Comanche National Museum and Cultural Center

Comanche people call themselves Nʉmʉnʉʉ, The People. In the Nation's own account they were once part of the Shoshone, and in the late 1600s and early 1700s they moved onto the plains and then south, through what are now Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Texas, before settling in southwest Oklahoma. The horse made them the riders and horse breeders of the southern plains, and the bison gave them food, clothing and lodge covers. The 1867 Medicine Lodge treaty held them, with the Kiowa and Plains Apache, to a reservation here; most Comanche lived on it only after Quanah Parker's Kwahada band came in in 1875, and it was allotted and opened in 1901.

The museum on NW Ferris Avenue states its purpose plainly: a place where the Nation's story is told from a Comanche perspective, and a place of pride for its citizens. The collections run from paintings, textiles and jewelry to regalia, musical instruments, military uniforms and an archive of film, photographs and recordings. The military history is close to home. In December 1940 the Army recruited seventeen Comanche men as code talkers. They built coded terms in their language for about 250 military words, a turtle for a tank among them; thirteen landed at Utah Beach, and the code was never broken.

The Nation has about 17,000 enrolled citizens, about 7,000 of them living around Lawton and Fort Sill, and runs a language program whose greeting, in Comanche, reads: let's all speak Comanche together.