The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw website is created and maintained by the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Confederation of Muskogees, located in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes in the southernmost part of the state of Louisiana (Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, 2006). The Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation represents an alliance of three separate Indian groups—the Bayou Lafourche, Grand Caillou, and Isle de Jean Charles—that are ancestrally related tribal communities sharing a common history and culture. Drawing from the “tribal communities” portion of the website, some members refer to themselves “simply as Biloxi-Chitimacha, but they are an amalgamation of several tribes which include Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Acolapissa, and Atakapa” (Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, 2006). Each tribal community is autonomously governed by its own tribal council, while acting together in the Confederation to pursue federal recognition on behalf of the three tribal communities. Throughout this website structural design decisions demarcate the individual tribes as well as their collective unification as the Confederation. The purpose of the Biloxi-Chitimacha website is to combine the resources and efforts for the common goals and objectives of each independent Indian community, while continually preserving of the culture, tradition, and honor of each tribal group.

(Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, 2006)

(Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, 2006)

Under the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Chitimacha homepage title, a rotating timeline image paired with textual information advertises local tribal communities’ need for assistance in the wake of recent hurricanes. The placement of this content on the index homepage conveys the importance of this issue to tribal members of the Confederation. The statement “our coastal tribal communities were hard hit and need your help,” distinctly includes the coastal communities within the Confederation’s scope, while negotiating the use of ‘your’ to target either insider or outsider members. The images within the rotating timeline exhibit real-life scenes of the textually described hurricane scenario. This combination of text and images allow users to create a more profound connection with the offline reality of the Confederations’ region. The use of images—particularly representations of local physicality—emerge as a prevalent tool throughout the Biloxi-Chitimacha website to construct and assert distinctions between each local tribal groups, as well as, to establish a unified Confederation identity. The use of text and images to reference and reproduce local physicality became a common and defining feature throughout tribal specific websites I analyzed.

(Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, 2006)

The three tribal communities represented in the Biloxi-Chitimacha website coexist in a very close geographical proximity, subsisting within a 10-15 mile radius. This geographical immediacy resulted in a strong interrelation between each of the tribal communities’ culture, ancestry, and family ties. The Biloxi-Chitimacha website is full of textual and image-based references to individual tribal members as well as physical localities. The image above is found on the “Tribal Communities” page, which displays information about each tribal group as well as the Confederation as a whole. This image captures a physical landmark familiar to tribal group members. The placement of this image within the “Tribal Communities” page provides a contextual setting to link a common physical space with community members, defining boundary within which group identity is reinforced. Furthermore, the explicit statement on the sign as “Home of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw” elicits a double meaning, creating an iconic representation heavily rooted in offline culture, while suggesting that this website may function as the Confederation community’s online home.

Organizing principles throughout the website are based upon the distinction between the three tribal communities comprising the Confederation. For instance, the “Calendar” page provides links to calendars exhibiting information about upcoming meetings and events for each individual tribal group as well as for state-wide intertribal powwows. This strict structural distinction exemplifies the organizational formation of the physical Confederation offline. Participants operate as members of their specific tribal council, the Confederation, as well as Louisiana powwows. This linear migration from tribal specific to broader pan-Indian identity characterizes the range of identities members may ascribe to, both online and offline, in contemporary Native American life. Similarly, the scope of tribal groups participating in the events featured on the “Louisiana Powwows” page varies. Some of the advertised gatherings are restricted solely to the three Confederation groups, while others are open to tribal communities throughout the state. Photographs honoring Confederation members for extended years of service at powwow events are pervasive throughout this section. These images provide a context to link specific Confederation members within inter-tribal powwows, allowing participants to identify with iconic community affirming events and their placement within them.

The “Guest Book” web page provides a communicative forum for users browsing the website to document their visit and post comments. Users first fill out an online Guest Book form, which requires information such as: Name, E-mail, City, State, Country, and Comments. Once this information is submitted, the posted comments appear on the “Guest List” page, which is a revolving list of entries that provide glimpses into the lives of members using this site. The names have been removed from the following selections taken from the Guest List page:

These responses recognize multiple levels of affiliation to this website and tribal specific group identification, covering themes of local, regional, and national dimensions. The geographical, social, historical, and cultural reflections in these comments are all components of asserting social boundaries. Members relate to each other based upon different commonalties and perceptions of group identity observed in this section. For instance, one sequence of comments is between local Confederation members discussing a recent powwow event, while another section displays two members displaced from their Choctaw tribe recalling past ceremonial events in an attempt to remember reservation life. “Identification relates to specifications in topics such as kinship, heritage, friends, location of birth and location of residence” (Christensen, p. 90). In this instance, ethnic identity is the main component—being a tribal specific member or more broadly an American Indian—in establishing connective bonds between members and sustaining the community online.

Tribal specific websites contain spatial references to the physical off-line locations of tribal members through images, symbols, references in text, and in this case text produced by users browsing websites. Identity and physicality seem to play integral roles in asserting social boundaries, creating a sense of belonging, and establishing commonalities. The absence of face-to-face interaction in a Guest Book, as in other forms of computer-mediated-communication, does not prevent members from engaging in sustaining interaction and asserting group identity. When members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Confederation post an entry on the Guest List, commonalities are established between group members and group identity is reinforced by references to specific people, physical locations, and community affirming events. The Guest List is a dynamic interactive forum allowing members to establish an affirming social relation in an online space, by creating a posting, that is acknowledged whether or not the user is a part of the Confederation’s offline space. This differentiation from the rest of the Biloxi website marks a key movement from reproduction of a symbolic community to a communicative area linking inside members familiar with offline culture and those with broader connections.

(Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, 2006)

The “Historical Research” page includes information about tribal ancestry and local history. The statement “Our Historical Existence is all around us…” is displayed as the header of the above image of Chief Randy Verdun standing in a field marked as the original site of the Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaws. This picture and statement directly connect the local space inhabited by tribal groups as a symbolic characterization of their existence, affirming the dynamic nature of local physical space as a platform for asserting group and cultural identity. The “Ancestors” portion of the Historical Research section lists the names of the earliest known members in the Lafourche and Terrebonne regions, which are categorically arranged by their tribal identities. The “History” page offers a detailed account of land sale documents that provide proof of tribal identity for the Biloxi, Chitimacha, and Choctaw nations. Images of the original documents are supplied along with photographs of the original settling grounds, which both proved to be common techniques across tribal specific sites to validate their authenticity and assert a claim for federal recognition.

Tribal specific group websites are heavily rooted in offline culture. Key physical spaces group members frequent are important underlying factors in the social organization and cultural identities of these local communities. In her study of Greenlandic local communities, Susan Dybbroe (1991) declares “local identity is a symbolic construction, where peripherality in the objective world informs the sense of belonging and identity. Peripherality is not just a political reality, but becomes a state of mind” (Dybbroe, p. 5). Biloxi-Chitimacha’s “Links” page connects to Cajuns.com—a website about local Louisiana history and culture—as well as the aforementioned portal site NativeWeb. By linking to broader supratribal sites such as NativeWeb and to local pages such as Cajuns.com, instances of periphery and center are simultaneously constructed. Native tribal group websites stressing locality, community, and cultural identity utilize the position of peripherality as a mode to foster greater connective bonds between members and create an increased sense of belonging (Christensen, 2003). In this instance, the use of physicality and local culture reduce the feeling of physical distance for inside members, while the reference to specific socio-physical boundaries assert a distance to the rest of the world. This dichotomy reinforces a sense of belonging for participants by creating a culturally localized niche within the expansive space of the Internet.