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  • Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830–1977 by Katherine M. B. Osburn
  • Nicholas A. Timmerman (bio)
Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830–1977
University of Nebraska Press, 2014
by Katherine M. B. Osburn

THE MISSISSIPPI BAND OF CHOCTAW INDIANS of the twenty-first century poses a historic conundrum to the dominant biracial history of the state. Katherine Osburn’s Choctaw Resurgence expertly reorients the conversation on race relations in Mississippi by focusing on the marginalized Choctaw and presenting the argument for a triracial history. Osburn skillfully examines the story of Choctaw resurgence from 1830 to 1977, and successfully explains the Choctaw miracle of the late twentieth century. The popular narrative portrays Southeastern American Indians removed to reservations west of the Mississippi River by the mid-nineteenth century, but countless American Indian individuals quietly remained behind, holding tightly to portions of their ancestral homeland. Osburn convincingly argues that the story of the Mississippi Choctaw is one of resilience. In the 150 years since the removal era, the Choctaw struggled to operate within the racial hierarchy of the Jim Crow South, successfully negotiated their relationship between the state and federal government to seek recognition and eventual self-determination, and carefully navigated the volatile civil rights era of the mid-twentieth century to maintain their course of active nation building.

According to Osburn, the Choctaw negotiated Article 14 within the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek of 1830, which offered a path to remain in Mississippi and access to limited citizenship. Combined with Choctaw participation in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War and the rise of Lost Cause ideology, the Choctaw slowly garnered support from white Mississippians and a place within the racial hierarchy. Osburn effectively argues that the Choctaw utilized race to separate themselves from African Americans by establishing connections to popular myths about American Indians. The Choctaw asserted their Indian ethnicity “through crafts, stickball games, dances, and tribal fairs. They acted as anthropological informants and subjects of anthropometric study, spoke with journalists, lobbied for legislation, testified before congressional committees, filed lawsuits, and instituted claims with the Indian Claims Commission” (4). The Choctaw withstood a second removal attempt in 1898 by gaining the favor of local white individuals and adopting federal blood quantum requirements proposed in the Dawes Act of [End Page 197] 1887. Osburn persuasively demonstrates that by maintaining distance from African Americans and firmly preserving their “Indianness,” the Choctaw attracted the support of unlikely Mississippi politicians. Senators James Vardaman, John Sharp Williams, and Theodore Bilbo diligently lobbied for federal assistance for the Choctaw in the early twentieth century. Choctaw diligence and the work of these senators eventually led to federal recognition in 1945.

Osburn cleverly challenges the common narrative of Mississippi civil rights activity by including conversations about Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and Fannie Lou Hamer along with Choctaw activism. Osburn demonstrates that the grassroots civil rights activity in Mississippi took place a few miles from the Choctaw reservation. Even though the Mississippi Choctaw maintained their distance from the overt African American civil rights movement, they fought for issues relevant to their people in a “distinctly Indian” manner (183). Activism looked different because their battles were concentrated at the federal level versus the state level. Osburn clearly argues that Choctaw civil rights activity connected them to larger national pan-Indian issues focused on reservation termination, relocation policies, and sovereignty. The Mississippi Choctaw joined national organizations like the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA) and the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), and they established a regional pan-Indian organization known as the United Southeastern Tribes Inc. (USET) that worked toward regional tribal sovereignty.

Osburn’s Choctaw Resurgence fills a tremendous void in the historiography of post–removal era, Southeastern American Indian studies. The field remains meager; however, Osburn sets the bar high by skillfully exploring the role of the state in mitigating poverty, including American Indians in larger conversations on Southern civil rights, examining tribal resurgence in the American Southeast, and analyzing race and gender constructions in identity formation for the Choctaw in the twentieth century. Osburn could have...

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