MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians - Ethnic Identity

Ethnic Identity

The historian Jacqueline Anderson Matte notes that the Choctaw have preserved their identity by cultural practices:

"The strongest evidence of the MOWA Choctaws' Indian ancestry is not, however, found in written documents; it is found in their lives. Their ancestors passed to them their Choctaw Indian identity and traditions, persevering and preserving their heritage despite a long history of persecution and discrimination. Interviews with elders reveal stories of survival by hunting, fishing, trapping, and sharing the kill; rituals related to marriage, birth, and death; customs associated with gardening, medicinal plants, logging, dipping turpentine, and restricted communication with outsiders; and ancestral relationships told generation to generation. Despite hardships, the Choctaw Indian community north of Mobile persisted as a system of social relationships solidified within ceremonial gathering areas, churches, schools, cemeteries, and kin-based villages. Reduced in numbers, and increasingly a dominated minority in their own homeland, the ancestors of the MOWA Choctaws made new alliances."

Leon Taylor, a revered elder, said in testimony to the US Senate: "Today, I am Choctaw. My mother was Choctaw. My grandfather was Choctaw. Tomorrow, I will still be Choctaw."

=.251 8295000. 1976, Dr. William S. Pollitzer published an analysis of gene frequencies found in a survey among 324 MOWA. He concluded from an analysis of serological (blood) traits that the MOWA have 70% white ancestry, 30% black ancestry, and little discernible American Indian ancestry. His team described the group as traditionally considered a tri-racial community, and noted that its members at one time had remained isolated by marrying within the group. Their conclusions were that the gene frequencies showed that the physical isolation of the group has been dissipated by intermarriage with people outside the group over the years.

These findings of virtually no Native American biological ancestry does not mean that the members of MOWA Band of Choctaw are not culturally Native American. Since before removal, through intermarriage they have absorbed new members from outside the original tribe and continued to practice Choctaw culture.

In 2007, Wilford Taylor, the Chief of the MOWA Choctaw Indians, agreed to participate in a DNA autosomal test that would map his genes, as part of the Genographic Project administered by the National Geographic Society. This type test looks at the full make-up of a person's genes, rather than only Y-DNA or mTDNA from the paternal or maternal direct lines. The study team found that Taylor's ancestry was mostly of the R1B Haplogroup, which is concentrated in Western Europe, for instance, England and Germany.

Most of his ancestors split away 40,000 years ago from those related to Native Americans ancestors in Central Asia. When his ancestors migrated from Central Asia to Europe, they became concentrated in that region and developed additional characteristic mutations that differentiated them from people who moved east in Asia. The R1b haplotype is concentrated in the British Isles and Western Europe. It is also found primarily among those peoples who migrated from Europe to North America from the 16th century on, and among their descendants in the United States. The British and Europeans entered North America from the east. The Paleo-Indians immigrated to North America from the west.

By contrast, the two primary Haplogroups of deep ancestry for Native American males prior to European contact are C and Q3. Contributions of the maternal line may also be tested. Female haplogroups that indicate deep Native heritage include A, B, C, D and X. These were the haplogroups of the peoples found in northern Asia by 30,000 years ago. Their descendants moved east over the Bering land bridge about 22,000 years ago. Eventually their descendants migrated and settled in the Americas as Paleo-Indians in waves beginning about 15,000 years ago, after the ice barriers broke up.

Like Taylor, many Native Americans are of mixed-race ancestry but identify with the Indian culture in which they grew up. For instance, the haplogroup R1b has been found among numerous men of the Cherokee Nation, as the DNA was passed on by European white male ancestors of mixed-race descendants. The Cherokee allowed non-Native men to marry into the tribe; as they had a matrilineal system, the children belonged to the mother's clan and took their status in the tribe from her people. Traditionally the mother's brother in this system was always more important to the children's rearing, especially of boys, than the biological father, who was of a different clan. Beginning with European traders in the eighteenth century, there were marriages between European men and Cherokee women.

The R1b Hapolotype in a Y-line test does not invalidate a male claim to Native American heritage, as it attests to only one line of ancestors. Even if a person has mostly European genetic ancestry, the individual and his or her direct ancestors can be culturally Choctaw from having been reared in Choctaw culture.