Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country

The first scholarly monograph dedicated to Choctaw Nation's engagement in the US Civil War, Choctaw Confederates importantly shows how Choctaws’ alliance with the Confederacy was a strategic move to maintain their sovereignty. To illustrate the historic arc of Choctaws navigating this decision and its aftermath, Fay A. Yarbrough utilizes ethnological work on Choctaw society and culture to understand possible rationales behind major decisions like the Choctaw Nation's incorporation of slavery to maintain economic autonomy and their approach to emancipation. Yarbrough also presents the experiences of enslaved people before and after the war, which importantly shows the human consequences of Choctaw Nation's importation of anti-black ideologies into their legal system. Collectively, these inform the book's claim to present a “Choctaw perspective” on their participation in the Civil War. But this “Choctaw perspective” has unique pitfalls due to the selection of sources. Although Choctaw Confederates is a valuable contribution for its overall argument and for highlighting the understudied impact of Indigenous sovereignty on the US Civil War and Reconstruction, some of its supporting arguments that claim to be a “Choctaw perspective” are inadequate due to the limitations of the primary sources analyzed and the biases of the ethnological sources used to show how Choctaw culture informed the nation's actions.First, Yarbrough's narrative surprisingly misses significant moments and factors that played into Choctaw Nation's alliance with the Confederacy. Most glaring is the constitutional crisis from 1857–1859 in which leaders split over whether slavery should be a constitutionally protected institution. Another major factor was the threat posed by railroad companies vying to be the first to enter Indian Territory. Given that these two key issues support Yarbrough's overarching arguments regarding Choctaws’ efforts to maintain their political autonomy, their non-inclusion raises questions regarding which sources were utilized. Throughout the text, Yarbrough draws on the printed volumes of Choctaw laws and resolutions for many of her arguments, identifiying laws and legal trends to reveal Choctaw Nation's changing political priorities and how those new laws affected Choctaw society. Although Yarbrough also draws on other Choctaw-produced primary sources like correspondence between Choctaw, US, and Confederate leaders and outsider accounts, these sources do not include all the events that factored into the Choctaw-Confederate alliance. Rather, there are smaller and seemingly less connected archival collections on this period that were not cited yet describe the aforementioned significant events.Second, while Yarbrough rigorously qualifies her interpretative decisions in Chapters 2 and 6 regarding enslaved people's experiences with slavery and emancipation, her usage of John R. Swanton's work to evaluate Choctaw cultural motivations is less critical. For instance, Yarbrough does not address the fact that Swanton conducted his field work in Mississippi and interviewed only two male individuals in the early 1920s—well after Choctaw removal. By the time Swanton published his ethnology in 1931, Choctaw communities had undergone great cultural and political changes; what was true for Mississippi Choctaws in the 1920s was not necessarily the same for their Indian Territory counterparts in the 1860s. While cultural continuity certainly existed, not all norms held the same weight for Choctaws in Indian Territory that Yarbrough ascribes—an issue that sources on contemporary Choctaw Nation could have elucidated. For example, in Chapter 5, which substantiates Chapter 4’s argument that Choctaws were enthusiastic supporters of the Confederacy, Yarbrough relies on Swanton's description of how masculinity was constituted through warfare (which also builds on Greg O'Brien). She argues that the US Civil War offered an opportunity for Choctaw men to prove themselves as warriors which partially explains why the bulk of Choctaw Confederate enlistments took place at the beginning of the war. Yarbrough interprets this motivation as enthusiasm for the Confederate cause. Unfortunately, Yarbrough fails to account for cultural discontinuity; the social meaning of masculinity for the Choctaws written about by Swanton were not the same as those living in pre–Civil War Indian Territory—a completely different geographic, political, and temporal context. The weakness of this claim becomes even more apparent when she suggests that the Lighthorsemen police force provided an opportunity to perform a “traditional” sense of masculinity. Given that only a few men per district could even be Lighthorsemen (which Yarbrough acknowledges), this argument does not hold. The impetus to prove one's masculinity by being a warrior simply did not have the same social meaning in Indian Territory as in pre-removal Choctaw Nation. Ultimately, by not carefully considering the discrepancies in the ethnological sources and relying on them to develop arguments regarding how Choctaw culture might have informed and shaped actions, Yarbrough provides an incomplete “Choctaw perspective.”Rather than interpreting Choctaw culture primarily through ethnologies, it would have been fruitful to consult contemporary Choctaw people who live and know their own culture and history—and how those inform one another. Heeding calls within the discipline of history and Native Studies to engage Native people in the analyses of their own history would in turn provide opportunities to write Indigenous histories more accurately and collaboratively.