The Choctaw Who Stayed

The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was signed in September eighteen thirty, roughly fifty miles northeast of Jackson, at a place in what is now Neshoba County. The Choctaw national leadership signed it under significant pressure. What the treaty required was simple: they were to leave. All Choctaw were to remove to land west of the Mississippi River, to what would become Oklahoma. In exchange they received promises of land, annuities, and protection. Many of those promises were not kept.

Nearly fifteen thousand Choctaw began the removal. The route took them through swamps and across rivers in winter. Hundreds died during the journey. The Choctaw who reached Indian Territory in what became Oklahoma became the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, which today has over two hundred thousand enrolled members.

But some Choctaw did not go. They hid in the forests and swamps of central Mississippi. They lived in isolation, in poverty, and outside the legal protections that might have helped them, because acknowledging their presence would have meant acknowledging their claim to land that had just been taken. For decades they existed in a kind of legal limbo, visible but not recognized.

The first-person accounts of those who stayed and their immediate descendants are not well preserved in accessible sources. The oral traditions belong to the community. What the written record can say is this: they were there, they stayed, and they are there still.

The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians was formally organized and federally recognized in nineteen forty-five under the Indian Reorganization Act. They govern more than thirty-five thousand acres in nine communities, centered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. They are the only Choctaw community that remained in Mississippi after the removal. Nanih Waiya, the mother mound, where the Choctaw tradition says the people emerged from the earth, is tribal land in Winston County, returned to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in two thousand eight. The Choctaw still consider it sacred.

The federal recognition that came in nineteen forty-five was not a gift. It was a legal acknowledgment of a continuity that had never been broken.