UCLA

Despite today’s era of political and economic revitalization due in part to American Indian economic development, Oklahoma Choctaw people still contend with land dispossession facilitated by state and federal governments. Considered alongside the state of Oklahoma’s contentious relationship with tribal nations today, this dissertation examines how US settlers have utilized the collusive power of history and law to constitute settler sovereignty and facilitate Indigenous land dispossession. By ethnographically examining the legal life of settler historical production and how it continually reshapes the conditions for landownership among Choctaw people living in their post-removal homelands, it reveals how US and state laws – informed by anthropological and historical scholarship that proclaim the decline of Indigenous sovereignty and legitimate the settler regime of private property – have continually worked to dispossesses Choctaw people of their lands throughout time. Nevertheless, despite the relegation of Choctaw sovereignty to the past in scholarly publications and its minimization in the present by state actors, Choctaw people who maintain Choctaw ways of life consistently challenge such claims and efforts. Furthermore, the dissertation addresses the discrepancy between the massive, underutilized archival sources created by Oklahoma Choctaws and published scholarship. Consequently, it argues for the usage and development of tribal histories that are attentive to the work of settler colonialism and that draws upon overlooked and underutilized archival materials. By holding an ethnographic study of contemporary Choctaw economic development, a critical historiography of the Choctaws and Five Tribes, fieldwork on Choctaw archival materials and their repositories, and the wide breadth of tribal history informed by cultural knowledge within the same frame, the dissertation importantly highlights the interrelated relationship between the production of history, US law, and ongoing land dispossession in an era of resurgent American Indian political-economic power.