Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830-1977

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. For the Choctaw Miracle see, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (mbci), Chahta Hapia Hoke; Bordewich, Killing the White Man’s Indian, 304–15; and Martin , Jeter, and Blanshard, Chief. 2. For the Choctaws’ view of Martin’s role in the Choctaw Miracle, see Denson, “The Passing of Chief,” Choctaw Community News, http://www.choctaw.org/pdf /Mar2010cCN.pdf (accessed July 2, 2012). 3. U.S. v. John, 437 U.S. 634 (June 23, 1978), http://supreme.justia.com/us /437/634/case.html (accessed June 8, 2008). 4. The text of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia is widely available on the web. See http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/ussc_cr_0030_0001_zs.html (accessed November 10, 2011). For an astute analysis of how southeastern Indians have deployed nationalism in concert with other identities, see Lowery, Lumbee Indians. 5. Some historians have found Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities ” useful in discussing the development of nationalism in Indian country. The Mississippi Choctaws reflect Anderson’s broader concept of a nation as “an imagined political community” founded on a shared sense of history and culture and a distinct territoriality. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5–7; quotation on p.6. 6. For this perspective on Choctaw nationhood, see mbci, Chahta Hapia Hoke, 4. Tribal chairman Phillip Martin expressed a similar interpretation of Choctaw identity in the years preceding government recognition. See Martin, Jeter, and Blanshard, Chief, 18–20, 41–43. Terminology for describing Indian polities can be problematic . Words like “band” and “tribe” harken back to old taxonomies that rank cultures along an evolutionary scale according to levels of cultural complexity. For this model see Service, Primitive Social Organization. An evolutionary classification implies that bands and tribes are characteristic of primitive peoples, which tends to confine Indians to the past. The Mississippi Choctaws, however, use all these terms interchangeably. They are the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (to distinguish themselves from Choctaws in the West). Their website (http://www.choctaw.org) proclaims them to 218 Notes to pages 3–6 be one of America’s first Indian nations, and most of their own publications declare them to be a tribe. (The remark about being an Indian Nation was accessed on July 2, 2012.) I use the terms nation and tribe interchangeably because both denote the Choctaws as a polity existing apart from state and federal governments. 7. House Committee on Indian Affairs, “Land Claims &c. Under 14th Article Choctaw Treaty,” May 11, 1836, H. Rep. 663, 24th Cong., 1st sess., 12; Crawford, “Report of the Secretary of War Communicating Information in Relation to the Contracts Made for the Removal and Subsistence of the Choctaw Indians,” February 7, 1845, S. Doc. 86, 28th Cong., 2nd sess., 39. 8. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries, 169; Peterson, “Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians,” 42–45. 9. For the decentralized nature of the Choctaw polity, see Peterson, “Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians”; Tolbert, “Sociological Study”; Coe, “Lost in the Hills of Home.” Thomas Mould, who worked in Choctaw communities from 1997 to 2000, argues that “Choctaw identity was negotiated most specifically and most vitally at the community level,” but Choctaws also layered a collective identity over their community affiliations. Mould, Choctaw Prophecy, 197–205, quotation on p. 201. 10. My ideas about the construction of ethnic boundaries have been informed by Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal; Knack, Boundaries Between; Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries; Barth, “Enduring and Emerging Issues in the Analysis of Ethnicity”; and Harmon, Indians in the Making. 11. Although Mississippians revered Choctaw military service, Jeanette Keith’s excellent study of draft resistance in the South complicates the standard narrative of the southern military tradition. She demonstrates that lower-class southerners frequently refused the call to arms while elite southerners were quick to call for military action because their loved ones were exempt. See Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight. 12. Theda Perdue’s essay “Native Americans, African Americans, and Jim Crow” outlines the ways in which colonialism created and exploited tensions between African Americans and Indians. 13. For an overview of recent scholarship in southern history, see Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Issue of Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (2009). 14. For evaluation of how Chinese people fit into Mississippi’s biracial model, see Loewen, Mississippi Chinese. For a historiographical essay that discusses recent scholarship on southern racial relations, see Jones, “Labor and the Idea of Race.” 15. Colleen O’Neill and Brian Hosmer call for a more sophisticated exploration of the...