Chief Phillip Martin

SHINING FEATHER FOR FEBRUARY-MARCH

Phillip Martin
1926-2010

Great Mystery has bestowed upon each individual the ability to harness and use lessons that are learned from the old ways, from Mother Earth, from Great Spirit. Few recognize this. Fewer still accept the responsibility of listening, hearing, feeling, experiencing and sharing this precious Knowledge thereby gaining Sacred Wisdom. Phillip Martin was one man who was not only a great visionary and leader, he lived his vision.

Martin was born in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1926, the third of six children. The family home on the reservation was destroyed by a fire when he was a toddler, and his father was later killed by a hit-and-run driver. Martin was sent to a boarding school in North Carolina and after high school served for a decade in the Air Force. He began his career in tribal governance in 1957.

Martin grew up on the reservation in a day when few Choctaws had running water or electricity, much less disposable cash. His father, Willie, who died when Phillip was 11, worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a janitor. His late mother, Mary, was a homemaker with five sons and a daughter. Subjected to the same Jim Crow racism as blacks, Choctaws were expected to clear the sidewalks when whites approached. The jobs, says Martin, "were all menial, if you got one." In 1939, at age 13, Phillip went to a BIA boarding school, where he was placed in fourth grade, the only Choctaw among Cherokees. Still, he graduated from high school at 18.

Drafted into the U.S. Army Air Forces at the end of World War II, he joined the Allied forces in Europe and was amazed by the devastation. For the first time, he says, he realized white people could have it as bad as Indians. Later, in Munich, he saw Germans sifting the ruins for reusable bricks and was struck that, "even in their defeated condition," they were determined to rebuild their lives. He wondered if his people might do the same.

Leaving the military as a staff sergeant in 1955, he married Bonnie Bell, who worked for the local BIA. (The couple have two daughters, Deborah, 43, and Patricia, 42; both work in the Choctaw school system.) Phillip had technical skills—he had been a radar specialist—but he could not find a decent job. "They told me, 'You don't have any experience,' " he says. Using the G.I. Bill, he went to school to learn to be an electrician but still couldn't get enough work. In 1961 he finally landed a maintenance job at nearby Meridian Naval Air Station.

In 1957 he won a seat on the tribal council. In 1959 he became chairman. But the council was then controlled by the local BIA. When Martin wanted to make contacts in Washington, D.C., the BIA superintendent took a group in an agency car and introduced them to select congressmen. Martin felt patronized. "We came back," he says, "and I told the guys, 'I've been all over the damn world. I know how to get to Washington and back.' From then on, we didn't tell anybody. We just got in the car and went."

Exercising a new-found independence, Martin and other tribal leaders cultivated powerful pols (among them the late Mississippi Sen. John Stennis) and secured federal funding for a high school, hospital, roads and housing on the reservation. Funds from a local bond issue were secured to build a 30-acre industrial park. In 1978, the Packard Electric division of General Motors asked the tribe to manufacture wire harnesses for cars and trucks. The plant opened in '79, but was soon on the verge of bankruptcy. Recruited by Martin, mid-level Packard executive Lester Dalme instituted management reforms that had the enterprise turning a profit within a month.

There was something about the charisma of Martin. He wanted to do something for his people. He had this vision—and he pulled others in with it.

Soon the Choctaws were making cards for the American Greetings Corporation and car speakers for Chrysler and running their own direct-mail business. When it started, the goal was to create jobs and break the cycle of dependency. The new goal became upgrading employees' skills. To this end, the tribe will pay full tuition for anyone who wants to go to college.

Martin was the democratically elected Tribal Chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. He had a 40 year record of service to the Tribal government, including more than 25 years as the Tribe's principal elected official.

University of Oklahoma historian Arrell M. Gibson outlines the “diminution of the Choctaw estate in Mississippi” as beginning in 1801, when a series of treaties resulted in the taking by the U.S. government of over 25 million acres of land from the Choctaws.

The Choctaws were left to subsist on reservation lands with poverty, joblessness, and illiteracy as their constant companions. Schools were poor, health care was scant.

By 2001, the tribe’s nine manufacturing enterprises including a construction company and a casino were generating over $172.6 million in wages and over $4.8 million in state income taxes and providing some 7,000 jobs for Native American and non-Native Americans alike.

A study by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development indicated that Choctaw unemployment had dropped from 75 percent in 1979 to 4 percent in 2001. Chief Martin is nationally recognized as a leader in Indian Country by creating a successful economy that took the Tribe from 80% unemployment to full employment in less than a generation.

Chief Martin preached Choctaw “self-determination” all of his life – the notion that his tribe should determine their own fate rather than await government largesse on the reservation. That’s his greatest legacy.

During his tenure as Chief, he ensured the young Choctaw children would not lose their language and customs of their Native heritage. All the schools taught the native language and all have opportunity to learn the customs of their ancestors.

When he lost a close election for Chief to Miko Beasley Denson many thought "Chief," who earned the nickname while training at Camp Shelby, in Hattisburg, MS would spend time traveling with his wife, a former Indian Princess Bonnie Kate Bell. Instead, both embraced the opportunity to record his life story.

"I felt compelled to recount the major events of my life because I believe I owe it to the Choctaw people, especially the young and those yet to be born," said Martin. "I want them to know how difficult life was before we as a people began to prosper again in the mid-20th century, following a 150-year period of suppression and tribal dissolution after the Trail of Tears in 1830. I want them to realize that earning a living was not always easy for their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. The Mississippi Choctaws' valuable legacy is to be cherished, and is one worthy of being preserved, protected, and told."