Remaining Chickasaw in Indian Territory, 1830s-1907 (review)

Sustaining tribal sovereignty and cultural identity were among the greatest challenges American Indian groups faced throughout the nineteenth century, concerns that remain paramount for Native people yet today. In Remaining Chickasaw in Indian Territory historian Wendy St. Jean masterfully details the Chickasaw Nation's struggles to define and sustain its political and cultural independence from Indian Removal to Oklahoma statehood. The conventional story of policy struggles between the tribe and the federal government is important to St. Jean's study, but equally crucial are regional and internal matters that challenged Chickasaw sovereignty. This book goes beyond the last chapters in Arrell Gibson's classic The Chickasaw (University of Oklahoma Press, 1971) by including new documents and a more Chickasaw-centered perspective. Most importantly, St. Jean chronicles various phases of the Chickasaw's sovereignty struggle to show how tribal responses forged the fundamental constructs of Chickasaw identity during the late-1800s that define Chickasaw identity and sovereignty today.

Land has always been crucial to tribal identity and sovereignty, and St. Jean demonstrates the centrality of land in the Chickasaw experience. Following Removal the tribe confronted land, citizenship, jurisdictional, and cultural preservation issues by opposing federal plans of merging the Chickasaw into the Choctaw Nation. What transpired was not the federal goal of Chickasaw-Choctaw fusion, but rather a political and cultural movement culminating in the Chickasaw Nation Constitution and defined reservation lands. The reservation, however, brought different struggles for the tribe. Fears of property loss and personal harm by raiding plains tribes from the west and Texas Rangers and other marauding Texans from below the Red River led to policies separating the Chickasaw further from both groups in law and identity.

Following emancipation, the Chickasaw resisted the forced incorporation of freedmen into their nation, and to control Chickasaw membership and lands the tribe shifted from cultural to race-based determinants for citizenship. This emphasis on racial composition became fundamental to Chickasaw nationalism thereafter. The issues of taxation, land use, the flood of non-Indians into Indian Territory, and the intermarriage of many non-Indians to Chickasaws created even greater challenges to tribal sovereignty. Complicating matters was a Chickasaw Nation increasingly divided in its political, cultural, and racial constructs. Here St. Jean addresses the great paradox facing the Chickasaw at the end of the nineteenth century: when the tribe needed to be most unified to protect and sustain its sovereignty, it actually became more divided.

The Chickasaw were quite unified, however, in their educational goals. Unlike most tribes at the end of the 1800s, the Chickasaw resisted the federal government's takeover of their schools. They invested heavily to create a flourishing education system that balanced western education for success in the broader society with the development of individual Chickasaw identity and tribal pride. Such educational self-determination became elemental to sustaining Chickasaw political and cultural identity.

For those interested in Chickasaw history St. Jean's work is a must, to be added alongside Gibson's work. For a tribe that has not garnered its deserved share of tribal histories, this book is most welcome. St. Jean's story of the tribe's fight for cultural and political sovereignty (internally and externally) is on point, and scholars of other tribes should take note. For those interested in frontier Texan-American Indian relations, St. Jean explores Texas aggressiveness on many levels towards the peaceful Chickasaw. This reviewer would have liked more clarity about the bands of Texas Rangers that troubled the Chickasaw as to whether they were ad hoc raiding groups or long-term Rangers. Such hair-splitting aside, this is a splendid work worth reading that should be of interest to those on both sides of the Red River and beyond.