The Chickasaw Nation, an American Indian community located in southeastern Oklahoma, entered into a period of substantial growth in the late 1980s. Following its successful reorganization and expansion enabled by federal policies for tribal self-determination, the Nation pursued gaming and other industries to affect economic growth. From 1987 to 2009 the National budget increased exponentially as tribal investments produced increasingly large revenues for an increasing Chickasaw population. Coincident to this growth, the Chickasaw Nation began acquiring and creating museums and heritage properties through which to interpret their own history, heritage, and culture through diverse exhibitionary representations. By 2009 the Chickasaw Nation directs representation of itself at five museum and heritage properties throughout its historic boundaries.

This study argues that the Chickasaw Nation is using museums and heritage sites as places to define itself as a coherent and legitimate contemporary Indian Nation. In doing so through museums they are necessarily engaging with the shifting historiographical paradigms as well as changing articulations of how museums function and what they represent. Through this interaction with history and with museums the Chickasaw Nation has developed a shifting representation of itself that is internally inconsistent and maintains a contradictory relationship with historiographical and museum literature.

Through a series of four case studies, this dissertation examines the roles of the Chickasaw Nation's museums and heritage sites in defining and creating internal representations of sovereignty. It examines the exhibitions at these sites within their historicized local contexts. The study describes the museum exhibitions' dialogue with the historiography about the Chickasaw Nation, the literature of the new museum studies and the indigenous exhibitionary grammars emerging from Native American museums throughout the United States.