Thlopthlocco Tribal Town

The Thlopthlocco Tribal Town is part of the Creek Nation of Oklahoma, which owns over 6,000 acres of federal trust lands.  This land is dispersed throughout an eight county area in eastern Oklahoma. 

One of the four members of the Oklahoma Creek Confederacy, Thlopthlocco Tribal Town is based in Okemah, Oklahoma. Like the Kialegee, the Thlopthlocco are headed by a tribal town king (called a Mekko), the only two instances of a monarchical title being applied to the head of a native nation within the United States.

 Thlopthlocco is one of the central core of Mvskoke-speaking towns that were the original members of the Creek Confederacy in Georgia and Alabama. Sometime before 1832 Thlopthlocco split off from a large tribal town whose name is variously represented as Hoithle Waule, Clewalla, and Thlewarthle. Thlopthlocco town was removed to Indian Territory with the rest of the Mvskoke Creeks in 1835, and ultimately settled in an area eight miles south of Okemah, in Okfuskee and Hughes counties. Like other Creeks, they lost most of their land with the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 and the subsequent assignment of small individual allotments to each family.

Thlopthlocco was offered its own federal charter, separate from that of the Creek Nation, in 1936. The motive of the town in accepting this charter and its implicit separation from Creek Nation was apparently to take advantage of the credit available through the Thomas-Rogers Act, also known as the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act. This legislation was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1936, just after the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, and was directed at the special situation of Indian tribes in Oklahoma.

The name of this traditional Creek town is difficult for English-speakers to pronounce. The sound of [thl] is usually spelled with an R in Muskogee, and is pronounced by placing the tongue half way between the [th] position in English, and the [l] position.