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This article analyzes how Arizona’s Indigenous leaders responded to attempts by the Arizona legislature to impose the state’s criminal and civil jurisdiction over Indian reservations under Public Law 280. Indigenous Arizonans’ activism included requiring tribal consent to any jurisdictional changes, significant cross-cultural cooperation in law enforcement, and insistence that non-Indian officials respect Indigenous methods of jurisprudence and learn from them. In each of these campaigns, Indigenous Arizonans articulated a vision of citizenship grounded in the opportunity to develop one’s “full potential” as an American citizen. This language signaled a hybrid political identity: sovereign Indigenous peoples with a unique contribution to make to America, who as Arizonans were entitled to participate in post–World War II prosperity as equal citizens.

This essay approaches Faulkner’s stories about Mississippi Indians from the perspective of a historian of the Native South. It discusses shifting ideas about the role of narrative in historical analysis and reviews what other scholars have said about Faulkner’s Indigenous peoples. It demonstrates the importance of stories crafted from historical documentation to understanding Faulkner’s Mississippi. At the time that Faulkner was writing, Choctaws were engaged in their own storytelling. The tales Mississippi Choctaws spun over the course of Faulkner’s life demonstrate how subaltern peoples use historical narratives, even painful ones, for powerful political purposes. Considering the actions of Mississippi’s actual Indigenous peoples locates Faulkner’s imaginary Indigenous peoples in a critical historical context of colonialism. The stories that Mississippi Choctaws crafted about themselves, excavated from the archives, deserve a place alongside Faulkner’s work as a way to think about Native Southerners and that elusive and contingent thing we call truth

This paper explores how the Mississippi Choctaws engaged state citizenship in the years immediately following removal. I challenge the standard narrative of Choctaws’ relationships with the Mississippi legal system as one in which they were primarily victimized by unscrupulous lawyers and state officials. I argue instead that Choctaws used their new status as citizens to fight back against dispossession. I also examine how ideals of masculinity and class conflicts shaped interpretations of rights and obligations between Indians and whites.

This paper explores the role of race in the construction of tribal rolls for the Choctaw Nation of Indian Territory under the Dawes Act. Examination of two examples, enrollment of Choctaws in Mississippi and arguments presented in the 1907 hearings before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on the status of Choctaws of Indian and African American heritage, demonstrates that policymakers' primary concern in deciding the fate of mixedrace individuals was not the determination of Indian blood, so as to enroll them, but of African American blood, so as to exclude them. With this approach, members of the Dawes Commission used Indian policy to uphold the color line. The Choctaw Nation also drew sharp racial lines. Their concern, however, was not racial purity, but citizenship and tribal sovereignty. Attorneys for the mixed-blood claimants proffered a definition which they believed to be biological—they focused on their clients' percentage of Indian blood—while the Choctaw Nation's lawyers held to a political and legal definition embedded in notions of children's legitimacy, as granted through marriages sanctioned by the Choctaw state. Thus the same racial enrollment policy—exclusion of blacks—served two different functions in the implementation of allotment.

Federal Indian policy during the allotment era intersected with the segregated society of the Jim Crow South to create a market for Indian identity; the discourse of Indian blood was the currency of this realm. For the Mississippi Choctaws, heirs to the failed promises of allotments for Choctaws remaining in Mississippi granted by the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, a policy known as the “full-blood rule of evidence” legitimized their enrollment with the Choctaw Nation of Indian Territory following the Dawes Act. This paper analyzes how the Mississippi Choctaws negotiated ideologies of “Indian blood” during their campaign for inclusion on the Choctaw Nation rolls. Appropriating the racial language of “full-blood” as defined by the Dawes Commission, they claimed citizenship in the Choctaw Nation by virtue of their “unadulterated” ancestry, their ethnicity, their historic role as military allies of the United States, and their treaty rights. Moreover, as thousands of people clamored for enrollment, the Mississippi Choctaws asserted their status as full-bloods to distinguish themselves from those claimants whom they viewed as pretenders. The Choctaws' use of racial language thus reflected multifaceted meanings that obscured the boundaries between racial and cultural delineations of ethnic identity. It was strategic to the political moment and did not reflect significant changes in the Choctaws' cultural practices; moreover, it did not become the basis for future political divisions based on “blood.” Rather, Choctaws' racial identity as full-blood Indians was a form of political capital in their drive for tribal resurgence in the early twentieth century.

"In December 1912, Mississippi representative Pat Harrison stood before Congress and delivered an impassioned speech on behalf of the Choctaw Indians living in his district. 'Mr. Chairman,' Harrison announced, 'the Choctaw Indians always stood with the white men of the South.'"

This article explores attempts of Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) agents on the Southern Ute reservation in southwestern Colorado to use Southern Ute women to "reform" Ute sexual and marital practices, as well as Ute women's responses to these efforts. While preaching the importance of Indian women as a force for tribal moral "improvement," OIA personnel also made women's sexual behavior the focus of punishment and coercion. Coming from a cultural tradition that allowed them complete control over their sexual choices and activities, however, Southern Ute women resisted the OIA agenda. Even in the face of harsh sanctions, Southern Ute women asserted autonomy over their sexual behavior and often thwarted the OIA's campaign. Attempts to contain Southern Ute women's sexual behavior reflected stereotypes about the sexuality of women of color, and were part of a larger pattern of concern over women's sexual conduct during this period.