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Harold Comby woke up tired. He had spent the previous day and much of the previous night keeping the peace in his role as captain of the Choctaw tribal police. “I was just talking to my mom about that this morning. I didn’t get enough rest last night, with all the people out at the mound. I was tired and she said that they used to say that the nights will get shorter and days will get shorter. That’s what she told me this morning.” Billy Amos drives through the community of Bogue Chitto as my guide, pointing out the new school where he works as a custodian, the recently mowed ¤eld where the Nanih Waiya team practices stickball on the weekends, and the new row of brick homes that have just been completed. He points out the homes of people I might know, providing a human landscape to accompany the somewhat more obvious geographical one. The homes are reserved for Choctaw families, Billy tells me. But that doesn’t always mean full blood. A number of people have married outside the tribe, creating small pockets of ethnic diversity in these communities. “They used to say that there would be no full bloods soon,” Billy says with no malice, only regret, as we drive back home. “I see that happening now.” At dinner in the only ¤ve-star restaurant in the county, Estelline Tubby listens attentively to Chief Phillip Martin, elected chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians for the past thirty-two years. The restaurant is housed in the casino he helped construct; the restaurant itself is named after him. He speaks words of warning, that the prosperity of the tribe is uncertain, that they must prepare themselves for darker times. Though he never mentions prophecy or removal, Estelline Tubby recognizes in his speech possible signs that the prophecy of the Third Removal may be ful¤lled soon. The very building she sits in, in fact, is one of the most prominent of those signs. Sitting in their of¤ces in the behavioral health wing of the tribal hospital, Regina Shoemake, Judy Billie, and Sally Allen talk about the things their elders told them when they were young girls gathered on front porches at night. Introduction “These things will be coming,” they were told. They, too, are seeing the old prophecies being ful¤lled today. The tradition of prophecy among the Choctaw is not designated with a unique term, though its prophets—the hopaii—were. Those prophets are gone and with them any public performances of prophecy. Yet prophecy plays a powerful role in the community. As spoken word, it is referenced in conversation , used as explanations for the fantastic and the mundane, recounted with deep reverence in the talk of the elders, and performed thoughtfully by practiced speakers. As philosophical contemplation, it is the verbal genre devoted to the discussion of change, its focus as much on the past and present as the future. It is a well-worn tradition, one that locates its roots in a more explicit past of hopaii and prophet-leaders who provided the tribe with guidance from higher powers. The role of the prophet was communally recognized and consistently ¤lled. These prophets worked as a doctor or pastor might, in service to their community. The visions of the future they were given and in turn shared with the rest of the tribe were not isolated phenomena but part of a larger system of Choctaw culture. This tradition could not be extracted and associated with individual prophets and individual messages. Rather, prophecy was an act shared by a number of prophets, each working to provide guidance and balance to the tribe. The Choctaw have lost their hopaii but not their inspiration. Men and women, ful¤lling their roles as elders, are continuing in the tradition of looking to the past, comparing it to the present, and projecting it into the future. This act, too, is rooted ¤rmly in the past, part of a continuous tradition both formal, as in council meetings, and informal, as in family talks in which elders are expected to teach the young. Such wisdom is not merely accumulated through time but is gained both in active thinking and supernatural inspiration. The prophetic tradition today remains a synthesis of past prophecy and contemporary prediction, shared by and among elders in an effort to teach, prepare, and warn younger generations, while interpreting and negotiating the world in which they...

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