Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750-1830. By Greg O'Brien. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xxx, 158 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-8032-3569-0.)

Abstract

This short monograph—a volume in the Indians of the Southeast series offered by the University of Nebraska Press—might escape the attention of those seeking broad-stroke volumes illuminating the tragic red-white story that is integral to our history. It should not be bypassed. As one of the many squares in a large quilt, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age deserves to be examined, pondered, and then applauded. Greg O'Brien is a young historian offering his first book, and he presents a study of the evolution of the words “authority” and “power” from the decades when Native people fought other tribes or each other to the days, particularly after the American Revolution, when Euro-Americans moved westward from Atlantic coast states to the Mississippi River and beyond as one century gave way to another. O'Brien is an ethnohistorian greatly interested in the evolution of cultural change. He notes that “the Choctaw people transformed their notions of power and authority as a result of decades of contact with Euro-Americans” (p. xvii), and he traces those changes into the early nineteenth century when white frontier pressure and advancing capitalism, including gifts to tribal leaders, made the “old ways” obsolete and made sovereignty within known boundaries impossible to maintain. He explains basic Choctaw ideology around 1750, notes the changes that a vicious civil war brought to a tribal view of authority, discusses significant power elements in both the political and the spiritual realms, and introduces important tribal leaders who were unable to stem the tide of white American advancement and desire for some of the richest land on the continent.