Background
LeFlore was the first son of Rebecca Cravatt, a high-ranking Choctaw daughter of the chief Pushmataha, and Louis LeFleur, a French fur trader and explorer from French Canada who worked for the Panton, Leslie and Company, based in Spanish Florida. Because the Choctaw had a matrilineal system for property and hereditary leadership, LeFlore gained elite status from his mother's family and clan. By the 1820s, as the historian Greg O'Brien notes, the Choctaw called such mixed-race children itibapishi toba (to become a brother or sister), which emphasized the connection to Choctaw, or issish iklanna (half-blood), which seemed to imitate Euro-American concepts. O'Brien notes the importance of their being first of all, part of the Choctaw elites. Choctaw chiefs recognized the advantage of using such mixed-race elite men as "trailblazers into an unprecedented universe of capitalist accumulation and renewable wealth."
Some like LeFlore gained Euro-American educations that enabled them to negotiate the larger, changing world developing in the American South. When LeFlore was twelve, his father sent him to Nashville to be educated by Americans.
Read more about this topic: Greenwood LeFlore
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