaties with multiple Native American tribes due to the tribes not fully supporting the Union during the Civil War. The government was going in the direction of taking away the tribes’ control over themselves. This was why the people in Indian Territory put together efforts to establish themselves as their own state (Moses). The Five Civilized Tribes put together this serious attempt for Indian Territory to achieve statehood. This attempt was known as the Sequoyah Convention of 1905. The members of the convention that was formed by the Native Americans to propose statehood made up a constitution and took it to Congress in Washington D.C. Their proposed state would have been called the state of Sequoyah, but Congress turned it down (Pennington).