Chickasaw

The Chickasaw are an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands whose towns stood in northern Mississippi, northwestern Alabama, western Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky. Their migration story tells of a journey from west of the Mississippi to the old fields of the Tombigbee, and their Muskogean language binds them to Choctaw kin. Famed as the Spartans of the lower Mississippi, unconquered by De Soto and courted by French, Spanish and English alike, they played empires against one another while farming, hunting and trading deerskins. Counted among the Five Civilized Tribes for their schools, constitution and newspaper, they nonetheless lost the gamble: the 1832 Treaty of Pontotoc Creek sold the homeland, and removal carried most to Oklahoma in the 1830s. The Chickasaw Nation rebuilt there into a modern economic power, while Muskogean kinship, the Chikasha language and the Pontotoc memory still order funerals, weddings and council openings in Oklahoma, where the migration story from west of the Mississippi still opens every gathering.