| Total population |
|---|
| 5,000[1] |
| Regions with significant populations |
| Alabama |
| Languages |
| Religion |
|
Protestant, traditional beliefs |
| Related ethnic groups |
The MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians are a state-recognized Native American tribe located in southern Alabama, primarily in Washington and Mobile counties. The MOWA Choctaw Reservation is located along the banks of the Mobile and Tombigbee rivers, on 300 acres (1.2 km²) near the small southwestern Alabama communities of McIntosh, Mount Vernon and Citronelle, and north of Mobile. In addition to those members on the reservation, about 3,600 tribal citizens live in 10 small settlements near the reservation community. They are led by elected Chief Wilford Taylor. They claim descent from small groups of Choctaw people of Mississippi and Alabama who avoided removal to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma at the time of the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek.
Since the late 20th century, the MOWA Choctaw have attempted to gain recognition as a federally recognized tribe. They have encountered difficulties in trying to satisfy dcumentation of continuity requirements of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). So far they have been unsuccessful in gaining recognition. In addition, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, both federally recognized tribes that operate successful gambling casinos in the area, oppose recognition of the MOWA Choctaw Band.
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This area of frontier Alabama had been inhabited for thousands of years by indigenous cultures. The Mississippian culture is believed to have been ancestral to the historical tribes of the Muskogean-speaking Creek and Choctaw.
The first European settlers in Mobile and southern Alabama were Roman Catholic French and later Spanish. English and Scots traders before the American Revolutionary War were followed by settlers arriving in the early 19th century.
During the antebellum years of the cotton kingdom, the wealthiest white planters were the ones most likely to take mistresses from among enslaved African-American women and to have more than one family, with the "second", or shadow family, having mixed-race children.[2]
Some Native Americans who came to this area were refugees after the Creek War. Others were Choctaw who refused removal to the Indian Territory in 1830. By their treaty, they were allowed to stay as state residents if they gave up Choctaw self-government. In 1835 the state government built an Indian school at Mount Vernon, Alabama, with labor supplied by the Choctaw. Before the American Civil War, the Choctaw were at risk in periodic "Indian roundups" by the federal government, as well as in raids by slave traders.[1]
Whites in Alabama and the South hardened racial lines as they worked to restore their social and political dominance after the Reconstruction era. Following paramilitary intimidation at the polls, whites regained power and disfranchised most Blacks and Native Americans, and many poor whites after the Reconstruction era through passage of a new constitution and laws making voter registration more difficult. The state government arbitrarily included the Choctaw and other Native Americans remaining in the state among the "colored" or black freedmen population, in part because whites had observed intermarriage between the groups. According to hypodescent, the whites thought that black ancestry outweighed a person's cultural identification; they discounted mixed-race Choctaw as not really Indian. Through racial segregation during the Jim Crow years, the state effectively barred blacks and Choctaw from the use of most public facilities. Because the freedmen could no longer elect representatives, the legislature consistently underfunded services for "colored" (blacks). Combined with blacks in a binary system, "[c]onsequently, American Indians living in the South became a group of people who officially did not exist. They were made, in effect, extinct by reclassification."[1]
"In the 1890s the state legislature defined a mulatto as anyone who was five or fewer generations removed from a black ancestor. By 1927 the state legislature defined mulatto as any person 'descended from a Negro'."[3] The one-drop rule was an example of hypodescent classification that often went against appearances and the community with which a person identified. Alabama passed laws imposing Jim Crow and divided society into only two races: white and "colored". They created legal segregation by two races, but in Washington and Mobile counties, there were too many mixed-race people to fit into those simple categories. Another factor affecting this was the region's relative isolation up until World War II.[4]
During the Jim Crow era, which lasted deep into the 20th century, the state senator L.W. McCrae popularized the term "Cajan" for the mixed-race population along the counties' frontier. The difference in spelling indicated recognition that the people were different from the Acadian descendants (Cajuns) in Louisiana. People also called the people "Creoles", as they seemed similar to the mixed-race Creoles in the next state, although their European-American heritage was primarily English and Scots-Irish rather than French, reflecting the major European settlers in Alabama.[5] The surnames among Cajans and Choctaw descendants are primarily English or Scots. As of 2006 about 5,000 of self-identified Choctaw live along the Mobile-Washington county line.[1]
Mid-twentieth century magazine articles described varied speech and cuisine that borrowed from black, Creole, American Indian and European-American traditions.[6] In one article from 1970, the Cajans were described as the "Lost Tribe of Alabama".[1][7] The terms of Cajans and Creoles were both used by the white majority population to reflect their perception that the Choctaw also had black heritage; this was part of the way the white society divided Alabama society into two parts: white and all other.
Numerous references in historical records note the presence of Choctaw Indians in this part of Alabama. Historically, there were recognized Indian schools in the counties.[1] In the 1970s, the American Indian Policy Review Commission (AIPRC) described the four thousand Choctaw in Mobile and Washington counties as a "non-recognized tribe." The AIPRC had been formed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to "examine the historical and legal background of federal-Indian relations and to determine if policies and programs should be revised. The commission found that the results of non-recognition were devastating for Indian communities."[1]
In 1979, the Choctaw in this area of Alabama organized as the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians. "MOWA" is a contraction of Mobile and Washington, the two counties which this group inhabits. Its tribal office is located in McIntosh, named after a prominent Creek chief of Scots and Creek ancestry.
Tribal members purchased their first 160 acres (0.65 km2) of land in south Washington County in 1983. They claim descent from several Indian tribes: Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, Mescalero, and Apache. Their annual cultural festival, which includes Choctaw social dancing, stickball games, a Choctaw princess contest, and an inter-tribal pow wow, occurs on the third weekend of June on their reservation lands.
The MOWA petitioned the federal government for federal recognition as an Indian tribe. In 1994 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) denied the MOWA petition because the petitioners failed to prove Indian ancestry by BIA standards, one of seven requirements for tribal recognition. The BIA requires tribes to prove "internal cohesion, external boundaries, and a distinct Indian identity," the latter traced by genealogical descent from members of historical tribes listed in the early 1900s in records such as the Dawes Rolls. According to the BIA spokesperson: "What we found was that the Indians that the MOWA claimed as their ancestors were not their ancestors."[8]
The Choctaw note numerous historical factors have made it difficult for them to satisfy BIA requirements: differences in traditional naming practices and difficulty in following name variations through records; the US government inconsistency in record keeping, not only in recording names but also races (for instance, listing all people with visible African ancestry as Choctaw Freedmen, regardless of whether they had direct Choctaw ancestry as well); the state's classifying all Choctaw as among the black population and recording them as black, effectively ending separate record keeping of them as Choctaw or Indian; and the reluctance of federal officials to accept oral histories of family lineage.[1]
The MOWA filed a lawsuit against the BIA, requesting that the federal court overturn the BIA's decision. The suit was rejected in 2008 by federal court on a technicality. The court ruled the tribe had waited too long to file the lawsuit and had passed the six-year statute of limitations. It noted a 1999 letter from the Secretary of Interior that had rejected any further consideration of the tribe's claim.[9]
The historian Jacqueline Anderson Matte notes that the Choctaw have preserved their identity by cultural practices:
"The strongest evidence of the MOWA Choctaws' Indian ancestry is not, however, found in written documents; it is found in their lives. Their ancestors passed to them their Choctaw Indian identity and traditions, persevering and preserving their heritage despite a long history of persecution and discrimination. Interviews with elders reveal stories of survival by hunting, fishing, trapping, and sharing the kill; rituals related to marriage, birth, and death; customs associated with gardening, medicinal plants, logging, dipping turpentine, and restricted communication with outsiders; and ancestral relationships told generation to generation. Despite hardships, the Choctaw Indian community north of Mobile persisted as a system of social relationships solidified within ceremonial gathering areas, churches, schools, cemeteries, and kin-based villages. Reduced in numbers, and increasingly a dominated minority in their own homeland, the ancestors of the MOWA Choctaws made new alliances."
Leon Taylor, a revered elder, said in testimony to the US Senate: "Today, I am Choctaw. My mother was Choctaw. My grandfather was Choctaw. Tomorrow, I will still be Choctaw."[1]
In 1976, Dr. William S. Pollitzer published an analysis of gene frequencies found in a survey among 324 MOWA. He concluded from an analysis of serological (blood) traits that the MOWA have 70% white ancestry, 30% black ancestry, and little discernible American Indian ancestry.[10] His team described the group as traditionally considered a tri-racial community, and noted that its members at one time had remained isolated by marrying within the group. Their conclusions were that the gene frequencies showed that the physical isolation of the group has been dissipated by intermarriage with people outside the group over the years.
These findings of virtually no Native American biological ancestry does not mean that the members of MOWA Band of Choctaw are not culturally Native American. Since before removal, through intermarriage they have absorbed new members from outside the original tribe and continued to practice Choctaw culture.
In 2007, Wilford Taylor, the Chief of the MOWA Choctaw Indians, agreed to participate in a DNA autosomal test that would map his genes, as part of the Genographic Project administered by the National Geographic Society. This type test looks at the full make-up of a person's genes, rather than only Y-DNA or mTDNA from the paternal or maternal direct lines. The study team found that Taylor's ancestry was mostly of the R1B Haplogroup, which is concentrated in Western Europe, for instance, England and Germany.[11]
Most of his ancestors split away 40,000 years ago from those related to Native Americans ancestors in Central Asia. When his ancestors migrated from Central Asia to Europe, they became concentrated in that region and developed additional characteristic mutations that differentiated them from people who moved east in Asia. The R1b haplotype is concentrated in the British Isles and Western Europe. It is also found primarily among those peoples who migrated from Europe to North America from the 16th century on, and among their descendants in the United States.[12] The British and Europeans entered North America from the east. The Paleo-Indians immigrated to North America from the west.
By contrast, the two primary Haplogroups of deep ancestry for Native American males prior to European contact are C and Q3. Contributions of the maternal line may also be tested. Female haplogroups that indicate deep Native heritage include A, B, C, D and X.[13] These were the haplogroups of the peoples found in northern Asia by 30,000 years ago. Their descendants moved east over the Bering land bridge about 22,000 years ago. Eventually their descendants migrated and settled in the Americas as Paleo-Indians in waves beginning about 15,000 years ago, after the ice barriers broke up.[14]
Like Taylor, many Native Americans are of mixed-race ancestry but identify with the Indian culture in which they grew up. For instance, the haplogroup R1b has been found among numerous men of the Cherokee Nation, as the DNA was passed on by European white male ancestors of mixed-race descendants. The Cherokee allowed non-Native men to marry into the tribe; as they had a matrilineal system, the children belonged to the mother's clan and took their status in the tribe from her people. Traditionally the mother's brother in this system was always more important to the children's rearing, especially of boys, than the biological father, who was of a different clan. Beginning with European traders in the eighteenth century, there were marriages between European men and Cherokee women.
The R1b Hapolotype in a Y-line test does not invalidate a male claim to Native American heritage, as it attests to only one line of ancestors. Even if a person has mostly European genetic ancestry, the individual and his or her direct ancestors can be culturally Choctaw from having been reared in Choctaw culture.[13]
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