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Living in the Land of Death: The Choctaw Nation, 1830-1860 (American Indian Studies)

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LIVING IN THE LAND OF DEATH - The Choctaw Nation, 1830-1860 by Donna L. Akers. Michigan State U. Press, 1405 South Harrison Road, Manly Miles Building - Suite 25, East Lansing, MI 48823-5202; www.msupress.msu.edu; reaumej@msu.edu. 202+xxvii pp. $24.95 trade paper, ISBN 0-87013-684-4. photographs, notes, bibliography, index.

Twenty percent of the Choctow Native Americans died in the forced relocation from their ancestral lands in Mississippi to Indian Territory (in present-day Oklahoma) as a result of the U. S. government's Indian Removal Act of 1830. But this was only the beginning of their travails. In Indian Territory, they faced hostility from tribes already settled there, along with diseases, natural disasters, and starvation. Akers, a professor of history at Purdue and a Choctaw Nation tribal member, follows how the Choctaws managed to overcome such hardships by intermixing with other groups and developing their own micro-economy based on cotton plantations linked to the world market for this commodidity. Like other tribes, the Choctows also had to deal with betrayals of agreements with them by the U. S. government. At best, they worked out an ambivalent mode of survival involving adaptations to regional economic and social conditions and measures to preserve their identity and heritage even though they had been transplanted. Akers sets out the historical account with a multicultural sensitivity to the Choctow's perduring, though at times frayed, desire to hold on to to their traditonal ways.