Living in the Land of Death: The Choctaw Nation, 1830-1860

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. See Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1975; reprint, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 33–36, 114–16 (page citations are to the reprint edition ); Arthur H. DeRosier Jr., The Removal of the Choctaw Indians (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 2, 70. 2. See, for example, Geoffrey C. Ward, with Rick Burns and Ken Burns, The Civil War: An Illustrated History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), in which the index has no listing at all under “Indian,” “Indian Territory, “Battle of Honey Springs,” “General Stand Watie,” or “Native Americans.” The map entitled “The Civil War, 1861–1865” (Charthouse , 1992), which accompanies the text, ends in the West with the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri, omitting Indian Territory altogether. In his Pulitzer Prize– winning text on the Civil War, historian James M. McPherson describes Indian participation in the war in two sentences, omitting the entire western theater of Indian Territory, tens of thousands of soldier participants, and generals Tandy Walker and Stand Watie, among others, in his 905-page volume. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 3. See R. David Edmunds, “National Expansion from the Indian Perspective,” in Indians in American History: An Introduction, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1988), 159–177. 4. Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, January 1831, Box 6, File 19; Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, 17 November 1830, Box 6, File 25, Cyrus Kingsbury Collection, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma; and DeRosier, Removal, 59, 61, 123. 5. Angie Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934), 290. 6. Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), preface. Also see Anders Stephanson, ■ 153 Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). His discussion of the half-truths and outright lies used as the foundation of the philosophical “justification” for the confiscation of Native lands in the American Southeast in the 1820s and 1830s is especially informative. Unfortunately, most American history survey texts continue to echo these distortions as though they were factual; in effect, passing on the propaganda of the era to generations of students of American history. 7. Foreman, Indian Removal, 399. 8. Ibid., 399–404. 9. Ibid., preface. 10. Debo, Rise and Fall, 243–44. 11. Foreman, Indian Removal, 17–18. 12. W. David Baird. Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972); Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 13. White, 116. 14. White, 116. 15. White, 117. 16. White, 119. 17. White, 121. 18. White, 125. 19. Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1989); and White, Roots of Dependency, xvi, xvii, xix, and 146. 20. White, Roots of Dependency, 146. 21. Ibid., xix. 22. Ibid., 146. 23. Debo, Rise and Fall, 45. 24. In Richard White’s conclusion to the Choctaw section in The Roots of Dependency, he asserts, “For the Choctaws as a whole, trade and market meant not wealth but impoverishment , not well-being but dependency, and not progress but exile and dispossession . They never fought the Americans; they were never conquered. Instead, through the market they were made dependent and dispossessed” (146). 25. Clifford E. Trafzer, Death Stalks the Yakima: Epidemiological Transition and Mortality on the Yakima Indian Reservation, 1888–1964 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 5. 26. Jack D. Forbes, “The Manipulation of Race, Caste, and Identity: Classifying Afroamericans , Native Americans and Red-Black People,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 17 (winter 1990): 24. 27. See Frederick E. Hoxie, “Interpreting the Indian Past,” in Major Problems in American Indian History, ed. Albert L. Hurtado and Peter Iverson (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Company, 1994), 35–37, for a discussion of Bernard Bailyn’s assertion that he had to omit Indians from his two prize-winning recent works on American history because “we know as yet relatively little about their histories.” Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986). See also Forbes, “Manipulation,” 1–51, in which he argues that “the uncolored have for too long been able to possess a near monopoly over the interpretation and...