American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This article will analyze the Choctaw living in the southeastern Oklahoma timber region, concentrated mainly in Pushmataha and McCurtain counties, to ascertain how they "make do" in the face of a history of nearly complete land alienation and profound economic challenges to their traditional strategies for maintaining a livelihood. Southeastern Oklahoma has been home to the Muskogean-speaking Choctaw since their forced removal from Mississippi and Alabama in 1829-31, known as the Trail of Tears. This region, an extension of the Arkansas and Missouri Ozark Mountains, resembles the New England countryside, with dense forests, clear mountain streams, dirt roads, and sparsely populated villages. Its uneven terrain and lack of good topsoil make it largely unfit for large-scale cultivation. The Choctaw today are a mere remnant of their former status as owners of a 6.8 million-acre tribal estate granted in 1829 in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Following resettlement, many full-blood Choctaw occupied small parcels of land in the Kiamitia Mountains timber region, today the Kiamichi Range (see figure l), and subsisted mainly through small-scale farming and animal husbandry, supplemented by hunting, fishing, and gathering. By the early 1980s, the Choctaw, numbering about 16,000 members by blood, constituted only about 10 percent of the original Choctaw Nation population and owned collectively only about eleven thousand acres, mostly in scattered tracts of twenty acres or less.