Desert Hawk Books

Choctaws at the Crossroads
The Political Economy of Class and Culture in the Oklahoma Timber Region

Sandra Faiman-Silva

 

 

321 pages
16 Photographs
9 Figures - 5 Maps
6" x 9"
Paperback

Quantity:   $19.00 & S/H

 

Choctaws at the Crossroads examines the political economy of the Choctaws at the end of the twentieth century.  Forcibly relocated in the 1830's from the lower Mississippi Valley to the southeastern corner of Indian Territory, the Choctaws today are dynamic and complex rural ethnic community in Oklahoma.  Many work as nonunionized laborers for large corporations, yet they seek to maintain some aspects of their traditional way of life.  Combining fieldwork archival research, Sandra Faiman-Silva uncovers the processes by which the local economic and social practices of the Choctaws have become intertwined with and, in some respects, dependent on corporate and global economic forces.

"A superlative work...Focusing on shifts in the political, economic, and  cultural lives of the Choctaw, the author demonstrates the degeneration of the group's political status from nation to tribe to ethnic enclave, as well as its economic marginalization through forced entry into the world capitalist system...Faiman-Silva eschews a simplistic model of victimization without denying the glaring inequalities and injustices of past and present interactions with the surrounding world, and she presents vividly the internal heterogeneity of Choctaw solution seeking." - Choice.

Sandra Faiman-Silva is a professor of anthropology at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts.