All about the ancient tribes
According to estimates based on tribal and military records, approximately 100,000 Indigenous people were forced from their homes during the Trail of Tears, and some 15,000 died during their relocation.
Between 1830 and 1850, about 100,000 American Indians living between Michigan, Louisiana, and Florida moved west after the U.S. government coerced treaties or used the U.S. Army against those resisting. Many were treated brutally. An estimated 3,500 Creeks died in Alabama and on their westward journey.
The estimate includes 21,000 Creek (whose descendents prefer to be called Muscogee), 16,000 Cherokee, 12,500 Choctaw, 6,000 Chickasaw, 4,200 Florida Indians now collectively identified as Seminole, and an unknown number of emigrants from various smaller tribes.
Chickasaw Removal is the most traumatic chapter in Chickasaw history. As a result of Congress’ Indian Removal Act, our Chickasaw people were forced to remove to Indian Territory. The foresight and skilled negotiating practices of Chickasaw leaders led to favorable sales of Chickasaw lands in Mississippi.
Resisting European-American settlers encroaching on their territory, they were forced by the US to sell their country 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.
European settlers killed 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America, causing large swaths of farmland to be abandoned and reforested, researchers at University College London, or UCL, estimate.
Severe exposure, starvation and disease ravaged tribes during their forced migration to present-day Oklahoma. As many as 4,000 died of disease, starvation and exposure during their detention and forced migration through nine states that became known as the “Trail of Tears.”
The Chickasaw language was the primary language of Chickasaw people for hundreds of years. Chickasaw is a Muskogean language, and Chickasaw and Choctaw together form the Western branch of the Muskogean language family.
The physical trail consisted of several overland routes and one main water route and, by passage of the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act in 2009, stretched some 5,045 miles (about 8,120 km) across portions of nine states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and
The original Chickasaw Indians lived in small villages. Their homes were one room wattle and daub homes made with a wood frame covered with a plaster of mud and straw. Typically the homes would be laid out in an oval with the center of the village being the main meeting place.
Then, they marched the Indians more than 1,200 miles to Indian Territory. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and starvation were epidemic along the way, and historians estimate that more than 5,000 Cherokee died as a result of the journey.
Under the settlement agreement, the United States will pay the Chickasaw Nation $46.5 million, and the Choctaw Nation $139.5 million.
Definition of Chickasaw 1 plural Chickasaw or Chickasaws: a member of a nation of Indigenous peoples of Mississippi and Alabama. 2: the Muskogean language of the Chickasaw.
Chickasaw Nation Industries, (CNI) a federally-chartered corporation established in 1996 for $50,000 now has revenues of more than $350 million annually.