Walking the Choctaw Road: Stories from Red People Memory (review)

2??8Book Reviews2 1 9 Walking the Choctaw Road: Storiesfrom Red People Memory. By Tim Tingle. (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2003. Pp. 128. Photographs, glossary, further reading. ISBN-0-9383 17-74-1. $16.95, cloth.) Readers will delight in sampling diis treat of a book with its gripping, easy-toread tales that cover almost two centuries of Choctaw history. Veteran storyteller Tim Tingle, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, assembled the tales intending to answer the question, "What is Choctaw?" Those interested in American Indian history and culture will find answers to that question and general readers will find valuable, touching insights into human nature. Tingle's book offers a collection of stories gathered through interviews with elders and storytellers. Although he drew on a variety of sources, two of the most prominent were Charlie Jones, who served as die Oklahoma Choctaw Nation's official historian, and Estelline Tubby, a Pearl River Reservation resident regarded as one of the greatest living Choctaw storytellers. The book is balanced between the Oklahoma Choctaw Nation and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. Chronologically, the stories date from about 1800 and extend into the author's lifetime. Five of the eleven stories are set in Mississippi, Alabama, or North Carolina. This journal's readers might be more interested in the four set in Oklahoma or the two set in Texas. The two Texas tales offer mixed results. "Bones on the Brazos" tells about the 1858 Indian exodus from Texas led by Maj. Robert S. Neighbors. The story seems to be missing some details and readers who are unfamiliar with the event may feel lost. "Saltypie," set in the Houston area at an unnamed time in the late twentieth century, focuses on the author's grandmother. It chronicles the challenges facing Indians in modern America, the joys that stem from simple things such as tending chickens, and the emotional triumph of a medical miracle. Saying more would ruin the carefully crafted story, one of the most touching in the book. The volume concludes with a poem praising Choctaw strength and resiliency. The useful resources at the end of the book include a one-page glossary of Choctaw terms, English and Choctaw lyrics to the hymns "Amazing Grace" and "On Jordan's Stormy Banks," and a brief bibliography of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry titles. Tingle has succeeded in writing a Choctaw "interior history" and in building a bridge between Choctaw and non-Choctaw cultures. Academics might bristle at the patchwork methodology and the fact that stories have been constructed from a variety of uncited sources, but this is neither an academic history nor an ethnographic study. Instead, it should be considered a welcoming hand extended from the Choctaw community. Grasp it. Texas Christian UniversityTodd Kerstetter ...