Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma

Background

The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture records that the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma is one of Oklahoma's three federally recognized Shawnee tribes, governed by a business committee and headquartered at West Seneca in Ottawa County, with 2,110 enrolled tribal members in July 2003. The entry also records that near Lewiston, Ohio, a small group of Shawnee lived with some Seneca, that in 1831 they ceded their domain for land within the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory, and that in December 1832 a sixty-thousand-acre reservation north and east of the Cherokee in present Ottawa County was granted to the United Nation of Senecas and Shawnees. A second treaty in 1867 divided the Shawnee from the Seneca and named the Shawnee side the Eastern Shawnee, and their lands were allotted in 1888. The Tribe was organized under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936. Mammoth Cave National Park lists the Eastern Shawnee among seven nations it consults that have been shown to be traditionally affiliated with the park lands, alongside the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Cherokee Nation, the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, the Shawnee Tribe, the Absentee Shawnee Tribe and the Chickasaw Nation.

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Visit and learn

Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma's own site

Tribal lands have their own laws. Check the nation's site before you visit.

Parks on its homelands

The Frozen Niagara travertine flowstone in Mammoth Cave, calcite deposits hanging like a stopped waterfall down the cave wall.

Mammoth Cave National Park

The Eastern Shawnee Tribe traces itself to the Lewistown Band of Shawnee, led by Qua-ta-wa-pea, whom Americans called Colonel Lewis, and it is the one of the three federally recognized Shawnee nations on the Oklahoma-Missouri border near Wyandotte, Oklahoma. Source

The New River Gorge Bridge, a long single-span steel arch carrying U.S. Route 19 high above the forested gorge.

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve

Three reservations were granted to the Shawnee remaining in Ohio by the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, at Hog Creek, Wapakoneta and Lewistown, and the Lewistown Reserve was shared with an independent band of Seneca. The Eastern Shawnee descends from the Lewistown Band. Source

Sources

Checked September 2026.

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