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Women, Labor, and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Choctaw Nation Fay A. Yarbrough Over the course of the nineteenth century, the people of the Choctaw Nation experienced tremendous change in almost every facet of their lives. Whereas traditional practices and understandings of clan obligation and responsibility had once governed the behavior of Choctaw men and women, the nineteenth century marked a transition to writing down laws to govern behavior and punish criminality in the nation. The American federal government then forcibly removed many Choctaws from their homeland in the southeastern United States to the Indian Territory in the center of the country. Choctaw Indians also adopted African slavery, participated in the Civil War as allies of the Confederacy, and strained against federal demands during Reconstruction just as their Southern brethren did. In response to these changes the Choctaws adjusted their understandings of gender relations and women’s roles in families and society. Because of their roles as agriculturalists, landowners, and producers of future members of the nation, Choctaw women retained some of their traditional authority in Choctaw society. And at the same time that Choctaw society was struggling to accommodate and resist the notions of gender that Americans attempted to force upon them, they also began to construct their own ideas about race. So while in some ways Choctaw women’s power diminished, they still remained important actors whose marital decisions, in particular, could have dramatic consequences for the nation as evidenced by the careful way that Choctaw legal officials attempted to police Choctaw women’s marriages to outsiders.1 This essay explores shifting ideas about gender and race in the Choctaw Nation by considering Choctaw regulation of marriage law. First, the essay outlines some of the basic social organization of traditional Choctaw society. For Choctaws clans were a central component of identity that shaped family and marriage structure. Within these Choctaw families labor was gendered with men and women performing different, complementary tasks for the household. Next, Choctaws moved to formalize practices through written laws and began to shift Fay. A. Yarbrough 124 away from traditional labor arrangements and to intervene in women’s marital choices. Marriage law in particular demonstrated Choctaw women’s changed position in society. Legislators circumscribed Choctaw women’s property rights and limited women’s marital options, giving careful consideration to race. This emphasis on and definition of race through marriage laws in the Choctaw Nation is the final subject of this essay. Again, these dramatic changes in Choctaw thinking about race and gender occurred while the nation was besieged by American threats to Choctaw territorial claims and national sovereignty. Clan, Family, and Marriage Choctaw Indians determined clan membership, traditionally a key part of Choctaw identity, matrilineally; that is, children became members of their mother’s, not their father’s, clan.2 Thus, within a household a mother and her children were kin while the husband was “a guest rather than a relative,” according to scholar Patricia Galloway.3 Elizabeth Kemp Mead may have been referencing the practice of assigning clan membership matrilineally when she remarked, “In old time the Choctaw children took the mother’s housename instead of taking the father’s name.”4 Given the traditional lack of the use of surnames among the Choctaw, this description of how one traditionally received a “housename” may have served as a kind of shorthand for clan membership or a nineteenth-century interpretation of what clan membership meant.5 Matrilineal kinship arrangements also meant that the family sought the advice of the oldest maternal uncle or oldest maternal male relative in important decisions regarding children. The maternal family took responsibility for raising children who lost their mother through death. And the woman’s children, not her husband, inherited her property. A Choctaw man’s siblings or other members of his clan took possession of his property if he died: “His children, being looked on as members of another ogla, since they belonged to their mother’s family, were not considered as entitled to any of this property.”6 Clan membership had been so vital as a form of social organization because of the traditional practice of blood revenge among the Choctaw Indians: “Iksa [clan] members were obligated to aid each other and to obtain blood revenge for the killing of one of their members.” It was the “right, but also the imperative duty of the nearest relative on the male side of the slain, to kill the slayer wherever and whenever a favorable opportunity...

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