American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The noted nineteenth-century Choctaw leader and intellectual Peter Perkins Pitchlynn counts among his accomplishments having served as the secretary of the joint Council meetings of 1826–1828. The Choctaw attendees, many of them quite eminent, were charged with amending traditional governing practices and codifying them. Pitchlynn's handwritten Choctaw notes were translated into English and published in 2013. One of Pitchlynn's salient problems was putting legal terms that were rooted in Euro-American governing systems into the Choctaw language. The author discusses the choices that Pitchlynn made in rendering such concepts into Choctaw, and also the choices the translators made in recapturing those concepts. The selected legal terms encompass legislation, political entities, law enforcement, and civil law, including terms for money.