The Prophet of Profit Phillip Martin’s evangelical brand of self-reliance transformed the Choctaw. By Victoria Hosey
I
t was in 1948 when Air Force Staff Sgt. Phillip Martin, future chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, first surveyed the fallen empire of Nazi Germany. Thousands of miles from the dirt roads and pine forests of Neshoba County, Miss., once-pristine cities, the pride of a nation, a people, and a führer, lay in ruin. Buildings that remained after Allied bombings sat gutted. Mountains of rubble, retched from walls turned into gaping mouths, overflowed onto German streets. Children ran barefoot, playing in front of once-stately cathedrals, now crumbling like stepped-on sandcastles. Mothers, desperate to feed these children, sifted and searched through garbage cans for remnants of food. Reconstruction for what remained of Adolf Hitler’s Germany would not come easily. But it would come. The Germans could be found rummaging through each singular pile of debris in their streets, pulling out the bricks and stacking them neatly. They chipped the mortar from decimated houses and offices and carted it away for reuse. Street by street, the piles disappeared, and a new Germany began to take shape, one block at a time. In his mind, Martin was taking notes. This was not the first time Martin had seen barefoot children. It was not the first time he had watched a desperate mother. In fact, as the son
of a janitor, a product of an impoverished Native American tribe in a backwoods, mostly backward part of Mississippi, this was nothing new to him at all. But the stiff German resolve, a badly beaten nation, rebuilding itself piece by piece, brick by brick; this was very new. And it taught him something. If this nation, shamed, shunned, all but obliterated, could start again, who was to say that his own broken tribe could not do the same? With that thought in mind, Phillip Martin would return to the reservation that raised him, designs in hand to resurrect a broken people. One could argue the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians was not just broken. It was shattered. Until Martin’s election as chief in 1979, unemployment rates soared close to 80 percent, with the percentage suffering from alcoholism trailing close behind. After years of living under the hard-handed cultural repression of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal organization once dedicated to the subjugation and assimilation of Native Americans into mainstream society, the Choctaw lived a hardscrabble existence for decade upon decade with almost no means of selfgovernment. They had endured so much that to many, the idea of engineering their own fate, laws, and industry seemed almost an impossible task. Choctaw Nation Part II
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