First Americans Museum

A spectacular new museum on the south bank of the Oklahoma River, opened in 2021 after a thirty-year planning process. The architecture is the first thing you notice: a 33-metre-high earthwork mound (echoing the mounds of pre-contact Mississippian peoples), a great hall oriented to the equinox sunrise, and a giant ring-shaped Hall of the People around a circular floor.

The exhibits cover the histories and cultures of all thirty-nine tribes now headquartered in Oklahoma — Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and many smaller nations — through contemporary art, video, immersive installations, and traditional artefacts. The restaurant on site, Thirty Nine, serves modern Indigenous cuisine. Plan three or four hours; the museum easily justifies that.

things to do museum
A story
Oklahoma is the legacy of the Trail of Tears — most of the thirty-nine federally recognised tribes now headquartered in the state were forcibly relocated here from elsewhere in the United States in the nineteenth century, and the museum tells that story without flinching.

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