In Lafayette County, the name Princess Hoka has many uses: The Hoka Theatre, a counter-cultural theatre that closed in 1996 and it’s also the name of an Oscar-like trophy given out by Oxford Film fest for a number of years. 

According to popular lore, Princess Hoka was a Chickasaw princess who sold her land to Lafayette County in 1836. But the dark truth behind the legend is far more slippery and far more complex, revealing how little most of us know about the Native Americans who once lived on the land that is now Oxford. 

The City of Oxford’s history page on its website says that the land that now comprises the city once belonged to “Princess Hoka, a Chickasaw Indian maiden. Although no pictures of Princess Hoka have survived, she is famous locally as the namesake for the fondly remembered Hoka Theatre.” 

But Robbie Ethridge, a professor of anthropology who specializes in the American South and Southeastern Indians, said that the concept of royalty did not exist in Native American culture. 

“The princess thing had to come from — it’s apocryphal,” Ethridge said. “It had to come from white people. She would not have been called a princess among the Chickasaw. That title would not have existed at the time.” 

Brad R. Lieb, the director of Chickasaw Archaeology for the Chickasaw nation, said that “Princess Hoka” is known only from the land patent record for section 21 which contains most of downtown Oxford. Further records would have to be checked to determine if she actually lived here or somewhere else in Mississippi. She was evidently a single person because she only received one section of land after the removal treaties. The name “Hoka” does not have a translatable meaning by itself for us today. “Ho” is a focus marker and “ka’” is an old nominalizer (turns something into a noun). Many Chickasaws’ names, especially women, were nicknames they earned. There were other Chickasaws around Oxford whose names are preserved in the land patent records from the 1830s: Iahoka, Shahhoka, Cunhoha, Eannayea, Nooscoonah, and Pullumatubby, whose land most of the University is on. 

The name is nonetheless a rare reminder of the Chickasaw who lived here and owned local land before being forced to sell it by the U.S. government. Much of the land Lafayette County and the City of Oxford resides on was previously owned by Chickasaw persons, and of course the whole of North Mississippi was owned communally by the tribe before U.S. interference. Chickasaw leaders negotiated with U.S. commissioners to include articles in the removal treaty stating that individual Chickasaws and heads of families would receive land sections of 640 acres each for them to sell at the point of removal so that they would have cash to start anew in Indian Territory in the west. 

Ron Shapiro, who died in 2019, named his theater with the tribe in mind.

“He named his theater the Hoka to honor the displaced people who once called this land home,” said Matt Wymer, with the Oxford Film Festival. “The Hoka was the center of the arts for over  20 years, closing in 1997.” 

As Shapiro likely knew, “selling” Native American land was rarely as amiable as history books make it out to be.

In 1829, Gov. Gerard Chittocque Brandon wrote a letter to the Alabama governor urging the removal of all “savage tribes of Indians” from Mississippi and Alabama land. The Chickasaw had already sold land in Tennessee and Kentucky in the decades prior. 

In 1830, the United States Congress passed the Indian Removal Act forcing Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi river. This led to the “Trail of Tears” and resettlement in Indian Territory, which turned into the state of Oklahoma, meaning “red people,” in 1907. Many deaths occurred along the way.  

However, the Chickasaw remained in Mississippi until 1837, when Chickasaw Removal began. Once the Chickasaw Cession survey was completed, which documented some 6,000,000 acres being given up,  white settlers and land speculators began piling in. 

Most of the chiefs who signed the treaty could not read or write, or speak much English, according to Lieb. 

The treaty was supposed to guarantee that each Chickasaw landowner would receive at least a minimum price of around $1.50 per acre. 

“If you had a family, you got two sections,” Lieb said. “If you had a large family (greater than five in the household) you got three land sections.”

The 1830 Indian Removal Act was proposed to remove Indian tribes from the Southeast so that white American settlers could occupy their land. Many in the government and in society looked down upon Native Americans and they were viewed as unequal to the white race. Really, it was about land and greed though. This was a case where the majority rule of democracy can get ugly for minorities.   

“The southern tribes who were removed to Oklahoma were not ‘wild Indians,’ causing problems or attacking anyone, in large part, certainly not the Chickasaws. They were largely farmers raising corn, cotton, and other crops and herdsmen just like American farmers by the 1820s, sending their children to mission schools to learn English and other subjects. Many had intermarried with whites since the 1700s and were of mixed blood, presenting racial appearances not unlike any American at the time,” Lieb said.

Under President Andrew Jackson, Chickasaws were told to leave their sacred homeland to move hundreds of miles west to Oklahoma for white people to receive land that was “rightfully theirs.” Lieb said many Chickasaws felt cheated by President Jackson because they had helped him in his war (the War of 1812) yet he did not enforce their prior treaties that guaranteed their land in Northern Mississippi and Alabama. Instead, Jackson allowed the states to run American Indians off of their land so that greedy whites could take over their productive farms and homes.  

“I suspect that most people around Oxford do not know that Chickasaws still exist,” Lieb said. “We remember our past selectively, I think, emphasizing some things and tending to forget other things. The 1830 Indian Removal Act was an act of racial discrimination, and some would say genocide in order to get the land and farms of a people who had been here for centuries and who were cooperating with the government in attempts to adapt to and acculturate to American society. U.S. Representative David Crockett from Tennessee was one honorable man who spoke out against the evil of the Indian Removal Act on the floor of Congress. The act passed by a narrow margin and Crockett lost his next election.” 

For many non-native people, the history of Native Americans is only taught for a small portion of any American history class, but without the Native Americans, there would be no American history. 

“History, as you know, is fluid and ever-changing, and we tailor it to meet the needs of our contemporary lives. Every nation/political body/ethnic group slants their histories toward the stories they want to tell themselves about themselves,” Ethridge said. “America and American history is no different, and in the story of America, for a multitude of reasons that we, as Americans, would rather not confront, we have decided to make Native Americans incidental to American history.”