Aug. 24, 2026, 12:33 p.m. ET
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Tulsa, Oklahoma
On East 11th Street in Tulsa, Route 66 is hard to miss.
Neon signs crowd the old highway through the Meadow Gold District. Murals, giant roadside figures, and the familiar red, white, and blue shield turn the block into a bright distillation of the Mother Road – nostalgic, playful, and designed to be understood through a windshield.
Inside Southwest Trading Company, however, David Bible refuses to sell anything bearing the highway’s logo.
Some Native American communities push back on stereotypes used to market businesses along Route 66. But they also know that the road attracts people who can be customers for their businesses, and who may listen to the true stories of Indigenous people in the American southwest.
“We could do the Route 66 emblem and hang some feathers off of it,” he says. People would buy it, too; nearly half the store’s customers are travelers.
But the shop, run by Mr. Bible and his daughters, carries no such design. “That’s not who we are.”
That small refusal opens onto a larger Indigenous encounter with Route 66. More than half of its 2,400 miles cross Indian Country, often following older Native paths through communities that predated it.
For nearly a century, roadside businesses turned Indigenous identity into a reliable commercial trope: a generalized “Indian” assembled from headdresses, tipis, and Hollywood Westerns, detached from the nations whose lands the highway crossed.
Now, tribal governments and tourism groups are using the centennial to tell another story: Native nations as founders of towns, owners of land, and as sovereign governments, while directing travelers toward tribal museums and Native-owned businesses.
This is reclamation, but also commerce. Mr. Bible sees reason for caution. What connects these approaches is a demand for control over the story, the identity being marketed, and the money travelers bring.
On his father’s side, Mr. Bible is Muscogee, of the Bird Clan, and on his mother’s side Hopi, of the Coyote Clan. As a child in the 1960s and ’70s, he rode Route 66 west nearly every year in his family’s station wagon to visit Hopi relatives in Arizona.
Outside were giant chiefs, wigwam motels, and trading posts that made the American Indian one of Route 66’s oldest roadside attractions.
Mr. Bible’s family now sells work by Native artists, along with affordable, mass-produced merchandise bearing Native designs. Yet during the highway’s centennial, as neighboring businesses lean harder into its mythology, Mr. Bible holds it at arm’s length.
Pressed on whether he is merely indifferent, he concedes “a little bit of active hostility,” even though “it would benefit our business,” he adds.