The Choctaws in Oklahoma begins with the Choctaws' removal from Mississippi to Indian Territory in the 1830s and then traces the history of the tribe's subsequent efforts to retain and expand its rights and to reassert tribal sovereignty in the late twentieth century. This book illustrates the Choctaws' remarkable success in asserting their sovereignty and establishing a national identity in the face of seemingly insurmountable legal obstacles.

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces. In Choctaw Confederates, Fay A. Yarbrough reveals that, while sovereignty and states' rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation's support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape. By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery.

Meet the Choctaw Indians and learn about their establishment in America, their traditions and their values.

Will "poisoned" Indians conquer the United States in the twenty-first century? Is there anything that can be done to stop them? Can the United States's oldest and most loyal Indian military ally, the Choctaws, stop them? Or do Choctaws pose the most difficult problem of all? In this provocative and incendiary book, D. L. Birchfield bluntly points out what few are willing to say: America's population superiority is now meaningless; its population density is a crippling liability; and the United States has a dangerous "Indian problem." If you don't know about the American betrayal of the Choctaws, or whether Choctaws are still loyal to the United States, or why the third largest Indian nation in North America is virtually unknown to Americans, sit back and hold on as Birchfield pulls back the curtain to reveal a startling future, with an irreverence and disdain for convention that is anything but subtle.

Blending an engaging narrative style with broader theoretical considerations, James Taylor Carson offers the most complete history to date of the Mississippi Choctaws. Tracing the Choctaws from their origins in the Mississippian cultures of late prehistory to the early nineteenth century, Carson shows how the Choctaws struggled to adapt to life in a New World altered radically by contact while retaining their sense of identity and place. Despite changes in subsistence practices and material culture, the Choctaws made every effort to retain certain core cultural beliefs and sensibilities, a strategy they conceived of as following ?the straight bright path.? This work also makes a significant theoretical contribution to ethnohistory as Carson confronts common problems in the historical analysis of Native peoples.

Frauchimastabe responded to shifting circumstances outside the Choctaw nation by pushing the source of authority in novel directions, straddling spiritual and economic power in a way unfathomable to Taboca."--BOOK JACKET.