The Choctaws have two stories about their origins in their traditional homeland in central Mississippi. One is that their ancestors came from west of the Mississippi River and settled in what is now the homeland. The other is that the tribe is descended from ancestors who were formed by a spirit from the damp earth of Nanih Waiyah, a large mound in northeastern Mississippi.
———The stories correspond in some details with evidence from archaeology and history. Some of the ancestors of the Choctaws probably lived in northwestern Alabama in a large village that archaeologists now call Moundville. By the late 1500s, the people of the community had moved on to other places because their homeland could no longer produce sufficient food. Most probably lived along the Tombigbee River in what is now northeastern Mississippi.
———Other ancestors of the Choctaws probably did come from west of the Mississippi. During the eighteenth century people moved regularly back and forth across the river, and by the early nineteenth century a number of Choctaws lived in the west near the Arkansas River. The differing origins of the Choctaws probably explain why their territory comprised three districts, each with its own chief; the three chiefs governed jointly.
———Both in Mississippi and later in the West, the Choctaws were farmers whose villages were composed of long houses surrounded by cornfields. Men hunted, and women raised the crops, although men sometimes helped with clearing the fields. Each village had a chief who met with a council of elders and experienced men in a square at the center of the village. The younger men made up the hunters and warriors of the tribe. They defended their territory against the Chickasaw tribe in the north, whose language is very similar to theirs but who considered themselves very separate from the Choctaws, and from the Creeks on the east.
———Conflicts between villagers, and sometimes with other tribes, were generally settled by sport rather than war. The stickball game (a forerunner of the modern game of lacrosse) pitted teams from different villages against each other. Winning was a mater not only of skill but of the power of the villages' spiritual leaders to influence the outcome through their prayers and powers.
———The Choctaw's major deity was the sun, a spiritual being whose earthly representative was fire. Their form of burial of the dead was to expose the body on a raised platform, where it decayed, offering its essence back to the sun. The alikchi were men with individual spiritual powers. They could foretell the future and affect people's lives by curing illness. They were also often suspected of using their power for evil ends.
———Choctaw society was organized in two major divisions, or iksas — the kashapa okla or Imoklasha, and the okla in holahta or hattak in holahta — that regulated marriage. Children belonged to their mother's iksa, and people were required to marry into the opposite iksa. Political power passed through the woman's line as a chief's nephew, his sister's son, generally inherited his power.
———The Choctaw met their first Europeans in 1541. Between 1539 and 1541 Hernando de Soto and some six hundred Spanish soldiers traveled from Tampa Bay to the Mississippi River, where de Soto died of a fever and his body was thrown into the river. Although the contact was limited, it probably introduced European diseases that had an effect on the population and location of Choctaw villages.
———The next European immigrants into Choctaw territory were representatives of French and English colonial governments who appeared at the end of the seventeenth century. Choctaw men discovered that the deerskins that their women tanned were desirable trade items for European men. Throughout the Choctaw territory, men began to trade skins for cloth, weapons, ammunition, and iron cooking utensils.
———These trade relationships and attempts by colonial agents to secure military alliances with the Choctaws ultimately led to a division within the tribe of those villages that traded with the French and those that traded with the English. A civil war led to a final victory for the villages allied with the French, and peace was restored by 1750. But the French ultimately lost their war with the British in the Ohio Valley (the French and Indian War of American history), and they were forced to give up their claims in America (and their alliance with the Choctaws) through the Treaty of Paris in 1763.
———The English now controlled the trade with tribes in the Southeast, but American settlers, who were moving steadily westward from North Carolina and Kentucky, entered Choctaw territory and added another element to tribal life. They married Choctaw women and produced mixed-blood families. They also introduced domesticated cattle and established trading posts that attracted other white men into Choctaw country. The cattle reduced dependence on deer meat for those who raised them. The trading posts changed the Choctaw's dependence on skins for clothing to a dependence on cloth as skins became the market of trade value.
———During the Revolutionary War, Choctaw leaders remained largely neutral, although some agreed to report the movement of English forces along the Mississippi River. Although American colonists won the war against their British governors, the Spanish still controlled the land below the thirty-first parallel in Florida and all the lands west of the Mississippi River. The Choctaws quickly signed treaties both with the American government in 1786 and with the Spanish in 1784 and 1793. The new balance of power did not last long, however, for by 1803 Thomas Jefferson had negotiated the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, which had acquired it from Spain two years before. The Louisiana Purchase isolated the Choctaws from many Spanish allies and set off an American campaign to remove all the Indian nations east of the Mississippi River to western lands.
———The Choctaws had seen the impact of white settlement in their territory since colonial times. War with the Creek Indians on their eastern boundary had led to the decline of the deer population and a loss of hunting lands. The development of cotton growing in the rich Mississippi Delta region began to cut off their access to hunting in Florida. The fledgling U.S. government was anxious to secure its borders against the threat of Spanish intervention in the South and was happy to separate tribes like the Choctaws from potential international patrons.
———In 1816 Choctaw leaders signed a treaty ceding land along their eastern boundary, the Tombigbee River. The cession was small, but the implications were important. The annual income from that treaty provided partial support for schools established by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Tribal leaders and white men with Choctaw families supported the idea of education because they believed it would improve the Choctaw's ability to deal with the U.S. government and with the white people who were settling in the surrounding territory.
———If the Choctaws saw education as providing an opportunity to live with their white neighbors, the federal government saw it as a way of assimilating Indians into white society. Those who would not learn white ways could be moved to the western territory beyond the Mississippi. Choctaws, however, lived and farmed on both sides of the river. Government agents tried to convince the Choctaws to sign a treaty giving up their lands east of the Mississippi. When they refused, Andrew Jackson, chief negotiator for the United States, threatened to make a treaty only with the western Choctaws, who were by this time quite a separate group.
———In 1820, Choctaw leaders acknowledged Jackson's threats and signed a treaty ceding their lands in Mississippi in exchange for approximately 13 million acres in what is now the state of Oklahoma. Although the 1820 treaty called for them to move to the western lands, most Choctaws remained in Mississippi. By 1825, white settlers were moving onto western lands, and a group of Choctaw leaders went to Washington, D.C., where they signed a treaty agreeing to an adjustment that moved the eastern border of these lands, in what was then Oklahoma, to its present location along the eastern border of the state.
———When it became obvious, however, that most Choctaws would not voluntarily leave their homes in Mississippi, government agents again put pressure on tribal leaders to sign a treaty agreeing to move west. Tribal leaders were deeply divided over the prospect of removal. A power struggle broke out in the northeast district of the tribe between David Folsom, son of a Scotch Irish father and a Choctaw mother, and Mushulatubbee, the last of the full-blood chiefs of the tribe (Pushmataha and Apuckshanubbee, the other two full-blood chiefs, had died during the 1825 trip to Washington.) At a council in 1826, David Folsom and the chief of the southern district agreed to step aside in favor of the election of Greenwood LeFlore, son of a French father and a mixed-blood Choctaw mother, as sole leader of the Choctaws. LeFlore personified the effect of European influence on the Choctaws. He supported missionaries and education. His position as sole chief represented the influence of white society upon the tribe and the decline of the traditional tripartite leadership. The council also adopted a written constitution calling for a form of elected, representative government, a significant change from the custom of councils composed of all the adult men of the tribe.
———This change from the traditional three divisions of leadership almost led to a civil war. This conflict gave Andrew Jackson the opportunity to convince a small group of Choctaw leaders to accept removal. In September 1830, near Dancing Rabbit Creek in northeastern Mississippi, Indian office officials held a treaty council. After most of the Choctaws at the treaty ground had rejected the idea of removal and gone home, this group of leaders signed a treaty in which they agreed to move from the state and go to the western lands.
———The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek set most of the Choctaws on what is now called the Trail of Tears — a trip, often reluctantly taken, to the Mississippi and along the rivers that led into Indian Territory. It was a time of great suffering for most of those who traveled from Mississippi. The majority made the trip in the winter of 1831-32, a time of bitter cold. Almost a quarter died along the way from exposure to the weather and outbreaks of cholera. When they settled in the new homeland along the western banks of the Arkansas River, they did not have adequate supplies of food or medicine, and after they had planted corn the following spring, the river flooded, destroying the crops.
———Despite the hardships, the Choctaws reestablished their tribal government in the West. they wrote a new constitution in 1834. The missionaries who had established their schools in Mississippi accompanied them, but by 1842 the Choctaw government had taken control of the schools, although missionaries still staffed them. By 1861, the Choctaws had a representative form of government, and Cyrus Kingsbury, head of the Choctaw Presbyterian mission, described the tribe as Christianized in its practices, although church membership was far from universal. Choctaw was still the working language of the tribe, and many people still hunted as well as farmed.
———Not all the Choctaws left Mississippi in 1831-32. The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek had included a provision to appeal to its signers, the fourteenth article: any Choctaw who did not want to move west could remain in Mississippi, register with the government agent for an allotment, receive title to the land, and remain as a citizen of the state. Yet very few of those who stayed behind actually received title to their lands. They became share-croppers and wage laborers and sustained their communities through traditional stickball games, funeral ceremonies, and attendance at Christian church ceremonies, where Choctaw ministers preached in their language where they could sing their hymns in Choctaw.
———In 1887 Congress passed the General Allotment Act, which would end the communal land-holding patterns of Indian tribes and gave individual tribal members title to their lands under the legal system of the United States. Under the act, the lands of the Choctaw tribe in Oklahoma were divided, and in 1907, when Oklahoma became a state, the right of the tribe to govern itself ended.
———In 1903 the Dawes Commission, which was overseeing the allocation of land to individual Choctaws, encouraged those tribal members still living in Mississippi to move to Oklahoma. About three hundred did so, but about one thousand stayed behind. In 1918, Congress finally appropriated funds to buy lands in Mississippi so the remaining Choctaws could have their own homeland once again.
———The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians today have separate governments, a heritage of their separate historical experiences. They are now beginning to establish a sense of their shared origins.
———The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians has, since the 1970s been able to attract manufacturing firms to their reservation lands. The reservation population is now about five thousand in Oklahoma, the tribal government runs a resort area on Lake Texoma. The tribal government, so long separated by the terms of a treaty, have reestablished contact to talk about their mutual projects. The Oklahoma tribe sponsors regular bus trips to Mississippi for tribal members who want to rediscover their heritage in the east.

CLARA SUE KIDWELL (Choctaw/Chippewa)
University of Oklahoma