Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author, to her credit, does have good contacts and spent time amongst the traditional people of the Choctaw Nation. However, her unrelenting Marxist approach to American tribal life is very grinding and does not expand her field of inquiry beyond the simplistic "US bad, Indians good" model that does not adequately address the complexities of the historical relationship between the Choctaw and multiple colonial and post-colonial societies. One of my own works is cited in this book, inaccurately, in my opinion.

But if Marxism is the reader's basis for political theory, it would be a good read and source.

Editorial Review:

Named a C. Wright Mills Award Finalist by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1998), this text draws on micro- and macro-analytical frameworks to critically examine the political economy of the Choctaws from their early life in Mississippi to the late twentieth century. Forcibly relocated in the early 19th Century from the lower Mississippi River Valley to Indian Territory (now Southeast Oklahoma, the Choctaws are today a dynamic and complex rural ethnic community in Oklahoma. This text models the tribe's social change from indigenous nation, to tribe, to ethnic minority community status. Many Choctaws are today employed as nonunionized laborers for large corporations, including Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and Tyson Foods, yet they still seek to retain some aspects of their traditional culture, through particpation in local church-based communities, regional tribal centers, and through tribal activities headquartered at Durant, Ok. Combining participant observation anthropological fieldwork and archival research, the author uncovers the processes by which the local economic and social practices of the Chocatws have become intertwined with, and, in some respects, dependent on corporate, extra-local, and global economic forces. The pathos of the tribe's struggle in the twentieth century is documented first-hand, while at the same time generalizeable conclusions are modelled through charts and maps. A thorough and passionate exploration.

"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 inqualities and injustices of past andn present interactions with the surrounding world. She presents vividly the internal heterogeneity of Choctaw solution seeking."