Oklahoma's flag is one of only two US state flags built around Native American iconography, and the more literal of the pair. Where New Mexico borrows a Zia sun symbol, Oklahoma puts an actual piece of Plains material culture at its center: a round rawhide battle shield of the type carried by Osage warriors, hung with seven eagle feathers, on a field of French blue. Crossed over the shield are a calumet, the ceremonial pipe smoked to seal peace, and an olive branch. Two peace traditions, one Native and one European, laid over an instrument of war. The design dates to 1925, and it exists because the flag before it was red.
The trouble with a red flag
Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state in 1907 and got around to a flag in 1911. Ruth D. Clement of Oklahoma City designed it: a red field carrying a white five-pointed star edged in blue, with the number 46 inside the star. It was serviceable and little used, and it might have survived indefinitely if not for the First World War and what followed. By the early 1920s, a red banner read less like Oklahoma and more like Moscow. During the Red Scare, anything resembling a socialist emblem became a political liability, and a state flag that was mostly red field started to feel like a problem worth solving.
In 1924 the Oklahoma Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution sponsored a contest for a new design, with the backing of Governor Martin E. Trapp. A committee chaired by Ella K. Fleming and Josephine S. Hickam reviewed the entries.
Louise Fluke's shield
The winner was Louise Funk Fluke, an artist from Shawnee. Fluke did her homework. She studied Oklahoma history and Native American artifacts and consulted Joseph B. Thoburn, secretary of the Oklahoma Historical Society, before settling on her subject: an Osage warrior's rawhide shield, rendered in buckskin tones on a blue field. The legislature adopted the design on April 2, 1925.
Every element carries a specific reading. The six painted crosses on the shield's face are a Plains Indian symbol for stars. The seven eagle feathers pendant from the lower edge belong to the shield itself, the kind of decoration an actual war shield would carry. The calumet and olive branch crossed over the top pair a Native peace emblem with a European one. The composite, in the state's own gloss, is defensive rather than aggressive: a united people who love peace but keep the shield handy. The state reads the blue field as devotion and loyalty.
For a design produced by a patriotic society's contest in the 1920s, it has aged unusually well. In a state where thirty-nine tribal nations are headquartered, the flag's central image is Native, specific, and treated with some care rather than as decoration.
Adding the name
The flag's one significant revision came in 1941, when the legislature added the word OKLAHOMA in white letters beneath the shield. The stated reasoning was recognition: too few people, inside the state or out, could identify the flag on sight. Flag design orthodoxy holds that if you need to write the name on it, the design has failed, and the North American Vexillological Association's guidance says as much. The lettering has nonetheless been there for more than eighty years, and no serious effort to remove it has gotten anywhere.
Fourteen flags over Oklahoma
Oklahoma tradition holds that fourteen flags have flown over the state, a count that takes in the European colonial powers, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and assorted territorial banners along the way. However the tally is drawn up, it is a reminder that the state's flag history is mostly a history of other people's flags: the land that became Oklahoma spent centuries being claimed at a distance before it spent four years, from 1907 to 1911, as a state with no flag at all.
Getting the colors straight
For most of the flag's life, statute described the design loosely and left the details to whoever was sewing. The results drifted. By the early 2000s, versions in circulation disagreed on the shade of the field, the color of the shield, and the drawing of the pipe and feathers, and state agencies were among the offenders. The discrepancies were brought to legislators' attention in 2005, after a Scout leader noticed that official renderings of the flag did not match each other.
The fix was Senate Bill 1359, effective November 1, 2006. The statute, 25 O.S. § 91, now specifies the design element by element with Pantone references: French blue (285) for the field, an amber buckskin shade (465) for the shield, gold-brown (174) for the crosses and feather tips, ruby red (195) for the pipe bowl, Dartmouth green (554) for the olive branch. Oklahoma had spent eighty years with a flag everyone recognized and no one could reproduce consistently; since 2006 there has been exactly one correct version. The state marked the design's centennial in 2025, one hundred years after Fluke's shield first went up a pole.
References
[1] "Flag of Oklahoma," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Oklahoma
[2] "State Flags of Oklahoma," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=ST066
[3] "Fluke, Louise Funk," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=FL005
[4] 25 Oklahoma Statutes § 91, state flag description as standardized by Senate Bill 1359 (2006).
[5] "Flag of Oklahoma," Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-Oklahoma