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At a regular session of the Choctaw Nation Tribal Council in the summer of 1992, tribal councilman Charley Jones reported on his recent trip to France. Representing the Choctaw Nation, Mr. Jones said that he was one of seven “ambassadors” from “various Indian nations” with whom the French government “wished to renew their friendship.” “We were given a royal reception. . . . We were received by diplomats, dignitaries and industrialists,” Jones told the council and the Choctaw citizenry. “The French government paid for everything.” To honor the Choctaws for their contributions to France during the eighteenth century, he continued, the French presented the Choctaws with a tract of French land. Mr. Jones paused as he looked at his fellow council members, then surveyed the audience with his eyes. Stiffening in his seat, he added that, at one point during the trip, he slipped into a French bank to cash a check. “I didn’t have my passport on me, and they would not accept any other [form of] I.D. I [then] pulled out my tribal membership card. They cashed the check immediately.” For a few seconds, the council sat motionless . Then multiple-term council members Bertram Bobb and Ted Dosh, together with my own councilman, Perry Thompson, raised their eyebrows and nodded their heads in approval. Speaker of the Tribal Council Randle Durant cleared his throat and let out a short, soft chuckle. They were impressed by behavior that, it was said, indicated that the French government and the French people treated the Choctaws and other Indian tribes as “full-fledged nations.” Most noteworthy for many of the council members, I later learned, was the incident at the bank: the teller, it 6. “We Don’t Believe That Claim Is Valid” Choctaw Sovereignty Assertions and the Water-Rights Conflict of 2001 “we don’t believe that claim is valid” 208 appeared, regarded Mr. Jones’s tribal membership card as a passport of a sovereign nation. For Choctaw activist and lawyer Scott Kayla Morrison, with whom I discussed Jones’s account of his experiences over coffee in a small restaurant in Talihina, the councilman’s account revealed that “France regarded U.S. Indian tribes not as a ‘domestic dependent nations’ [as the United States has long been accustomed to defining tribes], but [rather] as nations on par with the United States!” With Jones’s words still heavy in the air, from my seat in the tribal council house I exchanged glances with several other Choctaw citizens. I also looked around the room. Like Mr. Durant, many of us were smiling . We, too, were pleased that the French appeared to be seeing our tribe the way that many of us Choctaws often see ourselves. “If the French people can do this,” said one Choctaw citizen after the meeting, “why is it so difficult for the American people to do it?” This man, I assumed, was referring primarily to many of his non-Indian neighbors, who often resist the rhetoric that constructs our tribe as a nation. Other segments of the non-Indian American population use the rhetoric themselves. For example, during the years that I worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1994–95, 2000), dozens of times I heard Washington-based non-Indian politicians, staffers, and lawyers refer to our tribes as nations. In fact, it seemed to me that, at least in their interactions with the bia, which is staffed almost entirely by Indians, most of these individuals took every opportunity to refer to our tribes as nations. This is not to say that they, like the French according to Jones, constructed U.S. tribes as fully independent nations, separate and autonomous from the United States. The vast majority, in fact, did not. The term “semisovereign” was often used to describe the political status of U.S. tribes. Although dangerous politically because it can be used to deny that tribes have the potential to exercise full sovereignty, the term “semisovereign” is important from an anthropological perspective because it hints at the current slippage between the rhetoric of American Indian tribal sovereignty that is practiced by many Indians and the reality of that sovereignty. Current tribal sovereignty rhetoric, a rhetoric that some Indian peoples have been using since at least the early 1700s, asserts a structural equivalence in the global political arena between American Indian tribes, on the one hand, and nations such as Colombia, Japan, and Switzerland, on the other. It is a rhetoric in which we refer...

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