The term MOWA is a portmanteau of Mobile and Washington Counties.[7] They were formerly named the Mobile-Washington County Band of Choctaw Indians of South Alabama.[1]
Via oral tradition, the Band traces its tribal lineage to Choctaw people who evaded Indian Removal in the 1830s and remained in Alabama.[8] The Bureau of Indian Affairs declined to federally recognize the group, citing insufficient evidence of lineage.[9][10] Both parties agree the Band descends from 19th century progenitors who settled in the counties of Washington and Mobile.[11]
Etymology
MOWA Band historian Jacqueline Anderson Matte noted that locals began to call the ancestors of the Band "Cajuns" or "Cajans" in the 1880s, after L. W. McRae, a local senator, mistook them for relatives of the Louisiana Cajuns.[12] Although the group repudiated the term, and described it as pejorative, it likely stuck because it was an easy way to distinguish the community from the area's white and Black populations.[13][14] In 1980, the newly formalized MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians officially retired the exonym "Cajan".[15]
History
The MOWA Band descends from a racially diverse group of progenitors who settled in the counties of Washington and Mobile in the early 19th century, documented as whites, freed slaves, and free people of color.[11][16] Their oral history traces their tribal origins to Indigenous people who stayed in Alabama after others were coerced or forced to leave for areas west of the Mississippi River in the 1830s, including descendants of Six Towns, Tohomé, Naniaba and Mobilian Choctaw.[17][6][8] Their communities traditionally live on lands ceded by the Choctaw Nation in 1805.[18]
19th century
The first documentation of the progenitors of the MOWA Band was in the early 19th century.[11] The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was the first removal treaty after the 1830 Removal Act. While the MOWA Band stated they had established their descent from the treaty signatories to a high degree, scholars claim the ancestors of the MOWA Band were mostly or often not signatories, and registered and were denied under Article 14 of the Treaty to receive land and citizenship in Mississippi.[19][20][21][22] Fifteen individuals in the Band descend from the signatory Alexander Brashears, who received land under Article 14, and whose descendants married into the community in the late 19th century.[23][24][25]
The oral histories of the Band state Choctaw were joined over time by additional fugitives in the swamplands and forests of southwest Alabama, forming the forebears of the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians, lacking both legal recognition and property.[19][20][26] They initially raised livestock, typically on small, unimproved tracts, then moved into the lumber industry.[27][28] They maintained their own Indian schools from the 1830s until desegregation.[29] Choctaw communities were attested in south Alabama by William Armstrong in 1847.[17]
From the Reconstruction era (beginning in 1865), the women of the community, and some men, would sell firewood.[28] Scholar Angela Pulley Hudson reports that the community numbered around 750 by 1887, when they encountered the Apache internees brought to Mount Vernon.[30][31][32]
Apache internment at Mt. Vernon
Old Mount Vernon Arsenal Barracks
The community was known for bootlegging during this time; one of their oral traditions stated an Apache man assisted a family in production. Band ancestor Luke Rivers stated they used to perform with fiddles for the Apaches at their internment camp. The Apache purchased violins in Mobile, which Hudson implies was due to enjoying the fiddle performance.[33][10] Members of both communities were also sent to American Indian boarding schools, including the Carlisle Indian School and the Haskell Institute in Kansas. The ancestors of the MOWA Band sent their children to these schools due to their own schools not servicing a high school curriculum, while the Apache children were imprisoned there away from their parents, where some of them died.[10][34][35][36]
20th century
In 1910, many ancestors of the MOWA Band were listed in the Washington County census as "mixed" Indian for the first time.[37] Anthropological reports varied on local opinions, with a report in 1937 stating locals considered the ancestors of the Band to be of white, African-American and Native American heritage, whereas a report in 1975 noting local whites and Black people did not widely refer to them as Native American, or even rejected it as an identification.[38][39]
The community was especially impacted by Jim Crow laws, which reified a binary system for racial categorization.[40] This impacted the ancestors of the MOWA Band educationally, economically, and legally.[41][15][40]
Litigation
In 1922, Percy Reed, ancestral to the Band, successfully appealed his conviction under anti-miscegenation laws, as the prosecution was unable to prove he was Black. The appellate court ruled that the determination of his race had been based upon hearsay and appearance, while a defense witness and even his trial judge deemed him to be of Spanish and Indian heritage.[42][40][43] In response, in 1927, the legislature brought in the "one-drop rule", where anyone with any Black heritage was considered Black.[44][42]
Segregated institutions
Weaver School, Mobile County, Alabama
From 1921, missionaries from the Southern Baptist Church and Methodist Episcopal Church visited the area, bringing formal education and religion to the community. This led to the creation of Indian churches, such as Reeds Chapel, which became a center for community life. These newly established Indian missions were run by young female teachers, with the churches doubling as school buildings.[45] While they had convinced the Washington and Mobile County districts to offer a third school system especially for themselves, it remained inadequate for their needs.[41]
By this time, the community was more educationally deprived than Black people; until desegregation, they were typically barred from white schools and refused to attend Black schools, accept Black teachers, or allow church membership to those who married Black people. A few were able to pass and attend white schools, but their low literacy hindered economic advancement.[41][43][46][47] Some members of the Band now advance the view that they were banned from Black schools.[48][49]
During the era of segregation, many local business in Mobile would also not hire Native Americans, including the ancestors of the MOWA Band, as they would have to create a third set of bathrooms for them.[15]
The community was denied a high school education until the 1960s. Instead, many adults attended Bacone College, an Indian school run by the Southern Baptist Convention in Muskogee, Oklahoma. A few also attended a BLA-supported high school on the Mississippi Choctaw Reservation, which was relatively close.[50]
Civil rights movement and tribal formation
The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 superseded earlier Jim Crow laws, allowing many members of the community to find employment in chemical and industrial plants across the southeast.[15] By 1969, most of them went to desegregated schools, with only Reed Chapel school remaining.[51] According to Historian Mark Edwin Miller, the community's Indian churches have retained an important role in its members' sense of identity and pride.[45]
When the civil rights movement in the 1960s saw an increase in Native American political consciousness, the community was able to organize politically.[15] From the 1970s, members of the community began openly identifying as Native American on censuses, and in 1980, they formally organized as the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians.[52][2][3] In 1984, the group played a central role in the formation of the Alabama Indian Affairs Commission.[53]
Historical analysis and oral traditions
Miller notes that the MOWA Band represents a long-standing community with an established identity as a Native American people, but that its exact tribal heritage is contested.[54]Vine Deloria Jr., MOWA Band advocate and noted supporter of unrecognized tribes in the Southeastern United States, described their historical profile as "typical" of southeastern Native Americans, with documentation connecting them to Choctaw villages before Indian removal.[55][56] Like other tribes in the region, research into the origins of the MOWA Band has historically been complicated by ambiguous terminology, the racial problems of the American South, and orders from the U.S. government not to count Native Americans in censuses during the early 19th century.[57][58][59] Hudson has described the policy of disregarding Native groups or lumping them in with others as a "pencil genocide".[60]
Miller stated the MOWA Band's case "reveals the true complexities behind tribal recognition decisions and debates about Indian authenticity", noting that although the tribe's members have oral traditions of "Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek descent", their triracial heritage was not seen as justification for federal recognition by nearby tribes.[61] Miller also stated that the Bureau of Indian Affairs views ambiguities in other categories as less important for federal recognition if documented tribal ancestry exists, which he stated the BIA and the Band could not locate.[62][8] Former Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Kevin Gover, who handled their petition, has expressed support for them having a chance to re-petition under a revised process.[63]
By 1870, the census enumerated only 98 Native Americans in Alabama. 43 were in the vicinity of the modern Poarch Creeks, and none were recorded in the counties of Mobile and Washington.[57][64] Terms historically used for the three families most strongly associated with the tribe, since at least the middle of the 19th century, such as "mulatto", "free persons of color", and "Black", and sometimes white, were used to describe Black, Native American, and mixed-race people in the area.[59][22][58][65] They had free Black ancestry, and thus were not considered members of the enslaved Black community, but were not considered members of white community either.[58][59] Scholars suggest they sometimes affirmed, and were incentivized, to maintain separate identities, as Natives or whites, by practicing segregation from their white and Black neighbors.[29][43][66]
Following a high-profile criminal investigation in 1924, in which a nonliterate Native American shot the deputy sheriff of Mobile County, numerous reports circulated about the community. According to Matte, little research was actually done at this time, and each report largely echoed the reports of previous authors.[67] Miller states the reports, however, bear more systematic analysis. He noted they documented little if any evidence of a clear Choctaw identity upto 1929, and that people alive during the time of the reports would have intimately known the Band's progenitors.[68]
Kinship groups
Tibbie
High Hill
Chastang's
The Level
Areas of historic "Cajan" settlement in Alabama, 1950[69]
The MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians descend from several major kinship groups: the Weavers, Byrds, Rivers, Reeds, and Chastangs.[70][71][72] Matte suggested the ancestors of the Band may have also taken the surnames of families that owned the land they squatted on, similar to African-Americans.[73]
Weavers
Anna, Dave and Jim Weaver arrived in Alabama with Lemuel Byrd, Anna's husband.[72][74] Their younger sister Edy had married Joel Rivers and stayed with him and her mother in Monroe County.[72][74] Dave Weaver later married Cecile Weatherford, mother of Jerome Chastang.[72] Matte states he and Cecile moved near to an area known as "The Level", which he founded with Byrd and others.[75][76]
According to oral histories, Jim Weaver was exiled from Washington County for killing his nephew, and that after fleeing, he and his wife Marguerite settled in High Hill with a band of Choctaw led by Piamingo Hometah, in an area known as Caretta, which Matte suggested could have been a reference to Coweta.[77][78] Ella Weaver's son with Leon Taylor, Wilford "Longhair" Weaver, was elected chief of the MOWA Band of Choctaw in 1995.[79][80][81] Another descendant, Galas Weaver, became a prominent MOWA Band leader.[82]
Byrds
David and Jim Weaver's younger sister Anna Weaver married Lemuel Byrd in 1818 in Georgia.[75] Byrd was born in North Carolina, and served during the Seminole Wars from Putnam County, where he said he had fought Native Americans.[83][78] Oral tradition states that Byrd had served in a Cherokee regiment, under General Edmund P. Gaines, although the BIA said this had no documentation, and his descendants did not apply via him to the Guion Miller Rolls.[84][85][86]
Matte stated that between 1820 and 1830, Lemuel Byrd, Anna Weaver, and her brothers Dave and Jim Weaver had joined the refugee Choctaw community in southern Alabama.[72][74] Anna and Lemuel's eldest son, Bill T. Byrd, married Betsy Gibson.[75] According to oral tradition, Gibson descended from the Choctaw Chief Elitubbee, though she was documented to have been born in Georgia to parents from Virginia and North Carolina, whereas Elitubbee had his children in Mississippi.[87][78][75]
Dr. John Chastang, who was French, lived on Twenty-seven-mile Bluff, traditionally Choctaw territory, which also became known as Chastang's Bluff. There, a local Creole community of French Catholic and African origin emerged from his children with his wife Louison, a woman described in the local quarterly as a Black Indian. Matte claims the area was also occupied at that time by Choctaw exiles and refugees from the Creek War.[72][90]
John and Louison's son Edward Chastang later married Cecile Weatherford. The Chastangs of the MOWA Band trace their descent to Edward and Cecile's son, Jerome Chastang.[72][91]
Reeds
By 1818, the Reed family had settled near Tibbie. Local folk history and official documents suggested various origins for Daniel Reed, including that he was "Portuguese", mixed-race from the West Indies, or a free Black person.[92][93][78] He married a Mississippi-born woman named Rose, recorded as a former slave and a mulatto, whom he emancipated from her white master in 1818.[92][94][51] The sons of the Reed family married the daughters of Jim and Dave Weaver.[95][51]
The Band's oral tradition says that Rose was Rose Gaines, the daughter of Young Gaines, who worked as an interpreter for the Choctaw Trading House at Fort St. Stephens and witnessed several treaties as a settler married to a Native woman.[78] According to a posthumous news story, Gaines had married a Choctaw chieftain's daughter and buried several caches of Choctaw gold.[92][96] This claim was advanced by the Band during their application for federal recognition, but was rejected at the time by the BIA, due to lack of documentation, census records, Rose's enslavement and emancipation, and the dates of Young Gaines' time in Alabama and Mississippi.[97][78]
State recognition
In 1979, the State of Alabama formally acknowledged the MOWA Band of Mobile and Washington County as a state-recognized tribe, through legislation introduced by State Representative J. E. Turner. Band members Galas Weaver and Framon Weaver became active leaders in Native American affairs in the state of Alabama.[3] Galas Weaver was instrumental to the formation of the Alabama Indian Affairs Commission, created by the 1984 Davis-Strong Act.[41]
Petition for federal recognition
The MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians sent a letter of intent for federal recognition in 1983.[98] They completed their petition for federal acknowledgment in 1988.[99] Meanwhile, in 1994, legislation to recognize the MOWA Band passed in the Senate, but failed to pass in the House.[100]
Diagram from Final Determination, depicting the forty Band members with documented Native ancestry. Fifteen descended from Alexander Brashears, and twenty-five descended from the Laurendine-Williams family of Mississippi Choctaw.
Kevin Gover, then Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, and the US Department of the Interior denied their petition in 1997 and again in 1999. The final determination stated that "the Alabama group did not descend from the historical Choctaw tribe or from any one of the other five tribes it claimed."[1] It went on to state:
The Final Determination noted that the petitioning group is derived from two core families that were resident in southwestern Alabama by the end of the first third of the nineteenth century. All persons on the petitioner's membership (3,960) roll descend from these two families. About one percent of the members have documented Indian heritage but it derives from an ancestor whose grandchildren married into the petitioning group after 1880, and from another individual who married into the petitioning group in 1904. This insignificant Indian ancestry for a few individual members does not satisfy the criterion that the group as a whole descends from a historical tribe. The MOWA ancestors, most of whom were well documented, were not identified as American Indians or descendants of any particular tribe in the records made in their own life times.[1]
The MOWA Band of Choctaw requested a reconsideration of the Final Determination in 1998, and the US Department of the Interior reaffirmed its declining of the MOWA petition in 1999, stating, "The Final Determination concluded that there was no evidence that established Choctaw or other Indian ancestry of 99 percent of the MOWA membership. Rather, the evidence tended to disprove Indian ancestry."[99] Since 2000, the Census Bureau has referred to members of the band under the category "American Indian and Alaska Native", subcategory "Choctaw", as using the assigned code C12, for the label "Mowa Band of Choctaw".[102]
Lebaron Byrd, CEO of the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indian Commission
Under the leadership of Framon Weaver in 1980, the MOWA Band formally organized as a nonprofit organization in Alabama, the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indian Commission.[3][2]
As of 2022, the commission's administration includes:
The commission received grants from organizations such as the Gulf Coast Resource Conservation and Development Area, Ala-Tom RC&D Council, Alabama Business Charitable Trust Fund, and others.[2]
Reservation
Location of the MOWA Reservation
The MOWA Band is a rare state-recognized tribe with a reservation. The MOWA Choctaw Indian Reservation is a few miles west of US 43. It is 160 acres in size. It includes a health clinic, a museum, recreation facilities, tribal businesses, a tribal center, and several housing complexes, the largest of which is named after Jacqueline Anderson Matte.[104]
Culture and events
The MOWA Choctaw Cultural Center in Mount Vernon is subordinate to the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indian Commission. It was formed in 2003 as an A90: Arts Service Organization. Lebaron Byrd is its president.[4]
Members of the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians have a high frequency of Marinesco–Sjögren syndrome, a rare autosomalrecessive disorder which can lead to intellectual disability, muscle weakness, and balance and coordination problems.[106][107] They are the only known population in the United States to suffer from the rare disease.[108]
12Miller 2013, pp.30–31, 230, 257pg. 30-31: A third class of southeastern indigenous peoples consisted of refugee multiracial communities tucked away in remote, marginal lands throughout the Southeast. The Lumbees and related groups in North and South Carolina are the most well-known of these groups, but others include the MOWA Choctaw community of Alabama pg. 230: As with many other multi-racial communities, the MOWA were culturally and economically indistinguishable from other poor, rural southern communities by this time.Cramer 2005, p.123pg. 123: They have never denied their mixed racial heritage; one leader told me, “We’re poly-racial...We are a mixture of Spanish, French, Creole, Cajun, white, black, red.”Matte 2018, p.120
123Miller 2013, pp.261–262pg. 261: Other than geographic location within traditional Choctaw lands, however, the MOWA group did not locate a single contemporaneous record saying its core ancestors were Choctaw. They did not find any written account showing that an Indian-identified community existed in their area shortly after the removal era.pg. 262: As revealed in the Guion Miller proceedings and other surviving records, children and grandchildren of these core ancestors as early as 1908 did not present what appeared to be a strong tribal identity or specific Choctaw community identity. The acknowledgment office documented with specificity the marriage patterns of the three core ancestral families. It concluded that members of these families did not marry an individual with recorded Choctaw ancestry until the late nineteenth century. The MOWA group was not able to refute this claim.
123Miller 2013, p.251"It was between 1810 and 1850, both sides agree, that the Reed, Weaver, and Byrd families began appearing in records of the MOWA group’s core region. The tribe and BIA researchers ultimately concurred that these three family lines were the key progenitors of the modern MOWA people. Virtually all the group’s members were proven to descend from several ancestors who settled in Washington and Mobile Counties in the early nineteenth century."
↑Matte 2018, p.34 pg. 24: "Dr. Chastang died in 1813 and left his vast holdings to his “beloved worthy friend and companion, Louison, a free negro woman (who has resided with me for twenty years past and has been my sole attendant in health and particularly so in sickness)” and then to their mixed blood children, called Creoles." Miller 2013, pp.21, 202, 230, 236, , 253, 257, 261–262, 264, 323pg. 264: "their ancestral community may have been composed primarily of a mixture of European and African individuals, with a small fraction of Indian ancestry added much later"pg. 253: "The 1818 document describes Daniel as a “free male of colour"pg. 257: "Cecile Weatherford is proven to have had a son by Jerome Chastang, a member of the free Creole of Color group descended from French Catholic and African individuals that lived in a hamlet called Chastangs in Mobile County, just south of the modern MOWA settlements. Many MOWA ancestors were associated with this mixed-race Creole of Color community.'"pg. 323: "surviving contemporary land records, censuses, and other documents detail origins among European Americans and freed slaves."
↑Miller 2013, pp.204, 220, 236p. 204: "The MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians, on the other hand, is a long-standing community, although one whose Indian ancestry and exact tribal heritage are shrouded in mystery and controversy."p. 229: "...the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians of southwestern Alabama has a long-standing identity as an Indian people, though its exact origins are murky."p. 236: "...the leaders were confident that their long-standing recognition as an isolated, Indian people would lead to the federal imprimatur."
↑Matte, Jacqueline Anderson; Deloria, Vine (2018). They Say the Wind Is Red: The Alabama Choctaw - Lost in Their Own Land (Reviseded.). Montgomery: NewSouth Books. pp.10–11. ISBN978-1-58838-079-1. Miller 2013, p.236
123Renée, Ann Cramer (2005). Cash, Color, and Colonialism: The Politics of Tribal Acknowledgment. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. pp.116, 119.
123456Miller 2013, p.250-251 The MOWA Band conducted an extensive series of oral histories about their people and their origins that pointed the way toward proving their heritage using non-Indian records. According to group oral traditions and writings produced by the band, Choctaw and other Indian ancestors hid out in the pinewoods and swamps of modern Mobile and Washington Counties, Alabama, to avoid removal. Well-known Choctaw leaders Piamingo Hometak and Tom Gibson were among these people, as were dozens of Indians who went only by Indian names, names that have been lost to time. The modern MOWA peopie believe that they logically descended from men listed on several Choctaw treaties and various nineteenth-century reports noting Choctaws in the Mobile area. However, upon intensive research, Matte and her MOWA team admitted that they could not document these assertions with specificity
↑"Letter of Intent"(PDF). Petitioner #086: MOWA Band of Choctaw, AL. US Department of the Interior Indian Affairs. Retrieved 16 January 2022.
12Leshy, John D. (26 November 1999). "Secretary's Decision Documents"(PDF). US Department of the Interior. Office of the Solicitor. Retrieved 16 January 2022.
↑Miller 2013, p.258 pg. 258 "Sometime in the latter nineteenth century the family of Alexander Brashears began to intermarry into the core group. He is important to further show the genealogical complexity. Brashears was a documented Choctaw who chose to remain in the East under terms of the removal Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek." "As mentioned above, the Mississippi Choctaw Laurendine family moved to Mobile County sometime after the Civil War and settled among the well-known Creole of Color community called Chastangs. It is documented that members of this line married into the Weaver, Reed, and Byrd families sometime around 1900."BIA 1994, p.11"A small number of members of the MBC petitioner (15 out of approximately 3,960) can trace ancestry to Alexander Brashears, an Indian who remained in Alabama after the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek and opted to become a U.S. citizen.""A small number of members of the MBC petitioner (25 out of approximately 3,960) can trace ancestry to Mississippi Choctaw, families named Williams and Laurendine that moved into Mobile County, Alabama, after the Civil War, and intermarried with the well-known Mobile County non-Indian Creole of color family named Brue."Cramer 2005, p.124 "The BAR further estimated that only about 1 percent of the four thousand-person tribe (or forty people) could prove their Indian heritage"Matte 2018, p.83
Matte, Jacqueline Anderson (2006). "Extinction by Reclassification: The MOWA Choctaws of South Alabama and Their Struggle for Federal Recognition". Alabama Review. 59 (3): 163–204.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
