Searching For The Bright Path

Blending an engaging narrative style with broader theoretical considerations, James Taylor Carson offers the most complete history to date of the Mississippi Choctaws. Tracing the Choctaws from their origins in the Mississippian cultures of late prehistory to the early nineteenth century, Carson shows how the Choctaws struggled to adapt to life in a New World altered radically by contact while retaining their sense of identity and place. Despite changes in subsistence practices and material culture, the Choctaws made every effort to retain certain core cultural beliefs and sensibilities, a strategy they conceived of as following ?the straight bright path.? This work also makes a significant theoretical contribution to ethnohistory as Carson confronts common problems in the historical analysis of Native peoples.

In the past two decades, new research and thinking have dramatically reshaped our understanding of Choctaw history before removal. Greg O’Brien brings together in a single volume ten groundbreaking essays that reveal where Choctaw history has been and where it is going. Distinguished scholars James Taylor Carson, Patricia Galloway, and Clara Sue Kidwell join editor Greg O’Brien to present today’s most important research, while Choctaw writer and filmmaker LeAnne Howe offers a vital counterpoint to conventional scholarly views. In a chronological survey of topics spanning the precontact era to the 1830s, essayists take stock of the great achievements in recent Choctaw ethnohistory. Galloway explains the Choctaw civil war as an interethnic conflict. Carson reassesses the role of Chief Greenwood LeFlore. Kidwell explores the interaction of Choctaws and Christian missionaries. A new essay by O’Brien explores the role of Choctaws during the American Revolution as they decided whom to support and why. The previously unpublished proceedings of the 1786 Hopewell treaty reveal what that agreement meant to the Choctaws. Taken together, these and other essays show how ethnohistorical approaches and the “new Indian history” have influenced modern Choctaw scholarship. No other recent collection focuses exclusively on the Choctaws, making Pre-removal Choctaw History an indispensable resource for scholars and students of American Indian history, ethnohistory, and anthropology.

When the Choctaws were removed from their Mississippi homeland to Indian Territory in 1830, several thousand remained behind, planning to take advantage of Article 14 in the removal treaty, which promised that any Choctaws who wished to remain in Mississippi could apply for allotments of land. When the remaining Choctaws applied for their allotments, however, the government reneged, and the Choctaws were left dispossessed and impoverished. Thus begins the history of the Mississippi Choctaws as a distinct people. Despite overwhelming poverty and significant racial prejudice in the rural South, the Mississippi Choctaws managed, over the course of a century and a half, to maintain their ethnic identity, persuade the Office of Indian Affairs to provide them with services and lands, create a functioning tribal government, and establish a prosperous and stable reservation economy. The Choctaws’ struggle against segregation in the 1950s and 1960s is an overlooked story of the civil rights movement, and this study of white supremacist support for Choctaw tribalism considerably complicates our understanding of southern history. Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi traces the Choctaw’s remarkable tribal rebirth, attributing it to their sustained political and social activism.

Through stories of a dozen white adopters, adopted Indian children, and their Native parents in early America, Dawn Peterson shows the role adoption and assimilation played in efforts to subdue Native peoples. As adults, adoptees used their education to thwart U.S. claims to their homelands, setting the stage for the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Choctaw Language and Culture combines a beginning language and grammar text with a selection of essays on Choctaw history, language, and culture from prehistoric times to the present. In part one of the book, "Chahta Anumpa," Marcia Haag, a linguist, and Henry Willis, a native speaker and Choctaw instructor, present the Choctaw language. Each chapter begins with a conversation or a Choctaw story. Designed for classroom use and to preserve the rich heritage of the Choctaw language, the lessons introduce new words, explain sentence construction and correct usage, and provide exercises in grammar and composition. Part two, "Kaniohmichi-hosh Okchayat Il-asha ("The Way We Live")," contains essays on Choctaw history and culture written especially for this volume by leading scholars in anthropology, history, linguistics, archaeology, and Native American studies. Beginning with "The Ancient Ones," the chapters describe Choctaw prehistory, daily life before contact, ritual and religion, trade, removal to Indian Territory, schools, newspapers, and contemporary life.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, over twenty different American Indian tribal groups inhabited present-day Mississippi. Today, Mississippi is home to only one tribe, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. In Mississippi’s American Indians, author James F. Barnett Jr. explores the historical forces and processes that led to this sweeping change in the diversity of the state’s native peoples. The book begins with a chapter on Mississippi’s approximately 12,000-year prehistory, from early hunter-gatherer societies through the powerful mound building civilizations encountered by the first European expeditions. With the coming of the Spanish, French, and English to the New World, native societies in the Mississippi region connected with the Atlantic market economy, a source for guns, blankets, and many other trade items. Europeans offered these trade materials in exchange for Indian slaves and deerskins, currencies that radically altered the relationships between tribal groups. Smallpox and other diseases followed along the trading paths. Colonial competition between the French and English helped to spark the Natchez rebellion, the Chickasaw-French wars, the Choctaw civil war, and a half-century of client warfare between the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 forced Mississippi’s pro-French tribes to move west of the Mississippi River. The Diaspora included the Tunicas, Houmas, Pascagoulas, Biloxis, and a portion of the Choctaw confederacy. In the early nineteenth century, Mississippi’s remaining Choctaws and Chickasaws faced a series of treaties with the United States government that ended in destitution and removal. Despite the intense pressures of European invasion, the Mississippi tribes survived by adapting and contributing to their rapidly evolving world.

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces. In Choctaw Confederates, Fay A. Yarbrough reveals that, while sovereignty and states' rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation's support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape. By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery.

In the mid-1840s, Warner McCary, an ex-slave from Mississippi, claimed a new identity for himself, traveling around the nation as Choctaw performer "Okah Tubbee." He soon married Lucy Stanton, a divorced white Mormon woman from New York, who likewise claimed to be an Indian and used the name "Laah Ceil." Together, they embarked on an astounding, sometimes scandalous journey across the United States and Canada, performing as American Indians for sectarian worshippers, theater audiences, and patent medicine seekers. Along the way, they used widespread notions of "Indianness" to disguise their backgrounds, justify their marriage, and make a living. In doing so, they reflected and shaped popular ideas about what it meant to be an American Indian in the mid-nineteenth century. Weaving together histories of slavery, Mormonism, popular culture, and American medicine, Angela Pulley Hudson offers a fascinating tale of ingenuity, imposture, and identity. While illuminating the complex relationship between race, religion, and gender in nineteenth-century North America, Hudson reveals how the idea of the "Indian" influenced many of the era's social movements. Through the remarkable lives of Tubbee and Ceil, Hudson uncovers both the complex and fluid nature of antebellum identities and the place of "Indianness" at the very heart of American culture.