ABSTRACT
“Not Lost: ‘We are people of the land. We are clay people, people of the mounds’” calls forth the land and the people of the mounds. These earth works are heard at the juncture before 1829, before removal, as Mississippi seeds and Mississippi earth were forced west to Indian territory that would become Oklahoma. In cold words, “Indian Removal” has been seen as a time of death and loss and silencing. And still, Choctaw hymns, transcribed before 1829, were carried in voice along the trail of loss and tears, to sound a world view that is living Chahta. The singers of early 19th-century Choctaw hymns are not lost voices waiting to be found: we have always been people of the land … clay people … people of the mounds. Building on the insights of Choctaw novelist and critic, Louis Owens, we know that “the recovering or rearticulation of an identity [is] a process dependent upon a rediscovered sense of place as well as community.” For the writer as well as singers as tellers, “each story originates with and serves to define the people as a whole as a community.” What is at stake in such sharing of voice is “the adaptive, dynamic nature American Indian cultures”: the “quality requisite for cultural survival.” Voiced in the chords of the ancestors’ songs, these scripts are heard as mixed artifacts of resistance, conversion, and assimilation. While pre-removal Choctaw hymns incorporate the mounds and bring Mississippi to what will become Oklahoma, their shared quality speaks to Owens sense of the “coercive power of language in Native American oral traditions—that ability to ‘bring into being’ and thus radically enter into reality—intersects with what has been called the ‘development of historic consciousness’”: the stymying ends of written language.
