Oklahoma State Coat of Arms

Oklahoma's coat of arms is the same design as the Great Seal of Oklahoma, defined in Oklahoma Statutes Title 25, § 91. The central image is a large five-pointed star. Each of its five points contains the official seal of one of the Five Civilized Tribes, and the star's center shows a handshake between a Native American warrior and a frontiersman.

Forty-six small stars ring the outer border of the design. The state motto, Labor Omnia Vincit, appears on the seal's outer ring. Unlike most state coats of arms, Oklahoma's does not use a divided heraldic shield. The five-pointed star is the structural core, and the five tribal seals inside it make the design unlike any other in the United States.

Oklahoma's coat of arms was adopted on November 16, 1907, the same day President Theodore Roosevelt signed the proclamation admitting Oklahoma to the Union as the 46th state. The design was prepared by the constitutional convention that met in Guthrie in 1906 and 1907. The convention's task was unusual: it had to create a state emblem that represented two distinct territories with two very different populations.

The eastern half of the new state had been Indian Territory, governed for decades by the Five Civilized Tribes after the federal government forced their removal from the southeastern United States in the 1830s. The western half, Oklahoma Territory, had been opened to non-Native settlement in the Land Run of April 22, 1889. The two territories operated under separate administrations for nearly two decades before Congress directed their merger under the Enabling Act of 1906.

The constitutional convention's answer to the design problem was the five-pointed star. Each point could hold one tribal seal, placing all five nations visually within the new state's emblem on equal terms. The handshake at the center made the merger's intent explicit. The 46 border stars fixed the moment: this was the 46th state, admitted in 1907.

The design has not changed since adoption. No legislature has altered the composition, the tribal seals, the handshake, or the border count.

Oklahoma's coat of arms packs its history into a small number of precisely chosen images. Each element refers to a specific political or geographic fact about how the state came to exist.

The Oklahoma coat of arms solves a design problem that no other state faced. It had to represent two territories, five sovereign tribal nations, and a settler population that had only arrived eighteen years before statehood. The five-pointed star solved the first problem by giving each tribal nation a dedicated point. The handshake solved the second by placing both cultures at the exact center.

The 46 border stars do what most border decorations do not: they carry a specific count. Each star is a state, and the count stops at 46 because that is where Oklahoma entered. The design is dated by its own geometry.

The motto at the outer edge, Labor Omnia Vincit, connects both populations through the one thing they shared: the work of building farms and communities on the southern plains. It is a modest claim for an emblem that carries an unusually complicated history.

Oklahoma's coat of arms has retained its original composition since adoption on November 16, 1907. The five-pointed star, the five tribal seals, the central handshake, the 46 border stars, and the motto have not changed. No redesign of the elements has been authorized by the legislature.