Living in the Land of Death: The Choctaw Nation, 1830-1860.

Living in the Land of Death: The Choctaw Nation, 1830-1860. By Donna L. Akers. Native American Series. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xxviii, 202. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-87013-684-4.)

Donna L. Akers has produced a highly idiosyncratic and personal account of Choctaw history. She takes to task Angle Debo, Grant Foreman, and Richard White for implying in their histories of the Choctaw that the Choctaw Nation was almost defunct (Debo and Foreman wrote in the 1930s) or that it had reached a state of dependency on the United States government by the early nineteenth century. She uses the continued political existence of the nation in contemporary society to support her assertion that these scholars wrote of Indians as victims and underestimated the vitality of Choctaw culture as it adapted to changing circumstances.

Akers gives a brief summary of Choctaw culture and the events leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, the treaty that forced removal of the majority of the tribe from central Mississippi to Indian Territory in 1831-1832. Despite her criticism of Richard White, she cites his book, Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change amongst the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, Neb., 1983), to demonstrate the deleterious effects of the Indian trade upon the Choctaws. Akers describes the suffering of those who settled along the banks of the Arkansas River when the river flooded in 1833 and drowned their crops. She explores the effects of the smallpox epidemic that caused widespread death in the Choctaw Nation in 1837-1838. And she points out that plains and prairie tribes, primarily the Osages, claimed Choctaw land as hunting territory and attacked Choctaws' farms.

These travails were accompanied by changes in the social structure of the nation because the widely dispersed farmsteads established in Indian Territory placed more responsibility for children on fathers and emphasized the male role in farming, thereby devaluing women's traditional roles as farmers. The issue of slavery and the withdrawal of federal troops from Indian Territory brought the Choctaws into the Confederacy during the Civil War. After the war, the impact of railroads and a rapidly expanding white population led to statehood for Oklahoma in 1907, bringing about the final destruction of tribal governments--but not, Akers argues, to the disappearance of the Choctaw Nation. In an epilogue she brings the story into the present by pointing to the federal recognition of the Choctaw Nation in the 1960s.

Akers summarizes almost two hundred years of Choctaw history in 155 pages of text. It can be characterized in the language of cultural studies as a post-colonialist history in that the author presents a distinctive Choctaw perspective and attempts to give voice to the Choctaw people. Apart from quotes gleaned from secondary sources and oral histories collected in the late 1930s, the major Choctaw voice from history is that of Peter Pitchlynn, certainly not a typical representative of the tribe. Akers's own perspective as a tribe member is often presented in such an accusatory and polemical tone that it gives the reader reason to question her interpretation of events. Aside from tone, she adds no substantive information to our knowledge of Choctaw history, and it is unlikely that her work will displace that of Debo, Foreman, and White as standard, scholarly interpretations of that history.

University of Oklahoma 

CLARA SUE KIDWELL