Presidents rarely visit Indian Country. Trump’s planned Choctaw Nation rally will be the latest

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — President Donald Trump is holding a campaign rally on the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma on Thursday, putting him in the company of just a handful of U.S. presidents who have visited tribal nations while in office.

The rally is part of Trump’s recent campaign push through deep red states, where he has been stumping for Republican candidates and promoting his agenda ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The Choctaw Nation is renting its venue for the rally but not sponsoring the event, it said.

“We hope his visit provides an opportunity to learn more about what we do as a sovereign nation for our members and for all people in southeast Oklahoma,” Choctaw Nation Principal Chief Gary Batton said in a statement.

It's not the first time Trump has been to a tribal nation. In the homestretch of the 2020 election campaign, Trump visited the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina and endorsed its push to secure federal recognition as a tribal nation, which he signed into law in 2025.

Tribal delegations have been meeting with presidents in Washington since the Early Republic, but presidential visits to reservations have been few and far between. The purpose and tone of those visits have changed dramatically as the relationship between the U.S. and tribal nations has evolved.

What was likely the first visit to a reservation by a sitting U.S. president occurred by happenstance. While traveling to Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1883, President Chester A. Arthur met with Shoshone and Arapaho leaders on the Wind River Reservation and complimented the tribes’ “practice of industrial pursuits,” according to an account by Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan at the time.

While there, Arthur’s delegation pressed Shoshone Chief Washakie and Arapaho Chief Black Coal to consent to breaking up the reservation they shared into private parcels — a move aimed at dismantling tribal sovereignty and solving what Arthur termed the “Indian problem.” Both chiefs refused.

Other early presidential visits to tribal land similarly reflected an era when the U.S. tried to undermine tribal sovereignty and assimilate Native people into white society. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1903 trek to Havasupai land at the bottom of the Grand Canyon preceded the forced removal of that tribe to make way for a national park.

During his 1927 visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, President Calvin Coolidge promoted assimilationist boarding schools.

President Bill Clinton made Pine Ridge a stop on his 1999 “New Markets Tour,” billing the visit as the first by a sitting president to tribal land since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1934 trip to the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. Clinton acknowledged the federal government failed to meet its obligations to hundreds of tribal nations and called for investment in Pine Ridge's economy.

“We have tried to have a more respectful, more proper relationship with the tribal governments of this country, to promote more genuine independence, but also to give more genuine support,” Clinton said.

In 2014, President Barack Obama met with Dakota youths and attended a powwow on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, speaking about expanding economic and educational opportunities in Indian Country and promoting tribes' inherent right to govern themselves. The following year, Obama spent time in the Iñupiaq village of Kotzebue in Alaska, highlighting the impacts of climate change on Arctic communities.

In 2024, President Joe Biden traveled to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona to formally apologize for the federal government’s role in separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to attend boarding schools run by the U.S. and churches. A probe by Biden’s administration found that in addition to being stripped of their languages and cultures, many of those children experienced physical, emotional and sexual abuse. At least 970 died, and federal officials acknowledged the true number is likely higher.

Speaking alongside boarding school survivors and their descendants, Biden called that 150-year era a “blot on American history.”

“It’s a sin on our soul,” Biden said. “Quite frankly, there’s no excuse that this apology took 50 years to make.”

The visit marked a rare acknowledgment of the assimilationist policies that shaped some of the earliest presidential encounters with tribal nations.

This story is published through the Global Indigenous Reporting Network at The Associated Press.

FILE - Attendees clap at an event with President Joe Biden at the Gila Crossing Community School in the Gila River Indian Community reservation in Laveen, Ariz., Friday, Oct. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta,File)

FILE - President Barack Obama participates in a performance by native Alaskan dancers at Dillingham Middle School, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2015, in Dillingham, Alaska. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik,File)

FILE - President Joe Biden speaks at the Gila Crossing Community School in the Gila River Indian Community reservation in Laveen, Ariz., Friday, Oct. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta,File)

FILE - President Clinton waves as he takes the stage with Harold Salway, tribal president of the Oglala Sioux nation Wednesday, July 7, 1999 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in S.D. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite,File)

FILE - President Barack Obama talks to two young boys during a Native American dance on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation Friday, June 13, 2014, photo in Cannon Ball, N.D. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast,File)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian drone struck a school in Kyiv on Thursday, city officials said, as the Ukrainian capital endured another day of relentless aerial attacks.

Children and staff at the school were in shelters when the drone hit, Mayor Vitalii Klitschko said, and its warhead didn’t explode. No casualties were reported, but the building’s brick facade showed a large hole, revealing a staircase, and burn marks alongside smashed windows.

Kyiv has felt like a city under siege in recent weeks, with repeated air raid alerts, punctuated by loud explosions from drone and missile strikes. The onslaught aims to terrorize civilians, officials and analysts say, and break their will to resist 4½ years after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The strain is showing. Maryna Lystopad, 35, said her hair has started falling out due to the stress from escalating attacks and never knowing where the next attack will hit.

"It’s really horrible. I can’t take it anymore. I think, I think that soon we’re all going to leave. I’m really not doing well,” she told The Associated Press. “I’m constantly anxious. I can’t relax. I keep thinking that if something happens, if something hits, one of my relatives could be killed.”

Lystopad said she recently had to travel to another part of Kyiv and had been “genuinely stressed" the whole way there.

“I kept checking, like, whether anything was flying in, where it was going, where am I supposed to go? Where am I supposed to run?” she said.

The front line in eastern and southern Ukraine hasn’t seen major shifts since last year, but the country is struggling to fend off Russia’s intensified aerial attacks on cities that include ballistic missiles and high-flying jet-powered drones.

In response, Ukraine has fired its long-range drones at manufacturing plants deep inside Russia and has targeted Russia’s drone launch sites. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that Kyiv’s forces struck a site in Russia’s southwestern Oryol region that is used to store and launch attack drones.

To turn the tide, Ukraine needs U.S.-made Patriot missiles that can effectively defend against ballistic missiles, but they are in short supply since the Iran war began. A plan to produce them inside Ukraine could take years to bear fruit.

Kyiv is racing to produce interceptors that can bring down fast-moving jet-propelled drones as the swift cycle of military innovation during the war continues.

Ukraine also wants tougher sanctions imposed on Russia to prevent it from getting key high-tech components for its arsenal.

Britain on Thursday imposed sanctions on 31 Russian individuals, entities and ships it says are linked to disinformation, attempts to avoid energy sanctions and the mistreatment of Ukrainian civilians in areas seized in the war by Russia.

Moscow, meanwhile, is pressing its advantage before Ukraine comes up with an answer to the latest challenges.

Two Russian drones hit an important bridge across the Dnipro River in Kyiv on Thursday, Klitschko said, with traffic suspended until a safety inspection could be done.

Ukrainian officials didn’t report any energy infrastructure being hit Thursday, a day after what officials said was the biggest Russian attack on the power grid since spring.

Wednesday's barrage marked “the beginning of Russia’s strike campaign aimed at degrading Ukraine’s energy security ahead of winter … and forcing Ukraine to capitulate,” said the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.

Russia is expected to step up attacks on the electricity supply as the weather gets colder. It was 19 degrees Celsius (66 F) in Kyiv on Thursday, and mild temperatures were set to continue.

In a surprise development, Russia for the first time on Wednesday used a jet-powered drone fitted with a warhead designed to sever high-voltage pylons, said Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Zelenskyy on defense technology.

AP reporter Volodymr Yurchuk in Kyiv contributed.

Follow the AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

A police officer carries fragments of a Shahed drone in front of a school damaged by a Russian strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A police officer and a rescue worker carry an unexploded warhead from a Shahed drone out of a school damaged by a Russian strike on Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Police officers carry an unexploded warhead from a Shahed drone out of a school damaged by a Russian strike on Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Police officers look at a school damaged by a Russian drone strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)