By Sid Salter / Syndicated Columnist
The Meridian Star
MERIDIAN — Assessing the legacy of former Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians Chief Phillip Martin - who was in critical condition at a Jackson hospital at deadline for release of this column - is an exercise that is incomplete without context.
At the time that Europeans were introduced into Mississippi in about 1540, there were about 20,000 members of the Choctaw tribe here, according to the writings of University of Oklahoma historian Arrell M. Gibson in A History of Mississippi. By 1900, the Choctaws in Mississippi had dwindled to about 2,000. Today, there are 9,660 Mississippi Choctaws.
In that seminal history of the state, Gibson outlines the "dimunition of the Choctaw estate in Mississippi" as beginning in 1801, when a series of treaties resulted in the taking by the U.S. government of over 25 million acres of land from the Choctaws.
Today, the Choctaws own only about 35,000 acres of tribal lands. In return for those land cessions, the Choctaws were treated to the joys of smallpox, syphilis and other gifts from the intruding Europeans. They were forced off their lands and moved west to reservation lands in Oklahoma along the fabled "Trail of Tears."
The Choctaws were robbed, raped, bought, sold, herded like cattle to reservation lands and murdered with impunity in Mississippi between 1540 and 1900.
After that time, they were left to subsist on reservation lands with poverty, joblessness and illiteracy as their constant companions. Schools were poor, health care was scant and the once-pride tribe was left as a cultural oddity clustered mostly in Neshoba County.
In the early 1800s, the leader of the Choctaw nation was - according to 20th century ethnologist John Swanton - Pushmataha, the "greatest of all Choctaw chiefs." Is it accurate to mention Martin's name with those of Pushmataha and former Chief Emmett York? Without a doubt, yes.
Under Martin's leadership, the tribe launched the Silver Star Casino in 1994 in rural Neshoba County on what had previously been swampy bottom lands. Finding financial backing for the original project was difficult in the extreme.
The Silver Star was a rousing success, drawing gamblers from across the Southeast and helping to propel Mississippi to the status of the nation's largest gaming destination between Atlantic City and Las Vegas. But it wasn't only the gaming enterprise in which the Choctaws found success.
A 1998 study by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development indicated that Choctaw unemployment had dropped from 75 percent in 1979, when the tribe got its first General Motors wire harness factory, to 4 percent in 2001.
In 2001, the casino and nine other manufacturing enterprises and a construction company were generating over $172.6 million in wages and over $4.8 million in state income taxes and provides some 7,000 jobs -more than half for non-Indians. The Choctaws pulled themselves up by the bootstraps after white people almost annihilated them physically and economically.
Martin preached Choctaw "self-determination" all of his life - the notion that his tribe should determine their own fate rather than await government largesse on the reservation. That's his greatest legacy.
Contact Sid Salter at (601) 961-7084 or e-mail ssalter@clarionledger.com. Visit his blog at clarionledger.com. His talk radio show, On Deadline with Sid Salter, is broadcast on the SuperTalk Mississippi network.
