Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

The southeastern corner of Oklahoma is Choctaw country. It has been for nearly two centuries, ever since the federal government forced the Choctaw people off their ancestral homelands in Mississippi and marched them west in one of the most devastating removals in American history.

In eighteen thirty, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek made the Choctaw the first of the Five Tribes to sign away their eastern lands under the Indian Removal Act. Beginning in the winter of eighteen thirty-one, thousands of Choctaw men, women, and children walked more than five hundred miles to Indian Territory. The journey was catastrophic. Bitter cold, inadequate supplies, and epidemic disease killed somewhere between two thousand and six thousand people along the way. A French observer named Alexis de Tocqueville happened to witness the crossing at the Mississippi River and later described the ordeal in Democracy in America as one of the most affecting things he had ever seen.

The Choctaw rebuilt in Indian Territory. By the eighteen fifties they had established schools, newspapers, a bicameral legislature, and a flourishing agricultural economy. The Civil War devastated the nation again. Most Choctaw leadership aligned with the Confederacy, and when the Union prevailed, the tribe lost millions of acres under punitive Reconstruction treaties.

Dismemberment came more slowly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Dawes Commission allotted tribal lands to individual citizens and dissolved the Five Tribes' governments. But the Choctaw Nation survived, reconstituted itself under a new constitution in the late nineteen seventies, and today is the third-largest tribal nation in the United States, with more than two hundred twenty five thousand members.

The tribal complex at Durant, visible just off the highway, anchors a modern economy that includes several casinos, health clinics, and manufacturing operations that employ tens of thousands of people across roughly seven million acres of their historic homeland. The Nation's resurgence is one of the most significant stories in modern Oklahoma.