Choctaw

The Choctaw (Chahta) are an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, historically rooted in present-day Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and speaking a Western Muskogean language. Their origin story begins at Nanih Waiya, the leaning hill in Mississippi from which the people emerged, and their towns, grouped in three districts under elected mingos, farmed the Black Prairie's rich soils. Stickball, the little brother of war, settled disputes between towns; the Green Corn ceremony renewed the nation each summer. As French allies and later American treaty partners, the Choctaw ceded land in stages until the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, the first removal treaty, sent most west to Oklahoma, where the Choctaw Nation is today among the largest tribal nations. The Mississippi Band and the Jena Band of Louisiana stayed on fragments of the homeland. Choctaw code talkers of the World Wars turned the language of Nanih Waiya into an unbreakable American code.