The Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma’s tribal mortgage program has passed $100 million in originations through more than 1,000 loans, a number unthinkable even a dozen years ago.
The Nation’s Chuka Chukmasi program was started in 1998 amid a lot of publicity about the lack of mortgages to American Indians on their homelands. But while a lot of promises got made back then, most of them proved ephemeral, while Chuka Chukmasi went steadily on, year after year, making mortgages to people in its tribal area in south central Oklahoma and around the country.
Just a few years before Chuka Chukmasi (the name means “beautiful home” in the Chickasaw language) got started, the General Accounting Office (as it was known then) surveyed the hundreds of Indian tribes with reservations in America, most of them small but cumulatively, thanks to a few big ones, living on a piece of ground about the size of Utah.
It could find only a pathetic 91 mortgages made on these homelands between the years 1992 and 1996.
An asterisk needs to be inserted here because in Oklahoma, reservations were abolished many years ago. On reservations, where land is held by the United States government in trust for tribes, mortgages are not easy. (Think, for instance, about trying to get a mortgage in Yellowstone Park.) In Oklahoma, where the land status is mostly “fee simple” (private property), there is no great land status barrier. But there are plenty of others.
Chuka Chukmasi, based in the Chickasaw capital of Ada, Okla., is not a lender itself. The Chickasaw Nation Division of Housing and Tribal Development, headed by Kay Perry, refers people to First Mortgage, an Oklahoma City lender led by Ron McCord, a former top officer of the national Mortgage Bankers Association, which extends the mortgages.
Chuka Chukmasi has another program going, to help with the problem of lack of construction lending in its area. This program has extended $15 million in loans, building houses that then get permanent mortgages.
The Nation, Gov. Bill Anoatubby, Perry and her team deserve congratulations for their determined effort to bring the benefits of homeownership to their people.
In addition, the Chickasaw Nation also owns a bank, Bank2 of Oklahoma City, which last year ranked seventh in the country in mortgages to American Indians.
