Organization
Numerous references in historical records note the presence of Choctaw Indians in this part of Alabama. Historically, there were recognized Indian schools in the counties. In the 1970s, the American Indian Policy Review Commission (AIPRC) described the four thousand Choctaw in Mobile and Washington counties as a "non-recognized tribe." The AIPRC had been formed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to "examine the historical and legal background of federal-Indian relations and to determine if policies and programs should be revised. The commission found that the results of non-recognition were devastating for Indian communities."
In 1979, the Choctaw in this area of Alabama organized as the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians. "MOWA" is a contraction of Mobile and Washington, the two counties which this group inhabits. Its tribal office is located in McIntosh, named after a prominent Creek chief of Scots and Creek ancestry.
Tribal members purchased their first 160 acres (0.65 km2) of land in south Washington County in 1983. They claim descent from several Indian tribes: Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, Mescalero, and Apache. Their annual cultural festival, which includes Choctaw social dancing, stickball games, a Choctaw princess contest, and an inter-tribal pow wow, occurs on the third weekend of June on their reservation lands.
The MOWA petitioned the federal government for federal recognition as an Indian tribe. In 1994 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) denied the MOWA petition because the petitioners failed to prove Indian ancestry by BIA standards, one of seven requirements for tribal recognition. The BIA requires tribes to prove "internal cohesion, external boundaries, and a distinct Indian identity," the latter traced by genealogical descent from members of historical tribes listed in the early 1900s in records such as the Dawes Rolls. According to the BIA spokesperson: "What we found was that the Indians that the MOWA claimed as their ancestors were not their ancestors."
The Choctaw note numerous historical factors have made it difficult for them to satisfy BIA requirements: differences in traditional naming practices and difficulty in following name variations through records; the US government inconsistency in record keeping, not only in recording names but also races (for instance, listing all people with visible African ancestry as Choctaw Freedmen, regardless of whether they had direct Choctaw ancestry as well); the state's classifying all Choctaw as among the black population and recording them as black, effectively ending separate record keeping of them as Choctaw or Indian; and the reluctance of federal officials to accept oral histories of family lineage.
The MOWA filed a lawsuit against the BIA, requesting that the federal court overturn the BIA's decision. The suit was rejected in 2008 by federal court on a technicality. The court ruled the tribe had waited too long to file the lawsuit and had passed the six-year statute of limitations. It noted a 1999 letter from the Secretary of Interior that had rejected any further consideration of the tribe's claim.
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