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“Tomorrow is the day you are chief!” roared Hollis Roberts to a crowd of about four hundred on the eve of the 1995 Choctaw tribal election. “you call the shots! Do you want your friends and neighbors lifted up? Or, do you want to slip back and go by the wayside? . . . Do you want to continue to advance? Or do you want to slide back to the last seventy years?” The audience, packed tightly into a newly refurbished auditorium in Talihina in the geographic center of the Choctaw Nation, sat quietly and nearly motionless during the election-eve speech of the graying fifty-twoyear -old who had served as Choctaw chief for the past seventeen years. Under the lights, he looked visibly weary, perhaps even a bit discouraged , as he addressed the Choctaw people for what his opponents hoped would be the last time. Roberts was said to have confessed to one of his employees earlier that week that it had been a difficult campaign, one of the hardest of his political career. During the past several months, “the trash tellers,” as he called them, had helped his opponents wage what a coalition of 131 female tribal employees had collectively described in a letter to the Choctaw people as a “mean-spirited,” “slanderous,” and “spiteful” campaign to “destroy” their “decent and honorable employer” who was “a dedicated family man” (Robinson, Ketchum, Easterwood et al. to enrolled Choctaws 1995). Yet it was not this “mudslinging,” as Roberts and his employees had called it in a different letter to the Choctaw people, that had made this campaign Roberts’s most difficult (Hollis E. Roberts to enrolled Choctaws, June 1995). It was the fact that less than a month before the election a federal grand jury had indicted the chief 4. “Tomorrow Is the Day you Are Chief” Leaders, Citizens, and Political Groups in the 1995 Election “tomorrow is the day you are chief” 112 on two counts of aggravated sexual abuse, five counts of abusive sexual contact, and one count of sexual abuse.1 Almost two years after he went on to win the 1995 election, Roberts was convicted on four of these counts, forcing his resignation and beginning his eleven-year imprisonment .2 Two years before his conviction, in the confines of an auditorium packed with many of his most ardent supporters, Roberts could almost maintain the illusion that these charges were not looming large over his campaign as well as his person. Before he rose to speak that night in Talihina , eight leaders had addressed the crowd, one after another, to support his reelection. Among those selected for these talks were Assistant Chief Greg Pyle, two members of the tribal council, the mayor of Talihina (who happened to be a former tribal council member), and a former lieutenant governor of Oklahoma. Through these endorsements, Roberts hoped to persuade Choctaw voters that there was a consensus of support for his reelection not only among the rest of the elected Choctaw tribal leadership but also among the leaders of Oklahoma state and town governments . Roberts knew that many of his constituents believed that the support of both Indian and non-Indian leaders is critical to the ability of a Choctaw chief to get things done. Events such as the Talihina campaign rally provide opportunities to examine who and what the Choctaws are in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The political rhetoric deployed by the chief and others during this event invokes Choctaw ideas as to what constitutes a “strong” tribe, by what measures we feel that the state of our tribal nation should be evaluated, the character of our leaders’ relationships with our people, and Choctaw models of the tribe’s citizenry. In addition, events such as the Talihina rally provide forums for the Choctaw citizenry to respond informally to the rhetoric of tribal politicians. Citizens have conversations in parking lots before or after such events, make quips during leaders’ speeches, and issue invitations to friends of friends—or even to strangers—to attend, for example, the next meeting of a group of Choctaws of one-quarter or more Choctaw “blood quantum.” At the base of the structures through which Choctaws are expressing and negotiating their ideas about the past, present, and future of our tribe and the meanings of being Choctaw are the reinstituted relations of citizenship that bind together enrolled Choctaws and that formally link them to the Choctaw tribal government. Like many other...

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