Event

Tanner Allread is giving a talk on Choctaw Governance and Indigenous Constitutionalism at the McNeil Center on Thursday, November 14 from noon to 1pm. There will be light refreshments, and participants are also welcome to bring a brown bag lunch.

Description:

In 1826, the Choctaw Nation wrote the first-ever tribal constitution in the United States.  However, historians have largely overlooked this constitution and its significance for the processes of tribal constitution-making and tribal state-building during the era of Indian Removal.  This presentation corrects that oversight, recovering the ways in which the Choctaw drew from their intellectual and political environment to assert sovereignty over their lands and opposed federal entreaties to cede those lands.  It shows how the Choctaw Nation appropriated and subverted concepts of constitutionalism and written law to construct a hybrid legal regime that transformed the Nation from a web of cultural and kinship connections to a cohesive national polity and tribal state apparatus.  And it contends that the Choctaw Constitution was the genesis of a tradition of “Indigenous constitutionalism” in which hundreds of Native nations wrote constitutions from the nineteenth century to the present, a tradition historians and legal scholars should take into account when studying the legal and political development of the United States.