Project MUSE - Political Protest, Conflict, and Tribal Nationalism: The Oklahoma Choctaws and the Termination Crisis of 1959–1970

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, a tribe in which I am enrolled, is headquartered in southeastern Oklahoma and has a tribal citizenry of just over 175,000. Our tribal government currently compacts almost all of our tribe's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Indian Health Service (IHS) program funding and runs dozens of tribal businesses that today fund more than 80 percent of our tribal programs and services.¹ More than six thousand people work for our tribe, which is headed by a chief, a twelve-member tribal council, and three tribal judges.² Our people rebuilt our formal tribal political structures and institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, more than a half-century after the Curtis Act of 1898, the Supplemental Agreement of 1902, and the Five Tribes Act of 1906 eviscerated our elaborate nineteenth-century polity and allotted most of our land. Little scholarship exists about the era of our tribal history that spans the years between allotment in the early 1900s and the tribal nation-building of the 1970s, the era that is the focus of this article.

Despite the dearth of scholarship about this era of Choctaw history, by the late twentieth century a dominant scholarly narrative of this period had emerged. This narrative alleges that, during the greater part of the twentieth century, many Choctaws pursued a strategy of assimilation into the larger, non-Indian society and acculturation to white culture. "Nothing set the Five Tribes people apart quite so much," David W. Baird writes, "as their outspoken advocacy of assimilation with the white majority."³ James H. Howard and Victoria Lindsay Levine characterize Choctaw "sentiment" during the early twentieth century as "ultra-assimilationist," with many Choctaws undergoing "rapid white acculturation" and making "an all-out effort to remodel their culture to approximate [End Page 283] that of whites."⁴ Naomi Ruth Hunke notes that in the 1930s leaders of the only Oklahoma Choctaw community still holding Choctaw dances and stickball games decided to stop such performances, citing as their reason "opposition" from Choctaw tribal officials, among others.⁵ In the late 1940s, anthropologist Alexander Spoehr concluded that, in part because of the Choctaw pursuit of acculturation, Choctaw kinship had "lost its importance as a means of widely establishing and regulating social relations" and "of integrating the local group."⁶ Pointing to Choctaw behavior at the regional and national levels, several scholars have observed that the Five "Civilized" Tribes, including the Choctaws, provided much of the leadership for the Society of American Indians (SAI), a pan-Indian organization founded in 1911.⁷ The SAI, which Robert Warrior has identified as part of the "first important movement of twentieth-century American Indian intellectual history," embraced a "mainstreaming ideology" and promoted Indian "integration" into the larger, non-Indian society.⁸

For many scholars, the ultimate expression of Choctaw assimilationist aspirations during these years is our tribe's response to the termination era of federal Indian policy (1945–1960). In the late 1950s, Choctaw Chief Harry J. W. Belvin supported federal legislation to terminate our tribe, making the Choctaws one of as many as 109 cases of termination initiated between 1945 and 1960.⁹ The date upon which Choctaw termination was to become effective was extended three times in the 1960s before the law was repealed on August 24, 1970.¹⁰ While we did not become part of the 3 percent of the total Indian population that was terminated, according to historian Donald Fixico, "the Oklahoma Choctaws seized the initiative in abrogating their trust relationship with the government."¹¹

Using interviews and archival research that I conducted in 1995–1996 and 2005, this article raises questions about the extent to which our people supported this effort to terminate our tribe and thus the extent to which assimilationist aspirations defined Choctaw experience during these years. By documenting the emergence in the late 1960s of an organized Choctaw youth movement that resisted Choctaw tribal termination, I seek to expand scholarly interpretations that address only a single Choctaw position on tribal termination, or that, like Kidwell, acknowledge but only briefly address...