Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence

3. "Because We Were Proud to Be Chocktaw" Political Mobilization and the Reconstitution of the Tribe

“In 1969, I got a knock on the door,” said seventy-five-year-old Choctaw Charles Brown about the beginning of the Choctaw youth movement that helped effect the repeal of the 1959 Choctaw termination legislation . Brown, a Choctaw full-blood, had been the youth movement’s most important leader. At the suggestion of Choctaw elders, I had traveled to Oklahoma City to document his story. This story was a story not only of a battle to defeat federal efforts to dissolve the Choctaw tribe (for the second time in less than a century) but also of the grassroots movement that initiated the era of Choctaw tribal nation building in the late twentieth century. As will be seen, it is a story that began rather modestly with a simple knock on the door of a man named Charles Brown. Continuing the discussion of Choctaw culture, society, and history begun in chapter 2, this chapter documents one of the most important eras of Choctaw history, the era during which the Choctaws rebuilt their tribe in the aftermath of one of the most pointed threats to Choctaw tribal survival in the tribe’s history. The tribal nation building that followed the suppression of this threat has been literally life-altering, significantly impacting Choctaw experience and society. The political, economic, and social transformations that the tribe’s reconstitution has wrought in the tribe’s homeland have been far-reaching and profound. What it means to be Choctaw has been extensively reworked. Now a part of a vigorous, vibrant , and thriving tribe, not the declining, dejected, and enervated tribe that existed during the mid-twentieth century, Choctaws take great pride and find much self-respect in their new formal political structures and 3. “Because We Were Proud to Be Choctaw” Political Mobilization and the Reconstitution of the Tribe “because we were proud to be choctaw” 62 institutions, tribal programs and services, and successful tribal businesses . The many derogatory comments that I heard Choctaws make during my youth about us as a people are becoming markedly less common , and almost no one anymore expresses the doubts they had in earlier times about whether our tribe will be around for our grandchildren. By addressing the changes and change-makers that help define the era of Choctaw nation building, this chapter provides the essential context against which nearly all late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Choctaw actions and responses must be understood. The story of Choctaw nation building told in this chapter will be followed by an exploration in chapters 4, 5, and 6 of the social, political, and economic consequences of the new political order. I begin with the Choctaw youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a movement defined by the refusal of Choctaw youth to accept a vision of the tribe’s destiny in which Choctaw pride derived only from the actions and achievements of the ancestors. Choctaw youth insisted that the tribe regain its political, economic, and social standing, recapture the glories of the past, and rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the past. They insisted that the Choctaw people overcome the many obstacles that threatened the realization of this vision, obstacles that included widespread and endemic poverty, entrenched feelings of hopelessness and resignation, and the desire of many tribal members for the per capita checks that would follow the liquidation of Choctaw tribal assets and the final settlement of the Choctaw tribal estate. The Choctaw youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s was a potent expression of a much larger Indian youth movement that emerged during this period, a nationwide movement called Red Power. More broadly, the Choctaw movement, like the larger Red Power movement, also resembles the late-twentieth-century “surge of heritage politics” among “Guatemala’s Mayans, Bolivia’s Aymara, and Ecuador’s Quechua” that “recoded ‘Indian’ from a mark of subordination to an emblem of pride” (Starn 1999: 148). The U.S. federal antipoverty legislation of the 1960s and the passage of the U.S. Indian “self-determination” legislation in the 1970s abetted and fueled Choctaw nation building, as will be seen. In implementing antipoverty programs, especially a Housing and Urban Development (hud) program begun in 1964, the Choctaws successfully negotiated bureaucratic constraints in order to alleviate poverty and create new tribal corporate structures, structures that in the early 1970s became symbols of 63 “because we were proud to be choctaw...