Federal Recognition

Extinction by Reclassification: The MOWA Choctaws of South Alabama and Their Struggle for Federal Recognition – In the 1930s, Carl Carmer, a professor at the University of Alabama and author of Stars Fell on Alabama, traveled around Alabama collecting unusual stories. He said that he chose “to write of Alabama not as a state which is part of a nation, but as a strange country in which I once lived.” One of his stories describes his efforts to determine the ancestry of the so-called Cajuns who lived around Citronelle in southwest Alabama. Carmer’s story provoked a flurry of interest in the “Cajans,” when in reality they were not Cajun at all. Instead, they were descendants of the indigenous Choctaw Indians of southwest Alabama. Originally appearing in The Alabama Review, Volume 59, July 2006, pages 163-204.