Chickasaw

The Chickasaw (/ˈtʃɪkəsɔː/ CHIK-ə-saw) are an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, United States. Their traditional territory was in northern Mississippi, northwestern and northern Alabama, western Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky. Their language is classified as a member of the Muskogean language family. In the present day, they are organized as the federally recognized Chickasaw Nation.

Chickasaw people have a migration story in which they moved from a land west of the Mississippi River to reach present-day northeast Mississippi, northwest Alabama, and into Lawrence County, Tennessee. They had interaction with French, English, and Spanish colonists during the colonial period. The United States considered the Chickasaw one of the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast, as they adopted numerous practices of European Americans. Resisting European-American settlers encroaching on their territory, they were forced by the U.S. government to sell their traditional lands in the 1832 Treaty of Pontotoc Creek and move to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) during the era of Indian removal in the 1830s.

Most of their descendants remain as residents of what is now Oklahoma. The Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma is the 13th-largest federally recognized tribe in the United States. Its members are related to the Choctaw and share a common history with them. The Chickasaw were divided into two groups (moieties): the Imosak Cha'a' (chopped hickory) and the Inchokka' Lhipa' (worn out house), though the characteristics of these groups in relation to Chickasaw villages, clans, and house groups is uncertain. They traditionally followed a kinship system of matrilineal descent, in which inheritance and descent are traced through the maternal line. Children are considered born into the mother's family and clan, and gain their social status from her. Women controlled most property and hereditary leadership in the tribe passed through the maternal line.

The name Chickasaw, as noted by anthropologist John Swanton, belonged to a Chickasaw minko', or leader. "Chickasaw" is the English spelling of Chikashsha (Creek pronunciation: [tʃikaʃːa]), meaning "comes from Chicsa". In an 1890 extra census bulletin on the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole, a history of the Choctaw and Chickasaw was included that was written by R.W. McAdam. McAdam claimed that the word "Chikasha" meant "rebel" in the Choctaw language. Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto had recorded the people as Chicaza when his expedition came into contact with them in 1540; the Spanish were the first known Europeans to explore the North American Southeast.

The suffix -mingo (Chickasaw: minko) is used to identify a chief. For example, Tishomingo was the name of a famous Chickasaw chief. The towns of Tishomingo in Mississippi and Oklahoma were named for him, as was Tishomingo County in Mississippi.

The origin of the Chickasaw is uncertain; 20th-century scholars, such as the archaeologist Patricia Galloway, theorize that the Chickasaw and Choctaw split into distinct peoples in the 17th century from the remains of Plaquemine culture and other groups whose ancestors had lived in the lower Mississippi Valley for thousands of years. When Europeans first encountered them, the Chickasaw were living in villages in what is now northeastern Mississippi.

The Chickasaw are believed to have migrated into Mississippi from the west, as their oral history attests. They and the Choctaw were once one people and migrated from west of the Mississippi River into present-day Mississippi in prehistoric times; the Chickasaw and Choctaw split along the way. The Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere spanned the Eastern Woodlands. The Mississippian cultures emerged from previous moundbuilding societies by 880 CE. They built complex, dense villages supporting a stratified society, with centers throughout the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys and their tributaries.

In the 15th century, proto-Chickasaw people left the Tombigbee Valley after the collapse of the Moundville chiefdom. Chickasaw culture believe that the foundation of Chickasaw from proto-Chickasaw peoples was determined by the Mississippi River. The Mississippi River is referred to as Sakti Lhafa’ Okhina in Chikashanompa', which means “scored bluff waterway", known today as the Chickasaw Bluffs. Settling upon the river provided the people with a symbolic sense of new beginngings, washing away the past of the proto-Chickasaw and entering into a new modern age of the Chickasaw. The migration marked their split from other Native American communities like the Choctaws. They settled into the upper Yazoo and Pearl River valleys in present-day Mississippi. Historian Arrell Gibson and anthropologist John R. Swanton believed the Chickasaw Old Fields were in Madison County, Alabama.