The Charity Hall Mission: An 1820s Boarding School for Native American Children in the Chickasaw Nation

This study focuses primarily on the historical and archaeological investigations of Charity Hall, a Christian mission school that operated within the Chickasaw Nation in northeastern Mississippi between 1820 and 1830. This school and others during this time were funded by the United States government through the 1819 Civilization Fund Act, so I argue that these stations served as outposts for American colonialism before the federal government shifted its Indian policy to one of removal. Additionally, I argue that it is impossible to adequately understand the operation of individual mission schools apart from their networks, which I theorize here as “missionscapes.” The historic component also, therefore, focuses on a broader missionscape that encompassed both the Chickasaw Nation and the neighboring Choctaw Nation during the 1820s and 1830s. More precisely, the historical and archaeological data marshalled here are presented to answer my primary research question: what material tools and practices did missionaries use to “civilize” Native American children and their families prior to Indian removal? One of the chief ways that Chickasaw and Choctaw children were being “civilized” by the missionaries at Charity Hall was through the use of material culture. Their lives were regimented around an alien work schedule, they were clothed in materials procured by charitable societies, and they sat around a dinner table with ceramic and metal implements produced in faraway places, some coming all the way from east Asia. The pastors used practical mastery of both educational and mechanical “arts” to civilize the children in accordance with the wishes of the United States government. Here processes of practice and materiality took on a colonial character due to their being encouraged and enforced in a context where the balance of power was shifting from the Indians to the Americans. The American elites found the Christian missionaries to be ready-made agents to “civilize” Indians and spread political influence internally within both the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation. The mission experience, however, ultimately proved to be too costly and slow and therefore paved the way for the removal policies of the 1830s and the abandonment of the “civilization” project altogether.

Hidden in Plain Sight: The US Government’s Use of the Choctaw Nation as an Environmental Toxics Dumping Ground

Non-Indians have long used Indian reservations as dumping grounds for environmental toxics. My preliminary research suggests an urgent need for further study of the impact of the US-government-owned McAlester Army Ammunitions Plant in the Choctaw Nation on the health of my people and homeland. The plant detonates 45,000 pounds of explosives daily, and tests of the soil, water, and air reveal high levels of cancer-causing toxics. Indians in the area experience numerous health problems, including elevated rates of cancer. Additional research would open the door for environmental remediation and prevention of further harm to tribal members and the environment.

Collaborative implementation of a community-based exercise intervention with a partnering rural American Indian community

Background The prevalence and socioeconomic burden of childhood obesity and diabetes has increased rapidly in the United States in the last 30 years. American Indians have the highest prevalence of type 2 diabetes among newly diagnosed youth in the country. Contributing factors include environmental, behavioral, and genetic components. Some American Indian tribal communities have explored innovative ways to combat this epidemic including collaborations with academic centers on community-based research. Method From 2012 to 2017, the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma partnered on a National Institutes of Health–funded project to determine if financial incentives would elicit an increase in physical activity in Native youth. This was a community-based behavioral intervention for overweight or obese American Indian youth ages 11–20 living in a rural community at risk for developing diabetes. Results Tribal leaders and staff identified culturally appropriate strategies to aid implementation of the trial in their community. Their identified implementation strategies helped standardize the study in order to maintain study integrity. The mutually agreed strategies included co-review of the study by tribal and University research review boards (but designation of the Choctaw Nation review board as the “Board of Record”), training of community-based staff on research ethics and literacy, standardization of the informed consent process by videotaping all study information, creation of a viable and culturally appropriate timeline for study implementation, adapting tribal wellness center operations to accommodate youth, and development of effective two-way communication through training sessions, on-site coordination, and bi-monthly conference calls. Conclusion In an effort to partner collectively on a randomized clinical research trial to combat childhood diabetes, tribal leaders and staff implemented strategies that resulted in a culturally appropriate and organized community-based behavioral intervention research project.

Current Research: Current Research in the Upper McGee Creek Drainage, Oklahoma

In recent years the Choctaw Nation has acquired a roughly 80 square mile ranch in the western edge of the Winding Stair Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma. The land is currently a working ranch and timber management area. Choctaw Forestry manages timber activities and range management with the intention of returning the land to an oak savanna setting. Active logging of pine and selected hardwoods and on-going controlled surface burns are included in Forestry activity on the ranch. The project is supported by the Choctaw Nation Historic Preservation Department, which is responsible for the inventory and protection of the cultural resources found on the property. Archeological surveys were conducted in the McGee Creek Reservoir area in the 1970s and 1980s and a wide range of significant cultural resources were located in the reservoir area, less than 10 miles south of the ranch. Only one previous survey was conducted on the ranch property, by the Oklahoma Conservation Commission in the 1980s ahead of construction of an upland flood control reservoir. Significant archeological resources were recorded. Since very little was known about the ranch property itself, it was presumed that this portion of the McGee Creek drainage would also have a similar archeological importance.

Domestic Fronts in the Era of 1812

In 1811, while working as U.S. Indian Agent to the Choctaw nation, a white man named Silas Dinsmoor took guardianship of a ten- or eleven-year-old Choctaw boy named James McDonald. By examining the federal career and household arrangements of this government official and their convergence with the lives of James and his mother Molly McDonald, this essay highlights the central role that race, slavery, and kinship played in both imposing and resisting U.S. imperial rule. It begins by revisiting federal Indian policy and discourses concerning Indian “civilization” to consider the racialized and gendered kinship structures that supported U.S. territorial expansion. It then looks at how Dinsmoor specifically drew upon these same familial arrangements to push for U.S. settlement in the Choctaw nation on both a grand and intimate scale. Dinsmoor was initially invested in federal Indian policies and programs aimed at assimilating Choctaw people and their lands into the U.S. plantation economy by encouraging them to adopt U.S. kinship structures. However, in light of Choctaw responses to his controversial presence in their homelands, the Indian Agent became disillusioned with his work. Presented with an opportunity to “settle” Choctaw lands by establishing a plantation household of his own, Dinsmoor recalibrated his ambitions. Instead of trying to impose U.S. familial values on Choctaw people writ large, he began to acquire Choctaw lands for his own family’s gain, shoring up his claims to Choctaw lands and his sense of spatial mastery through the containment of black and Indian bodies within the space of his own “private” patriarchal household. The essay briefly concludes with the unexpected consequences of Dinsmoor’s actions. When Dinsmoor incorporated a Choctaw youth into his plantation home, he inadvertently supported Molly McDonald’s efforts to use both her son and racial slavery to bolster her own influence on lands coveted by the United States. In the end, Silas Dinsmoor and Molly McDonald’s actions reveal the yawning gap between imperial agendas and colonial realities as Native people found new ways to maintain control over their homelands.