Tanner Allred to speak on Choctaw History Nov. 14

The presentation will be “This Series of Strong Laws”: Choctaw Governance and the Rise of Indigenous Constitutionalism, 1826-1830. W. Tanner Allread (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) is a Richard M. Milanovich Fellow in Law at UCLA School of Law. His research lies in federal Indian law, tribal law, Indigenous legal history, and constitutional law. His current projects focus on early nineteenth-century Native American history, with a specific interest in the creation of the first tribal constitutions and the sovereignty arguments deployed during the era of southern Indian Removal. Allread’s publications have appeared in the Columbia Law Review.

In 1826, the Choctaw Nation wrote the first-ever tribal constitution in the United States.  However, historians have largely overlooked this constitution and its significance for the processes of tribal constitution-making and tribal state-building during the era of Indian Removal.  This presentation corrects that oversight, recovering the ways in which the Choctaw drew from their intellectual and political environment to assert sovereignty over their lands and opposed federal entreaties to cede those lands.  It shows how the Choctaw Nation appropriated and subverted concepts of constitutionalism and written law to construct a hybrid legal regime that transformed the Nation from a web of cultural and kinship connections to a cohesive national polity and tribal state apparatus.  And it contends that the Choctaw Constitution was the genesis of a tradition of “Indigenous constitutionalism” in which hundreds of Native nations wrote constitutions from the nineteenth century to the present, a tradition historians and legal scholars should take into account when studying the legal and political development of the United States.