Join Edward P. Green as he discusses the development of early U.S. policies towards Native Americans and the ways that Choctaws attempted to influence those policies, shaping them in ways that would best protect their people.
This project examines the ways that Choctaws understood, debated, and contested ideas about power in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Dr. Green contend that two distinct sources of power developed over this period, one derived from clan membership and local decision making, the other from access to external resources, from outside. Even as the fundamental logic on which these two systems increasingly diverged, they became ever more interdependent on one another. Understanding the ways that Choctaws experienced these multivalent systems of power offers new perspectives not only on Choctaw cultural and political persistence and futurity, but also the development of Euro/American colonial regimes.
Ed is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Penn State University. He examines the development of concepts of power, authority, and legitimacy in the Choctaw Nation between the early eighteenth and early twentieth century. At Mount Vernon, he is researching the ways that Choctaws articulated some of these concepts to outsiders in the early nineteenth century.