A Thanksgiving event at the community center at the Choctaw Indian Reservation in Lauderdale County
If you ask Google, it may tell you that there are no Native American reservations in Tennessee. But that’s misleading.
In West Tennessee there is a piece land owned by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. It’s about 220 acres. Only about 100 people live there. There are no businesses – just homes, a community center, a storm shelter and some ball fields.
It may or may not be accurate to call this place, in Lauderdale County, a “reservation,” because it is a subset of a large Indian reservation in Mississippi. How it came about is one of Tennessee’s best-kept secrets.
Those who remained behind
When settlers migrated across the Appalachian Mountains, the Choctaw were living in present-day central Mississippi – south of the Chickasaw Indians and west of the Creek.
A Choctaw family in traditional clothing, around 1908 (Public domain photo)
When the U.S. government forced these tribes to migrate west in the 1830s, about 11,500 Choctaw Indians left Mississippi to head west. However, about 4,000 remained behind.
For many years, Mississippi’s Choctaw population ebbed away until only about 1,500 remained in about 1910. The numbers have since rebounded.
Today, there are about 11,100 members of the Mississippi Band of Choctaws. The band owns about 35,000 acres in central Mississippi, scattered over nine counties.
Golddust
So why did a group of Choctaw Indians move to Lauderdale County?
Sharecroppers in Golddust in the 1920s (TN State Library and Archives photo)
It was hard to find work in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Meanwhile, there were farmers in the tiny Mississippi River town of Golddust, Tennessee, who needed sharecroppers to grow cotton. Around 1952, one of these farmers managed to recruit some Choctaw Indians living on tribal land in Mississippi to move to Goldust.
“We left the reservation because we thought that if we could get away from the low-income area and raise crops, we could make a better living,” a young man named Cubert Bell said in 1976. “But sharecropping never worked out.”
Bell, who now lives on the Choctaw reservation with his wife Lacy, grew up in Golddust. “The houses were remote and it was primitive,” he recalled. “We had no running water. We did have electricity, but we didn’t have much that operated on electricity.”
Members of the First Indian Baptist Church (Golddust) in 1962 (Cubert Bell photo)
The isolation of the Native Americans in Golddust was increased by the fact they spoke the Choctaw language and a time when public schools weren’t equipped to deal with second languages.
Most of Tennessee’s Mississippi River towns vanished over the years because of flooding and the decline of ferry travel.
Margaret Moore
Golddust suffered the same fate. After about 1965, people in Golddust scattered to places such as Ripley, Henning and Memphis.
“I was a small child in Golddust,” says Margaret Moore, now president of the Tennessee Choctaw Development Club. “My father became a welder and got a job at a factory, and so we moved to Memphis.”
Chucalissa
Some of the prehistoric mounds at Chucalissa
Meanwhile, there was something occurring near Memphis that had a big impact on Tennessee’s Choctaw community.
In 1936, the government of Shelby County bought land south of Memphis for a park. There was a prehistoric mound complex on the property.
Eventually University of Memphis archaeologist Charles H. Nash and his students began exploring the mound complex. They discovered thousands of artifacts which proved that generations of Native Americans had lived in the area. Nash called the place Chucalissa (a Chickasaw word meaning “Abandoned House.”)
Grady John, his wife Betty, and their daughter Sandra were among the Choctaws who lived at Chucalissa in 1961. (Library of Congress photo)
Nash wanted Chucalissa preserved, but also wanted it turned into a living history area for Native American culture. Eventually, governmental agencies worked together to organize what is now called the Chucalissa Indian Mounds and the C.H. Nash Museum — now part of the University of Memphis.
Along the way, Nash recruited a Mississippi Choctaw Indian named L.D. John to move to the Chucalissa property with his wife and two children. L.D. and his wife Alice lived in there in one of several small houses. They served as caretakers and also demonstrated to school groups and visitors how Native Americans made pottery and beadwork. The John family thus became the first of dozens of Choctaw Indians to live at Chucalissa.
The best remembered of these Choctaw Indians at Chucalissa was Wood Bell – a World War II veteran who became a guide in 1971 and died in 1999. Wood Bell and other members of Tennessee’s Choctaw community took part in annual powwows staged at Chucalissa that featured crafts, music, dancing demonstrations and stickball games.
A 1983 article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal about one of the powwow events at Chucalissa
“Those powwows were wonderful events that drew hundreds and hundreds of people,” says David Dye, an archaeology professor at the University of Memphis who spent a lot of time at Chucalissa in the 1980s and 1990s.
The events continued until the turn of the century. Around 2005, the Choctaw Indians living at Chucalissa moved away. But for decades, Chucalissa gave impetus for the West Tennessee Choctaw community to remain an active group.
The Purchase
Members of the Tennessee Choctaw Community pictured with local officials. Cubert Bell is on the far left and Henning Mayor Quenton Reed is third from the left.
In the late 1980s, some of the members of Tennessee’s Choctaw community began talking to federal officials and to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw about long-term needs.
“We asked people at the Indian Health Service why we couldn’t get services for more than 200 Choctaws living in West Tennessee,” says Cubert Bell, a nephew of Wood Bell. “They told me that if Chief Phillip Martin, who was the chief of the Mississippi Band of the Choctaw Indians at that time, wanted to do it, that they would look into it.
“Then we went to Chief Martin and asked him. At first, his reaction was to tell us that we had to move back to Mississippi. But we persisted.”
Whenever there is a meal at the community center, some of the food is prepared in big cast iron pots.
In 1994, the Choctaw Housing Authority received a $1.37 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing. That grant funded the purchase of 88 acres near Henning and the construction of 20 single family homes there.
As of today, the Choctaw reservation has been expanded to include about 220 acres.
The heart of the place is two large buildings: a community center and gymnasium and a storm shelter that includes meeting rooms and a kitchen.
Among the events are regularly staged at the community center are health fairs, dance demonstrations, communal meals, veteran’s breakfasts, and fall and spring festivals.
History Bill, Leilani Elyse Allen, Cubert Bell, Chief Cyrus Ben, Angel Bell and two of Cubert Bell’s smaller grandkids at a Thanksgiving event at the community center. Leilani Allen is the princess for the Mississippi Band of Choctaws; while Angel Bell is the princess for the Tennessee Choctaw Community.
At an event in November 2024, one of the guests at a Thanksgiving feast was Cyrus Ben, current chief of the Mississippi Band of the Choctaw Indians.
“Days like today take me back to the powwows I used to attend at Chucalissa when I was a boy,” Ben said.
“It’s wonderful for us to get out, see our neighbors, speak our language, eat some of our food, and celebrate our culture.”
