TTU Professor Awarded NEH Fellowship To Complete Book On Choctaw

January 7, 2008, COOKEVILLE – A $25,200 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship will allow a Tennessee Technological University history professor to complete a book about the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon announced.

“NEH grants are highly competitive and involve a rigorous review and selection process to ensure that the best of humanities research, education, preservation and public programs is cultivated,” Gordon said.

The grant will help Dr. Katherine Osburn release time from teaching and committee duties this spring to complete her research and to write her book, A Tribal History of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, 1830-1964. Osburn has written numerous books on Native American history and teaches Native American and Environmental history for TTU.

“This fellowship is extremely competitive,” Osburn said. “Only about 150 of them are granted each academic year, and the field is open to scholars across the nation in all fields of the humanities.”

In 1830, The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek promised Choctaws who remained in Mississippi allotments of land. When several thousand Choctaws tried to claim these lands, the government failed to follow through, and the Mississippi Choctaws were left without property. They retreated to east-central Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast and survived by sharecropping and working low-wage day jobs.

Despite overwhelming poverty and racism, 150 years later, the Mississippi Choctaw created a functioning tribal government and a prosperous and stable reservation economy known as the Choctaw Miracle.

“This monograph will add to the growing body of scholarship that informs both the academy and the public that all Indians are not on reservations in the west, and that Indian culture is multifaceted and alive across the nation, despite five centuries of severe hardships,” Osburn said.