It’s just before 5 p.m., and even though some of the lights have already been switched off, the electric hum from the large overhead fuorescents can still be heard as they slowly cool down. Even in the darkness, three flags can be seen hanging vertically from the rafters. In the center, the American fag. To its right, the state fag of Mississippi. To its left, the flag of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.
This is no ordinary metal fabrication facility. Sure, sparks fy brightly as the intense heat from a welding torch makes contact with what will one day be part of an American-made flatbed trailer, an image that could just as easily be seen in industrial cities such as Detroit or Buffalo.
Here at the Chahta Enterprises Metal Fabrication Operation, however, the man behind the mask as sparks cascade around him is a Choctaw Indian. Twenty years ago, he might not have had the opportunity to hold a job like this. But here he is, part of a workforce more than 5,750 strong, all of them employed by the Mississippi Choctaw.
As the few remaining workers finish up on a bright orange trailer, another man emerges from behind a translucent yellow eye-shield. He’s tall and stocky and stands out even among the large machines that fill the room. He has dark skin and even darker, somewhat curly short black hair. His name is Mark Patrick, and he has been Director of Quality and Sales at Chahta Metal Works since the plant opened in 2014.
Patrick is quiet at first. Then I ask if he has any children. Patrick perks up a bit.
He tells me that he has two sons. One recently graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi, using the tribe’s generous college scholarship program to pay for his education. His other son works here at the plant.
In a sense, Patrick embodies the remarkable resurrection of the Mississippi Choctaw, a group that a century ago was nearly extinct and a little over three decades ago sufered in seemingly hopeless poverty. Today the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians is one of Mississippi’s largest employers, one of the nation’s most successful Indian nations, a glittering example of what can happen when government loosens its hold and allows a tribe to run its own affairs. It is a miraculous transformation, one of the greatest minority success stories in American history.
But how? How is it that now, a Choctaw like Patrick is able to send one son to college and give the other son the opportunity to work and sustain himself when just over one generation ago most of the tribe was living in utter poverty, barely making $2,000 a year?
The Choctaw tradition of business can be traced back to the 18th century, back when the Choctaw people had a strong economy based on communal ownership and responsibility. At one time in the South, pidgin Choctaw was the language of commerce. The Choctaw favored business over warfare, the sharing of goods over the shooting of arrows.
Marveling at their affinity for trade, Robert White, author of Tribal Assets, wrote that the Choctaw “were the late 20th-century Japanese of the pre-European South.”
After a series of treaties gradually tore land away from the Choctaw beginning in 1786 with the Treaty of Hopewell, tribal members who were able to avoid Removal, the Choctaw’s preferred term for the “Trail of Tears,” made their living sharecropping.
“Made their living” is a bit of an exaggeration, as thousands of Choctaw sharecroppers were forced into bitter poverty and wretched lives. On its website, the tribe’s own economic development history quotes a congressional investigator’s description of the Mississippi Choctaw in the early 1900s as “the poorest pocket of poverty in the poorest state in the country.”
By 1910, the number of Choctaw in the state had dwindled to just 1,253. In 1918, one-fifth of the remaining population was killed in a flu epidemic. For years, the survivors barely existed in the poor red clay farmland of hill country Mississippi.
In 1945, this tattered remnant fnally won tribal recognition from the federal government. But it took more than federal acceptance for the tribe to emerge from its economic doldrums. During the 1950s, tribal leaders had seen little to no improvement in the desperate living conditions of their people, even with what help they were able to get from the forever financially strapped Bureau of Indian Affairs. Average annual income was $600 per family, with most lucky to make more than $2.50 a day on farm wages.
The tribe needed a savior. It found him in Phillip Martin, whose knack for economic development has since become legend to Native Americans across the land.
Martin started out on the Tribal Council but became chief in 1978. From the beginning, he was convinced that the tribe would never be successful depending on the federal government to save it. With 80 percent of the Choctaw unemployed, Martin knew what the tribe desperately needed most: jobs.
In 1969, Martin led the tribe to seize upon the one opportunity he could see at the time, federally funded housing. The tribe launched Chahta Development, a construction company. Instead of letting the feds continue to pay contractors to build low-income housing on the reservation, the Choctaw got the feds to pay Chahta Development to build the houses.
The tribe didn’t just begin a construction company that day. It began an economic resurgence that would expand to provide almost 6,000 permanent, full-time jobs and a payroll of more than $100 million. The tribe became one of Mississippi’s major employers, with enough money to establish a scholarship program that pays for a Choctaw’s college education and gives students a stipend to live on as well as a laptop, ultimately preparing them to hold more specialized jobs.
In the two decades ending in 1999, household income on the reservation jumped from $2,500 to $24,000, while unemployment fell to about 2 percent. Between 1985 and 2000, life expectancy in the tribe rose 20 years. It’s only gotten better from there.
Talk to anyone on the reservation about how the tribe was able to pull it of and the conversation goes right back to Phillip Martin. He is revered much like a saint, a Moses fgure leading his people out of a wilderness of poverty and into the promised land of prosperity.
“He was a natural-born leader,” John Hendrix, the tribe’s economic development director, says about Martin as we sit in the conference room of Chahta Enterprises. We’re sitting in building A of the TechParc, a campus of multiple buildings that house Choctaw business and industry. Martin hired Hendrix in 1993 after he had acquired a business degree from Millsaps College. He got the job even though he is not a Choctaw, a regular occurrence at the time, considering more than half of their employees were not Native Americans.
“I think what got (Martin’s) spark was that he was stationed over in Europe after World War II,” Hendrix says. “So he saw Europe rebuild itself after the war, and he came back and said, ‘Well, we can do that, too.’ He wasn’t a micro-manager; he just intuitively knew what needed to be done and he hired the right people for the job.”
Unlike some bosses, Martin was always open to letting people work on new ideas that had potential to better the tribe.
“He had a very entrepreneurial approach to management, and he discouraged red tape and bureaucracy.
“If somebody had an idea, even if it wasn’t directly their job, Martin would let them try it,” Hendrix says. “And if it didn’t work, he didn’t fire them. He had a very flat management structure, and it worked.”
Martin’s Mississippi miracle was nothing less than a revolution. In time, it would inspire other tribes across America to subscribe to his self-help philosophy.
In a state that regularly ranks at the bottom in terms of per capita income, the scope of the Choctaw’s economic influence is impressive. The tribe has 12 businesses, ranging from Defense contracting to growing organic vegetables to commercial laundry services. They have a brand-new health center and three casinos that since the first one opened in 1994 have provided thousands of jobs.
Martin kicked it of with sheer force of personality. He coaxed the tribe into springing for an industrial park with no tenants in sight. Then he criss-crossed the country for years, buttonholing business executives and trying to sell them on moving to the reservation.
Finally, he lured a plant that hired Choctaws to install the spaghetti-like tangle of wiring in automobiles. He got American Greetings, a billion-dollar player in the lucrative greeting card industry, to move into a 120,000-square-foot plant on the reservation. He talked the neighboring town of Philadelphia into using municipal revenue bonds to help pay for it. He made the tribe a powerful lobbying force in Washington, D.C., where he was a familiar figure in the offices of senators, congressmen and federal agencies. And with that, the empire began to grow. So did the tribe’s reputation, which made it that much easier to recruit industry and key employees.
In 1988, Congress approved the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which allowed tribes to get into the casino business. Indian gaming took America by storm.
The Choctaw met initial resistance from state government but in 1994, with the help of a new governor, Kirk Fordice, a towering hotel and casino complex rose from the red dirt on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of state highway in rural Neshoba County.
The Silver Star Hotel and Casino is an elaborate gambling palace with four restaurants, entertainment venues, first class hotel and a sea of slot machines and card games. If the Silver Star is not enough excitement, a covered walkway soars guests over the adjacent highway and into a sister casino and hotel complex, the Golden Moon, which opened in 2002. (A third, Bok Homa, is a two-hour drive from the frst two.) Along with two championship golf courses and a water park, they make up the multi-million-dollar Pearl River Resort, which quickly became the tribe’s major source of revenue. An economic impact statement prepared by Mississippi State University once estimated that the resort businesses generated more than $180 million in wages alone.
All of this has given the tribe the ability to take care of itself. And it does. But not, as some tribes do, by giving large annual payments to rank-and-file members. The latest semi-annual check the Choctaw sent to each member was a demure $500. The total annual payment is limited to $1,000 per member.
Instead, they do something much more valuable for fellow Choctaws. All that money from this self-made empire gets plowed back into programs and services that are the envy of poorer tribes — a 120-bed nursing home, subsidized housing, transportation, day care, Head Start, food programs for the elderly, programs for those struggling with substance abuse and addiction. If a tribal member needs a job or a house, the tribe can help. It is a business juggernaut and miniature Great Society rolled into one. And, most remarkably, the Choctaw were doing it even before casino gambling came along.
It’s a rainy St. Patrick’s Day in Tucker, not far from Choctaw, where the tribal government is headquartered. The Tucker Elementary School, one of eight reservation schools, is having its annual spring festival inside a gymnasium.
The program has “Halito!” written across the top in dark green. It means “hello” and is heard multiple times as Choctaw children in brightly-colored traditional garb begin to fill forest-green bleachers. Some of the girls’ dresses cost upward of $800. Some are homemade. Many conceal at least 40 safety pins, needed just to hold everything together.
The Choctaw Princess, Emily Shoemake, is here, almost at the end of her year-long term. The princess is beautiful, her dress covered in rose print, a crown atop her head and a hand-woven basket held in the crook of her left arm.
Shoemake almost wasn’t able to fulfll her duties as princess. As a mechanic in the 91 Bravo Humvee unit, she was supposed to go off to Army basic training a few weeks into her term. Current Chief Phyliss Anderson wrote a letter pleading her case, and the Army allowed her to report immediately after she finished her term.
The spring festival is meant to showcase the children and traditional Choctaw dances, as well as celebrate their culture. I look inside the program and see a few dances I recognize, like the “Snake Dance,” which mimics the slithering of a snake as dancers hold hands and weave in and out of an ever-changing line. As I scan further inside, I see a name I recognize:
“Invocation — Mark Patrick”
Sure enough, Mark Patrick emerges shortly after the start of the festival to say a prayer in Choctaw. The only words I recognize are “Jesus Christ” and “Amen.” He’s wearing a green shirt for St. Patrick’s Day.
“It’s my day, Patrick,” he jokes after walking over to where I’m leaning up against a padded gym wall.
Patrick is anything but quiet here. He’s a fxture in the Choctaw community. He knows everyone. Speaks to everyone. Waves at everyone. He spots a 14-year-old girl and asks how her driving test is coming along. He asks where her mother is and says he needs to talk to her.
“What did I do?” the girl snaps back. She’s heard this question before.
I ask Patrick how he knows everyone so well, and he tells me he likes doing a lot of community outreach. When he grew up, he says, he had no idea who his father was. His grandmother raised him and wove baskets to support him.
“I just know everybody,” Patrick says. “A lot of the kids look for that father or mother figure or infuence in their lives, and it means a lot to me.”
Patrick watches as children perform the Raccoon Dance. “Some of these kids have no clue what they’re doing or why they’re out there,” he says. “But they’ll realize it soon enough.”
It’s true, and these children don’t know it yet, but the opportunities they have even at this age already outnumber what their parents and grandparents had. An older Choctaw teacher in a magenta zip-up jacket watches her class dance on the Dreamsicle-orange basketball court. She won’t reveal her name. She’s there to watch one of her last classes in 40-plus years of teaching school.
“I feel like I’m watching my grandkids out there now,” she says. “Things have changed so much.”
When I ask how she’s seen the opportunities for children in her classes change over the years, she finally turns to look at me.
She says she’s seen countless children grow up without having a chance. She’s seen kids whose only job opportunities were spending their years behind the wheel of a school bus, kids used to having no hope of a better life.
Things are diferent now. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians has more jobs than they do working-age Choctaw these days. Average income has risen, education has improved, anyone who needs a home gets one, an economic impact report once pegged the tribe’s contribution to the state GDP at around $1.2 billion, and the chances to succeed have never been higher.
The children dancing and laughing in the middle of this gym on a rainy St. Patrick’s Day are no longer just Choctaw kids. They’re comeback kids.
THIRD ROW: Bill Rose, Chi Kalu, Slade Rand, Mitchell Dowden, Will Crockett. Not pictured: Tori Hosey PHOTO BY THOMAS GRANING
The Meek School faculty and students published “Unconquered and Unconquerable” online on August 19, 2016, to tell stories of the people and culture of the Chickasaw and Choctaw. The publication is the result of Bill Rose’s depth reporting class taught in the spring. Emily Bowen-Moore, Instructor of Media Design, designed the magazine.
“The reason we did this was because we discovered that many of them had no clue about the rich Indian history of Mississippi,” said Rose. “It was an eye-opening experience for the students. They found out a lot of stuff that Mississippians will be surprised about.”
Print copies are available October 2016.
For questions or comments, email us at hottytoddynews@gmail.com.
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