Building a Nation: Chickasaw Museums and the Construction of History and Heritage

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIES

Heidi M. Altman, Series Editor

J. Anthony Paredes, Founding Editor

Building a Nation

Chickasaw Museums and the Construction of History and Heritage

Joshua M. Gorman

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2011

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: ACaslon

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gorman, Joshua M.

    Building a nation : Chickasaw museums and the construction of history and heritage / Joshua M. Gorman.

        p. cm. — (Contemporary American Indian studies)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8173-1740-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8562-0 (electronic) 1. Chickasaw Indians—Economic conditions. 2. Chickasaw Indians—Social conditions. 3. Chickasaw Indians—Politics and government. 4. Gambling on Indian reservations—Chickasaw Nation, Oklahoma 5. Indian museums—Chickasaw Nation, Oklahoma. 6. Self-determination, National—Chickasaw Nation, Oklahoma. 7. Chickasaw Nation, Oklahoma—Economic conditions. 8. Chickasaw Nation, Oklahoma—Politics and government. I. Title.

    E99.C55G67 2011

    976.004′97386—dc22

                                                                                                                2011007979

For Mary and Camden

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Museums and American Indians in Context

2. The Chickasaw Council House Museum

3. The Chickasaw National Capitol and White House

4. The Chickasaw Cultural Center

5. Hayochi and the National Museum of the American Indian

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Many friends and colleagues have helped me intellectually and spiritually to write this book. I have benefited greatly from all those who read and criticized various drafts: James Fickle, Joseph Hawes, Jonathan Judaken, Ann Mulhearn, Elizabeth Watkins, Anthony Paredes, and Kent Reilly. I am grateful to the many librarians and archivists who tolerated my long hours and requests to photograph collections, including those at the universities of Memphis, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Historical Society, the National Archives in Fort Worth, and the Anthropology Library at the National Museum of Natural History. Central to this story are those shared with me by the generous museum and heritage professionals of the Chickasaw Nation. I want to specifically thank Governor Bill Anoatubby, Josh Hinson, Amanda Cobb, Kirk Perry, Kelly Lunsford, Tim Baugh, Glenda Galvan, Regina Berna, LaDonna Brown, Sue Linder-Lindsey, and the myriad others who patiently told me about their work, lent me access to their papers, and guided me toward the meaningful bits of the Chickasaw Nation's history, heritage, and culture. It almost goes without saying, but without the inspiration, sustenance, and lodging Dan Swan provided over several years, I would have neither begun nor finished this project. Special thanks to my family, who absorbed my many absences stemming from this book, and to Mary, for supporting, nurturing, and helping me as I embarked on this most selfish of projects. Thank you.

Introduction

Edward Curtis, in his 1930 The North American Indian, had only a brief paragraph on the Chickasaws, and even then, they were jointly considered with the Choctaws. Such was their complete amalgamation with European and American settlers that he described them as a striking forecast of the ultimate solution to what is now regarded as the Indian problem.¹ The presumed assimilation of the Chickasaws was so thorough that Curtis did not seek to take any ethnographic photographs of them. There was no collection of stories and objects as documents of a people who were, in his estimation, one and the same with the white settlers of Oklahoma. Previous to their Removal to Indian Territory, they had advanced in all of the ways of civilization, becoming part of the body politic. In this telling, the Chickasaw Nation as a sovereign enterprise had ceased to exist.

A complex refutation of this idea has been a central component of Chickasaw identity in the past fifty years. Beginning with Chickasaw governor Overton James's assertions of popular, sovereign authority in the 1950s, the Chickasaw Nation has persistently sought to reestablish its political and economic sovereignty and demonstrate it through expanded tribal programs. This book documents the manner in which the Chickasaw Nation created a history of itself as a nation and a national identity founded on history, heritage, and culture that is predominantly expressed through its museums and other heritage sites. The Chickasaw Nation is using museums and heritage sites as places to define itself as a coherent and legitimate contemporary Indian nation. In doing so through museums, they are necessarily engaging with the shifting historiographical paradigms as well as changing articulations of how museums function and what they represent. Through this interaction with history and with museums, the Chickasaw Nation has developed a shifting representation of itself that reflects and informs the transformations present in emerging indigenous museums. Through this process I will describe the role of museums in creating history within the Chickasaw Nation and the consequent effect of that history on the Nation's representation of social and political identity.

The principal questions considered are threefold: Why has the Chickasaw Nation chosen museums as an important part of this national expansion? How has the Chickasaw Nation constructed its own history, heritage, and culture within these spaces? And how do the Chickasaw Nation's museums and heritage spaces correspond to the broader shifts in American museums, including the increase in Native American tribal museums, during, roughly, the last twenty years? Ultimately, this work identifies the ways in which the Chickasaw Nation is utilizing a new indigenous exhibitionary grammar to create and sustain a common community heritage that supports its sovereign authority within the context of the United States' relationship with American Indian nations. This development is viewed within the context of the shifting museological ideas of the late twentieth century, and it places that development within the Chickasaw historiography. The study interprets the re-articulation of that heritage by Chickasaws within their heritage spaces as the locating justification for contemporary sovereignty. Chickasaws are using a Western tool for their own purposes, in the same way that tool has always been used. But they are developing a style of doing so that, like other indigenous museums, rejects the history and science upon which the museum is based. This book examines the process through which these Chickasaw museums have interacted with written histories and ethnographies to create a new discourse for defining and describing themselves.

Writing a history of the Chickasaw Nation as part of a study that examines multiple representations of the same is an awkward enterprise. In some ways the presentation of a narrative by the author undermines the struggle for authority, relevance, and accuracy in which the Chickasaw Nation engages through the articulation of its own history in its own museums and heritage spaces. Certainly, the contents of this history are disputed within the historiography and in the Chickasaws' representation of their own heritage. From the origins of the Chickasaws and the location of their ancestral homelands, to their role in colonial North America, to the cultural continuity maintained into the twentieth century, the history of the Chickasaw Nation remains unsettled. Nevertheless, it seems fitting to offer a primary history of the nation in order to broadly situate this book within the history of the Chickasaw Nation and the Chickasaws within the history of the United States. Particular historiographical debates are noted within the ensuing case studies as they specifically relate to the Chickasaw representation of Chickasaw history within their own exhibitions. Despite the subsequent criticism this study provides of the historiography of the Chickasaw, the chronology of the history is largely undisputed by myself or the Chickasaw Nation.² What follows is an expanded version of this chronology that provides the context for ensuing discussions of the historiography and the Chickasaw Nation's representations of itself within its own exhibitionary spaces.

There are several existent versions of the Chickasaw migration story documenting how the Chickasaw came to occupy their precontact homelands in the southeastern United States (map 1). These accounts all include the Chickasaw moving from the west following a big white dog or a leaning pole toward their eventual settlement in the east. On this journey they crossed the Mississippi River (where the dog perished) and the prairies of present-day Mississippi until they settled in the north and west of present-day Alabama. Several of these stories also account for the separation of the Nation from the Choctaw and the subsequent distance between them.³ The first Chickasaw contact with Europeans came with the entrada of the Spaniard Hernando de Soto in 1540. De Soto and his men first landed in Florida, near modern-day Tampa, and headed inland in an effort to locate the mythical land, Cale. De Soto reached the upper Tombigbee River in the Chickasaw homelands by the winter of 1540. The Chickasaws resisted de Soto at the banks of the river, but he eventually managed to cross and enter the heavily populated towns and fields at the Nation's center. The de Soto contingent camped close to the Chickasaw towns through the winter of 1540–1541, subsisting on the pigs they brought with them and native foods taken from Chickasaw fields. De Soto demanded payment from the Chickasaw of two hundred carriers and women to assist in the Spaniards' departure, provoking an attack upon his party. Though de Soto anticipated the attack, the Chickasaw routed the Spanish in early March 1541, severely reducing their stores and supplies before forcing the intruders farther west.⁴

It would be nearly 150 years before the Chickasaw made another documented contact with European settlers. In 1682, a party of Chickasaw warriors encountered members of the Sieur de La Salle expedition on the Mississippi River at present-day Memphis. The Chickasaws, several days removed from their villages, were recorded to have been at war with the Quapaw to the west and at peace with the Natchez to the south.⁵ The English, moving west from Charles Town, established trade with the Chickasaw people along the Tombigbee River by 1698. Traders brought English trade goods such as beads, cloth, guns, tools, and jewelry to exchange for hides and Indian slaves.

The French and the English were the main European rivals in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Southeast prior to the American Revolution. The Chickasaw Nation generally allied itself with the English and opposed the French in their contest over the region. Supplied with English arms and goods, and exacerbated by regional and colonial struggles for territory and resources, the Chickasaws engaged in almost constant warfare from the Yamasee War in 1715 through the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. French attacks slowly faded and in 1763 the French ceded their colonial holdings west of the Mississippi to Spain and east of the Mississippi to England. Formal treaties were made with England, ensuring Chickasaw sovereignty over their lands and ongoing trade. Through this warfare and the endemic diseases of European contact, the Chickasaw were reduced from a precontact population of nearly eight thousand to perhaps as few as sixteen hundred individuals in 1760.⁶

At the end of the Seven Years War the Chickasaws were able to realize a consistent period of peace for the first time in many decades. Having played an instrumental role in eliminating the French in the Mississippi Valley, the Chickasaws enjoyed unfettered trading with the English, a modicum of protection from Anglo settlers on their domain, and peace with neighboring tribes formerly allied with the French. Though they engaged in a few brief military campaigns, this was a period of stability and growth for the Chickasaw Nation. With the return of war to the North American continent, the Chickasaws again allied with the British and kept U.S. forces, for the most part, out of the lower Mississippi Valley. Following the cessation of hostilities between the United States and Britain, the Chickasaws were eagerly sought by the United States and Spain as allies in securing the middle of the American continent. Though there was considerable dissent within the tribe, Chief Piomingo eventually made peace and an alliance with the United States. By 1800 the Chickasaw Nation was recognized as a sovereign entity with inviolable borders under the protection of the United States.

Map 1 shows the major part of the Chickasaw Nation as defined by the 1786 Treaty of Hopewell with the United States.⁷ The Chickasaws were induced to concede land to the United States in 1805, 1816, and 1818, leaving only a small area (map 2) that was ultimately conceded to the United States in 1837. This shift from tribal security to territorial insolvency happened to the Chickasaws much as it did to most of the Indian nations and communities east of the Mississippi River. By 1815 the bands of Chickasaw warriors were no longer useful to the United States in its contentions with the Spanish and other Indian nations for control of the Southeast. White intruders settled on the Chickasaw lands at a rate that increased with each land cession. Farmers expecting that the Chickasaw would ultimately be driven from the area risked their lives and made improvements, hoping to establish squatter's rights on the land. Though several times the federal government sent soldiers to clear these intruders and destroy their improvements, the hundreds they rounded up barely made a dent in the advancing tide. Especially after the cession of 1818, the territories and states of Mississippi and Alabama increasingly asserted control over the Chickasaws. They passed a series of laws that eventually placed all Chickasaws under respective state jurisdictions and made the functioning of the Chickasaw national government illegal.

The forced Removal of the five civilized tribes began in earnest in 1830 with the passage of the Indian Removal Act. Though overtures were made to the Chickasaws as early as 1826, it was then that pressure to relocate in the West became paramount. Beginning in 1830, until their final capitulation in 1837, councils were called every year in Washington summoning Chickasaw chiefs to begin Removal. Because of their relative prosperity and participation in the American marketplace, as well as the relatively inaccessible and isolated location of their lands, the Chickasaws were the last of the five tribes to sign final Removal treaties. The Treaty of Doaksville, signed in 1837, functionally disbanded the Chickasaw Nation as they would be removed to the western districts of the Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory (map 3).

The Chickasaw trail of tears was not as brutal as that of the Cherokee and Creek.⁸ The relative experience of the U.S. Army made for a smoother Removal. Additionally, the Chickasaws were themselves paying for their Removal with proceeds from the sale of their lands in the East, so whenever they were unhappy with the pace or their treatment, they slowed down, asked for better food, or took a different route. Nevertheless, the Removal was painful and resulted in the deaths of many Chickasaws. Their destination was some four million acres acquired from the Choctaw from their western district in Indian Territory. The Treaty of Doaksville effectively eliminated all forms of the Chickasaw Nation; it subsumed all duties of governance, with the exception of dispersal of tribal funds, to the control of the Choctaw constitutional government. While the Removal itself was not specifically brutal, the movement and circumstances in which the Chickasaw found themselves were devastating. The Chickasaws would be in the West nearly twenty years before they effectively reorganized themselves again into a nation.⁹

In 1856, with their lands secured and their people living once more in a common space, the Chickasaw Nation formed again at Goodsprings, near Tishomingo, Oklahoma. This constitutional government consisted of an elected governor, tribal legislature, and judges and operated in a structure similar to the U.S. government. This government busied itself with the business of passing laws, building infrastructure, and managing annuities and, in 1861, of disassociating itself from the United States and entering an alliance with the Confederate States of America. This alliance arose from the Chickasaws' common social and economic ties to the southern states (including the ownership of slaves) as well as the federal abrogation of treaties guaranteeing protection and the distribution of annuity payments.

Chickasaw participation in the Civil War was limited. Chickasaw troops saw little action and the Chickasaw Nation itself faced only a single raid by Union troops. Nevertheless, the absence of the Chickasaw men and the presence of refugees from the destroyed Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee nations (not to mention the cessation of annuity payments) devastated the country. Following the war, the Chickasaw Nation signed a new treaty with the United States stipulating an acceptance of the principal of allotment of their lands, permission for railroads to enter the Nation, and conditions for the treatment of freed slaves. The Choctaw and the Chickasaw, however, had land the United States desired—by selling it, they received more generous terms of surrender than the other southeastern tribes.

The period from the end of the war to the beginning of the new century was marked most by the explosion of the population in the Chickasaw Nation. In 1866 the Nation consisted of 4,600 Chickasaws, 1,000 freedmen, and no Anglo settlers to speak of. In 1900 the Nation contained 5,000 Chickasaws, 4,500 African Americans, and 150,000 white settlers. The major social, economic, and political changes revolved around Chickasaw reaction to these developments. By the 1870s two political parties formed, the Progressive and the National Pullback parties. The Progressive party promoted the opening of the Chickasaw Nation to settlers, whose labor would be used to develop and enrich the nation. The Progressives also pushed for the expansion of the railroad network and the unification of the Indian tribes into a single territorial governing entity. The Pullback party, on the other hand, placed blame for most problems within the Nation on the railroad and the thousands of intruders they brought. This party sought to check railroad expansion, immigration, and tribal membership.

The railroad intruded upon the Chickasaw Nation, bringing thousands of non-Indians into the Nation's lands. The railroad brought economic opportunity through intensified agriculture and stock raising. These radical economic, social, and political changes enabled a reactionary Pullback political party to maintain favor among Chickasaws. From 1874 to 1898 the Pullback party held the governor's seat, with the exception of one term in 1886. Despite their efforts to insulate the Nation from external influence and change, the Chickasaw Nation increasingly transformed as the governor and tribal legislature lost control over the Nation. With all the change within the Nation, the largest reordering in the period 1890–1907 came from outside. With increasing Anglo presence in Indian Territory and the reduction of the frontier, Congress pushed for the allotment and distribution of Indian lands.

The passage of the Dawes Act of 1887, the establishment of the Dawes Commission in 1893, and passage by referendum of the Atoka Agreement in 1897 enabled the elimination of tribal government, the dissolution of the commonly held tribal lands, the allotment of those lands to individual Indians, and the sale of excess lands. Chickasaw citizens and Chickasaw freedmen (and their descendents) were allotted land of equal value consisting of at least 160 acres or more, dependent upon the relative value of the allotted parcel of land. So, in 1907 when the land of the Chickasaw Nation was allotted in small tracts to the citizens of the Nation, the remaining land was sold to non-citizens seeking inexpensive homesteads. Within the Chickasaw Nation, Chickasaws consisted of less than 5 percent of the population in 1900, thus having no hope of maintaining tribal authority. The consequence of allotment was the erosion of indigenous governmental authority, which resulted in the creation of the State of Oklahoma.

With restrictions for selling their land largely removed for those Chickasaw with less than one-half Indian blood quantum, many sold their allotted lands in order to survive. While the majority of Chickasaw lands had been allotted to Chickasaws, by 1930 fewer than 10 percent remained in Indian possession. In the seventy years after Oklahoma statehood, the Chickasaw Nation had four governors appointed by the president of the United States: Douglas H. Johnston until 1939, Floyd Maytubby from 1939 to 1963, Hugh Maytubby in 1963, and Overton James from 1963 until his popular election by the Chickasaw people in 1971.

Through the efforts of the Chickasaw-led Seeley Chapel movement, consisting of Chickasaw families and the Chickasaw Tribal Council, Overton James was appointed the governor of the Chickasaw Nation by John F. Kennedy and sworn in at Seeley Chapel on October 26, 1963. Governor James formed an advisory council as well as local councils and worked toward the reorganization of tribal government and a new tribal constitution. In 1971, James was elected the governor of the Chickasaw Nation by popular vote. In 1983 a new tribal constitution was ratified in accordance with federal guidelines for Indian reorganization and self-governance. In 1987 Lt. Governor Bill Anoatubby was elected governor of the Chickasaw Nation and has remained in that office to the present. With the advent of Indian gaming under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, the Chickasaw Nation has flourished. Gaming and other industries provide for dramatically expanded programs and services to the Chickasaw Nation and contribute to the development of museums and heritage spaces.

The roughly twenty years in which the Chickasaw Nation built a heritage infrastructure of museums, historic sites, and a cultural center were a period of substantial change within the community. In 1987 the Chickasaw Nation consisted of about twelve thousand citizens. Its annual budget was $700,000. In 2008 the Nation consisted of more than forty-four thousand citizens, and its 2009 budget was nearly $800,000,000. An emphasis on registering citizens prior to the 2000 federal census and an expansion of available tribal programs and resources contributed to the growth in population.¹⁰ The funding for this expansion was born principally of the Nation's gaming enterprises, although a variety of other industries contribute to a continued growth in tribal revenues and resources.¹¹ Tribal expenditures for history, heritage, and culture expanded from virtually nothing to over $60,000,000 in this same period. Besides spending heavily on healthcare and housing, the Nation contributes substantially to regional infrastructure development and employs more than ten thousand people. This growth and commitment to tribal history, culture, and heritage is coincident with the administration of Governor Bill Anoatubby, first elected in 1988. Moreover, this growth was simultaneous with broader articulations and claims to sovereignty by American Indian tribal communities across the United States. Faced with a myriad of enabling legislation and court rulings, Indian nations increasingly demonstrated their rights as sovereign entities through bureaucratic, economic, and cultural development. The Chickasaw Nation's expansion fits within this broader context, although its specific manifestations arose from slightly different causes. This book provides a history of Chickasaw heritage development within its larger national context.

Several questions from the literature stand out as fundamental to the context of this book. These influences are predictably broad and sometimes contradictory. The first point of departure comes from the trans-disciplinary array of approaches that have expanded significantly the field of museum studies since the late 1980s. The concept of new museum studies, which encompasses a transdisciplinary approach to studying museums as phenomena of identity and representation, holds several ideas. First, that museum objects may have different meanings in different exhibitionary contexts. This developed into the concept that exhibits may have grammars from which the meanings of museums and their exhibitions might be read. Additionally, there is a movement to examine the materiality of museum objects