Last Updated on June 24, 2013 by Dennis Wilford “Longhair” Taylor Tribal Chief MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians Testimony Before the Committee on Resources Unites States House of Representatives Hearing on the Federal recognition and acknowledgement process by the Bureau of Indian Affairs March 31, 2004 Mr. Chairman and committee members: good morning. My name […]
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.
Last Updated on May 6, 2023 by Dennis Choctaw (possibly a corruption of the Spanish chcdu, ‘flat’ or ‘flattened,’ alluding to the custom of these Indians of flattening the head). An important tribe of the Muskhogean stock, formerly occupying middle and south Mississippi, their territory extending, in their most flourishing days, for some distance east
