Dissertation

“Building More Than an Economy: Histories of Choctaw-US Laws, Land and Economic Development in Oklahoma” is an ethnographic study of the legal life of settler historical production and how it continually reshapes the conditions for landownership among Choctaw people living in their post-removal homelands. Through a close examination of underutilized (yet vast) Choctaw archival materials, institutional histories for local repositories, and Choctaw historiography alongside ethnographic fieldwork on Choctaw economic development, the dissertation reveals the limits of American Indian economic development in the face of US and state laws informed by anthropological and historical scholarship that proclaim the decline of Indigenous sovereignty and legitimate the settler regime of private property that dispossesses Indigenous people of their lands. It importantly highlights the interrelated relationship between the production of history, US law, and ongoing land dispossession in an era of resurgent American Indian political-economic power.

Support for this research has come from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, ACLS/Mellon Foundation, American Anthropological Association, American Philosophical Society, Western History Collections, Carl Albert Congressional Studies and Research Center, Native Nations Institute, UCLA Institute of American Cultures and others.