he story of a people overcoming colonization

Volume 2 in the American Indian Law and Policy Series

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.

As Clara Sue Kidwell tells it, the Choctaws' story illuminates a key point in contemporary scholarship on the history of American Indians: that they were not passive victims of colonization and did not assimilate quietly into American society. Adapting to the very structures imposed on them by their colonizers, tribal politicians quickly learned to use the rhetoric of dependency on the government, but they also demanded justice in the form of fulfillment of their treaty rights. Adroitly negotiating with the United States, the Choctaws have created the Choctaw Nation that exists today.

Clara Sue Kidwell received her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma and is Assistant Director for Cultural Resources with the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.

Lindsay G. Robertson, Judge Haskell A. Holloman Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the American Indian Law and Policy Center at the University of Oklahoma, is author of Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands.