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Klopotek, Brian. "The Long Outwaiting: Federal Recognition Policy in Three Louisiana Indian Communities," American Studies, University of Minnesota, May 2004.
Federal recognition policy shapes and constrains discourses on Indian identity, and provides an important public domain in which the boundaries of identity are expressed, formed, policed, and contested. Federal recognition policy can be usefully thought of as a battle of competing “racial projects,” or attempts to define the boundaries of racial identity for the purposes of structuring race relation and controlling the distribution of resources based on those racial definitions, following Omi and Winant. Federal Indian policy always influences the direction of transformation among Indians, but Indian people have always challenged, shaped, and responded to the impositions of the federal government by asserting their own visions of tribal life and the federal-tribal relationship. At its heart, this research is a discussion of those tribal challenges to federal attempts to define and control the boundaries of Indian identity and the ways that context has shaped the lives of Louisiana Indians. This research reveals the impact of the discussion as it explores the limits and opportunities of both recognition and non-federal recognition in three Indian communities in central Louisiana. Taken together, the histories of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe, the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians, and the Clifton-Choctaw Community illustrate the varied impacts of the federal recognition process on social and political structures, community cohesion, cultural revitalization projects, identity, and economic health in Indian communities. Though recognition has acquired a transformation aura, seemingly able to lift a tribe from poverty and cultural decay to wealth and revitalization, the cases of the three central Louisiana Indian tribes examined here reveal that reality has been much more complex. Transformation and revitalization need to be understood more broadly as ongoing processes for federal and non-federal, a conceptualization that makes federal recognition one of several ongoing factors influencing the longer trajectory of change in tribal histories.
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