Katherine M. B. Osburn

What one has here is a workmanlike accounting of those members of the Choctaw nation that opted not to be removed from Mississippi and yet were able to carve out a space for themselves in the Jim Crow South. As for what allowed this band to become a relative success story, apart from a deep attachment to their ancestral burial grounds, these people were prepared to be sufficiently adaptive in the cultural sphere not to "read" as totally alien, and they consistently availed themselves of every available legal avenue to make sure that their rights on paper had traction in real life.… (mer)

This book might matter more to people who understand what its intervention is in the first place- that the Mississippi Choctaw "Miracle" is not in fact a miracle at all, but rather was in line directly with Choctaw political resistance over the course of over a century. To someone completely unfamiliar with the primary narrative in the first place, it was interesting but maybe not as groundbreaking as it could have been? I also thought that her explorations and theorizing of these situations could be much more useful than it stands, but it wasn't a terrible book.… (mer)