The present-day Choctaw communities in central Mississippi are a tribute to the ability of the Indian people both to adapt to new situations and to find refuge against the outside world through their uniqueness. Clara Sue Kidwell, whose great-great-grandparents migrated from Mississippi to Indian Territory along the Trail of Tears in 1830, here tells the story of those Choctaws who chose not to move but to stay behind in Mississippi.

As Kidwell shows, their story is closely interwoven with that of the missionaries who established the first missions in the area in 1818. While the...

As the son of missionaries among the Choctaw Indians in Mississippi, H. B. Cushman witnessed their heartbreaking removal from the area in the 1830s. Later in life, he chronicled their culture and criticized their exploitation by whites in his historic History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez Indians. He spent six years renewing contacts, visiting cemeteries, observing Indian councils, and studying Indian records in the original languages. Published in 1899, his history is valuable for his firsthand observations on the removal and later history of the Choctaws and Chickasaws...

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...