Extinction by Reclassification: The MOWA Choctaws of South Alabama and Their Struggle for Federal Recognition
Page 165

These accounts are all similar, told so often that their repetitiveness seems to imply validity. Each author has, however, simply echoed the conclusions of previous writers. "No one knows where those people came from," is a recurrent observation. Rather than conduct historical research to clarify the situation, these authors embellished scanty and questionable data with speculation. Although the southwest Alabama Choctaws consider the term Cajun to be pejorative, it stuck. The name served as a convenient means of distinguishing the group from the surrounding black and white populations. Moreover, once the term was incorporated into the literature, it persisted; a 1948 Smithsonian Institution report, for example, included a description of the "Cajun" Indians of southwest Alabama.⁵ Unfortunately, such erroneous descriptions of their identity have been the rule rather than the exception, obscuring the true identity of the Alabama Choctaws.

My association with the Choctaw Indians of south Alabama began in 1980 while I was researching and writing the first comprehensive history of Washington County.⁶ The previous year they had adopted the designation "MOWA Choctaws," with the acronym MOWA selected to represent their modern geographic location, an area straddling the county line between Mobile and Washington counties. I contacted their chief because I wanted to include all segments of the county's population in my book. Evidently, this was the first time they had been asked to tell their own story, because after the Washington County history was published, the tribal chief asked me to help research their history for their petition to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) seeking federal recognition as an Indian tribe.

Federal regulations developed in 1978 outline a procedure for non-recognized Indian tribes to petition the BIA for formal recognition. These regulations require petitioning groups to demonstrate that their members comprise a "community" with internal cohesion, external boundaries, and a distinct Indian identity. To meet the criterion of a distinct Indian identity, the BIA requires petitioners to show an unbroken genealogical paper trail
 

5 William Harlen Gilbert, "Surviving Indian Groups of the Eastern United States," Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1948 (Washington, D.C., 1949), 407-38.
6 Jacqueline A. Matte, The History of Washington County: First County in Alabama (Chatom, Ala., 1982), 124-29.

The Alabama Review 59 (July 2006): 163-204.