Wallace became the first female leader of her tribal nation headquartered in northeast Oklahoma near the Missouri border. She encountered patriarchal views and doubts because of her gender in the early 2000s. Despite initial pushback, she won reelection four times and saw more women in neighboring tribes in Ottawa County elected to leadership roles.
Wallace credits her childhood as a key time when she learned responsibility and the importance of setting goals — a mindset she has carried with her during her time as chief. Growing up away from her tribe, she returned and immersed herself in research. She has shared this history across multiple states, notably in Ohio, where she worked hard to strengthen the tribe's current and ancestral presence.
KOSU Indigenous Affairs Reporter Sarah Liese sat down with Wallace to hear more about her time in office, her memorable takeaways and the legacy she hopes to leave behind.
Sarah Liese, KOSU Indigenous Affairs Reporter: How has the Eastern Shawnee Tribe evolved since you took office as chief in 2006, and what changes are you most proud of?
Glenna Wallace, Former Chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe: When I took office in 2006, we had two very different groups. There was bickering. There wasn't as much cohesiveness; there wasn't as much peace. It didn't seem like one tribe, so that was the first thing that I wanted was to try to bring more unity to the tribe. Not to have my way, but to find a way that all of us could work better together and be more like our logo shows: a circle that means no beginning, no end, one unity. So that was my immediate goal.
Liese: I'm curious what the division was about 20 years ago.
Wallace: I think it has to do with elections. Some felt very strongly that they wanted to be chief, and sometimes that just goes too far. I might compare it to social media today. If you look on social media, you will always find positive comments, but you will also always unfortunately find negative comments. Sometimes the negative comments just go a little bit too far.
Liese: What goals did you set for yourself as chief? What goals were you happy to reach?
Wallace: We have three federally recognized Shawnee tribes in the state of Oklahoma. We don't have federally recognized Shawnee tribes elsewhere. So all three of us are here. I believe, in the other two as well, a female has never been elected as a chief.
It's been very difficult to elect females, even as president of our United States. That's something that has not happened. In 2006, I actually had several men who said, 'I really think I want to vote for you, but I don't know that females should be chiefs or that females can be leaders like males can be.'
And yes, I am proud of being the first elected female chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, but I'm more proud of the fact that I have been re-elected four times. That's something that I have to be proud of, and hopefully something that transcends to other tribes and other people: to realize that women, we aren't excellent chiefs simply because we are women. But nor are men excellent chiefs simply because they are men. People are excellent because of qualities other than their gender.
Liese: Being a leader for so many years, do you think that perception has changed?
Wallace: Yes. After that first term, I had several friends of mine who said, 'I don't have any qualms at all now about voting for you.'
Here in Ottawa County, we have nine federally recognized tribes. Those nine tribes meet together monthly at what we call an Inter-tribal Council meeting, and we refer to that as ITC. So the first time that I appeared as chief at ITC, it was eight males and one female. Now we've had some deaths, and we've had a resignation. But just recently, within the last two years, it was four female chiefs.
Liese: One legacy you leave behind is how you boosted the presence of Shawnee people in the Buckeye State. Talk to me more about the Ohio partnerships and why this was important to you.
Wallace: We are Eastern Shawnee, and we are right on the border of Oklahoma and Missouri. I lived two miles from the headquarters, but I lived in the state of Missouri. I had some opportunities that came to me solely because I lived in Missouri. That's because of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery and Expedition, which occurred more than 200 years ago, and the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial was going to occur in 2003.
In the year 2000, I worked at Crowder College, and the president, the CEO of the Humanities in the entire state of Missouri, knew that the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition was going to occur. It just happened that the president of the college where I worked was on that board of directors. My college president said, 'We have one on our faculty who is active in her tribe.' I was on the business committee for 18 years prior to my becoming chief. So that gentleman came down to see me, to ask me if I would present some programs, and I would talk about my tribe and other tribes. When he came, I said, 'No, I can't do that.' I had to explain to him. The Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830. We signed a treaty in 1831, and we — meaning the mixed band of Senecas and Shawnees — were living on a reservation there in Ohio, and we were the first ones to be forcibly removed from the state of Ohio.
Our ancestors walked or rode on horseback from Ohio to this area, a distance of some 700 to 800 miles. It took them four months to do so. Our people walked in September, October, and November and arrived here in December, which is a cold month. Money all gone. Food all gone. No crops to pick, not a time to plant. So my tribe got down into the late 1800s to having only 60-some people. We did not know our history in 2000.
I researched constantly, as much as I could while keeping my full-time job from 2000 to 2003. So I learned a great deal about Ohio from that. Weekends and summers, I worked with the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery, giving speeches, talking about Eastern Shawnees, talking about tribes in general. That's from 2000 to 2006 — those are the years that prepared me for the election for chief. In 2007, I read where an author by the name of John Sugden, who was the primary person that I trusted and read everything that he wrote about the Shawnees, was going to be lecturing at Ohio State University. I drove there, visited with him and learned that the next day this was a speaker series. It was a requirement of the speaker to go to a place called Newark. It was Newark Earthworks. I had never heard of it, but went along simply because I would continue to be able to visit with John Sugden.
I arrived at Newark Earthworks to learn that it is one of the most beautiful mounds that there could be. But the Ohio History Society had signed a 99-year lease with the Mound Builders Country Club, and that 99-year lease enabled them to put a golf course on top of those mounds, and they were having a golf tournament there that day. I was appalled. The 30 seconds of beauty and awe and pride turned into tears and questions. And what do I do next?
At that time, Ohio History Society was not contacting any of the tribes at all. I was the first. And then we got a second tribe involved. Then Ohio History Society became Ohio History Connection, and we developed a conference that occurs there in Columbus, Ohio, every single year. Today, Ohio History Connection communicates regularly with more than 45 tribes, and that came out of that visit to Newark Earthworks because I had never heard of them.
Liese: The mound that you visited, is it still a golf course or a country club there?
Wallace: When we decided to work for World Heritage Status, we tried to do eminent domain and take that back, but they had a lease, and it was a valid lease. So we had to go to court, and we had to sue them. We won; they appealed. We had to go back to court. We won. They appealed again.
So when we received World Heritage designation in 2023, the golf course was still there. Ohio had its first celebration the following January. I did not go back and participate in that deliberately because the golf course was still there. And we won again. The golf course is now removed, and Ohio History has complete control over two of the eight mounds now: the Octagon and the Great Circle. And so once the golf course was gone and they had another celebration, I went back and participated in that celebration.
Liese: I guess just to like pull on that thread a little more. What does it mean to you personally to be able to have had success like this in preserving the legacy of your ancestors in a state that they were forcibly removed from?
Wallace: In 2023, I flew to Saudi Arabia for the World Heritage hearing. 21 countries make the decision. 350-some pages in length. We had the best people in the world do the research and do the mathematics.
You need to realize that a couple of nominations before us, that panel deliberated, asked questions and did not seem satisfied for two and one half hours with that particular nomination. They did not give them World Heritage status. And I'm sitting there in that building listening to all of that and thinking, I don't believe I can answer all the questions for two and one half hours.
When it came to us, they approved us in three minutes. They said ours was the best nomination that they had received in years and years. So what does that mean to me? What it means is it changes the vocabulary because my entire life I have heard my ancestors referred to as savages.
At this hearing, there was never a question about the majestic qualities of the mounds. There was never a question about how they should be recognized. In that two minutes, this designation of World Heritage proved that they were geniuses.
Liese: What's your hope for the tribe?
Wallace: One of our challenges is that only our citizenship was down to the 60s. As I said, now we are just above 4,000. But of those 4,000 people, only 34% live here in Oklahoma. So it is a challenge for us to establish connections with the people who are spread throughout the United States. That's one of the reasons the powwow is important. That's one of the reasons the history summit today is important.
We provide gas money for certain mileage that people have to travel to make it more affordable for them to come here. So how do we get them to connect with their tribe? It's important to have monthly newsletters. I have provided and sponsored, I don't know, six or seven travel trips. We just returned in July from going to nine states in the Ohio River Valley. So it's teaching them, taking them to the historical places, because we can document that we lived in 27 different states.
I try to be accessible. I try to always publicize not just the tribal number, but my personal phone number, my personal address, my personal mailing address, where I can be reached so that trying to build that connection.
And now we own some property in Ohio. We have developed what we call the Ohio Project. We are hoping to go back to Ohio, and we are hoping to be able to go to the legislature and ask for that land to be placed in trust. And no tribe has any land in trust in Ohio today.
Liese: How many acres?
Wallace: 52, I believe. It's not massive. But when my ancestors, our ancestors, signed the treaty in 1831, it indicated that we were going to receive 60,000 acres. Now again, remember that's two tribes because it was the mixed band of Senecas and Shawnees. We ended up with 58.19 acres, where we are today. It was all in a floodplain. So we have had to move to a new location, and we want people to come back and to join us.
Liese: If and when it does go into trust with the federal government, what's the plan after that? Are you hoping to open something on that land?
Wallace: We have a company called Eastern Shawnee Companies that does federal contracting with the federal government. We don't have any contracts with Ohio, and so that would be first.
Ohio people are less knowledgeable about our history than we are. And I'll give you a story to illustrate that: two years ago, the governor, he was raised in the area where he just built a brand new museum called Great Council Park. Because it's on Shawnee land, he dedicated it to the three federally recognized Shawnee tribes here in Oklahoma. We went there for the grand opening and took a busload of about 60 people. We decided that we wanted to make T-shirts with our names on them — all the same color so we could identify each other and so others would know that the Eastern Shawnee were proud to be there. So we had about 60 people, including myself, wearing those T-shirts. Two ladies stopped me. One lady, in rather a harsh voice, said, 'Where did you get those T-shirts?' I said, 'We made them.'
She said, 'Who's we?' I said, 'Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.' She asked, 'What are you doing here in Ohio? And Eastern Shawnee Tribe, does that mean Indians?' And I said, 'Yes, ma'am.' And then she said, 'You all know how to make T-shirts?'
She did not mean that with criticism. She did not mean that as a put-down. It is a lack of information, lack of knowledge, lack of awareness. So yes, we would like to place a museum to add to the culture to Ohio. We wouldn't be part of Ohio History Connection, but we would love to be able to have resources in that area where people would know more about Indians. So many of them associate us with what life was like in 1800. And again, that word 'savage.' We would like to be the first, and hopefully it would grow with other tribes returning and having a presence there as well.
So we've talked a lot about Ohio. What has happened here in Ottawa County for our tribe? We started bingo in 1984. I was not on the business committee at that time, so I'm not responsible for that. But they made a wise decision to save the money. When they had enough, the first thing they did with that money was to go and buy 112 acres up on Highway 10, which is out of the floodplain. So we have had to relocate our entire complex. When I became chief, there was one building on that complex. Now it's a beautiful complex and we have building after building. We've added programs. We didn't have an early childhood learning center. We opened it 10 years ago; we had 20 children. Today we serve 140.
We've just been in our powwow, and we have a special red dress competition. That red dress is because of the number of Indigenous women who are missing or murdered. We have a very strong Haven program, where we have six tiny houses where we can give refuge to those women who need to get out of that situation and need protection for a while. They serve more than 260 cases each year.
We're on the border of a little town called Seneca, Missouri, and it has a population of 2,300. It does not have a swimming pool. We have built a wonderful wellness center four miles from here. Open to anyone and everyone. Yes, we have fees, but they are lower than any place you will ever go. And we have between 4,500 and 5,000 visits a month to show you how many people come there.
We have built a splash pad for our young. We keep it open on weekends for the general public free, so that they can come. Many tribes have splash pads, but we were the first in the area to incorporate our history and our culture into that splash pad. So we have pavers in the sidewalks that tell you the date that we had to leave Ohio and how many days our people walked. We have our entire journey written in concrete there.
Liese: How do you want to be remembered after you retire?
Wallace: I don't think it's necessary to remember me. It's the tribe that I want remembered, and I want the tribe to grow, but not just numerically. I want them to grow in pride. I want them to grow in participating. I want those voting numbers to be increased. I want their lives for them to realize that they have abilities and they can make their lives more productive. And if that happens, then that's beautiful.
So I want to be known as a chief who cared for her people, a chief who wanted the best for her people, a chief who tried to be available to her people, a chief who tried to teach their history and encourage them to always remember our ancestors and that we come from not just geniuses, but uncommon geniuses.
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