The Choctaw Indians of Mississippi bear a rich and lively culture.It is evident in their living language and daily activities. They celebrate high days and holidays with favorite foods and festivals. They cherish and perform their tribal dances. They fashion blowguns and baskets of native cane, and they play the old game kabocha toli - stickball, with its handmade hickory sticks and balls.
The Choctaws were reckoned to be the most numerous of the Muskhogean linguistic family having once numbered, perhaps, a quarter of a million before reduction by repeated ravages of imported epidemic disease. Other Muskhogean tribes include Creeks, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Apalachi and some smaller groupings. The Cherokees,another major southern tribe speak an Iroquois dialect.
Of the Muskhogean languages, Chickasaw is most closely related to Choctaw. On a lexico-statistical analysis of the two languages which I performed 30 years ago only one word in a one hundred word test differed: For the generic term "bird", the Choctaws use "hushi", the Chickasaws "fushi". An early English trader, James Adair, who spent nearly 20 years in the land of the two tribes commented on their similarity. There was some commerce between not only the Muskhogean Indians, but northern and western tribes as well. Chickasaw hunters swapped hides to Choctaw farmers for corn. There were trade routes (some of which became "roads" later) throughout the south; A part of the Warriors Path, a major north-south link, is preserved as a State Park in Northeast Tennessee. The trade language was "mobilian" - which one author called a kind of pidgin Choctaw.
Choctaw and Chickasaw traditions indicate a close relationship. One legend holds that Choctaw and Chickasaw were the names of two brothers who like Abraham and Lot, moved their followers into separate lands. As mentioned, the languages are almost identical. (A present-day Choctaw told me that he can understand Chickasaw, but not Creek.) Chickasaw phrases as recorded by Adair shortly after 1700 are easily understood by today's Choctaw. It has been conjectured that Chickasaws and Choctaws were one tribe just before the coming of the white man. There was no "northern" province of the Choctaw nation - just southern, central, eastern and western. The Chickasaws inhabited the area which would have reasonably constituted a northern Choctaw district. Further there is the consideration of Nanih Waiya.
The fortified mound group clustered around the high mound Nanih Waiya (Sloping Hill) stood between Choctaw and Chickasaw country. The Choctaws considered it a holy place. Their origin myths, of which there are several always include it in some degree. One version holds that the Choctaws emerged from the ground at a nearby cave. Another holds that it was the site on which a sacred "guiding pole" stood erect - a sign that they had arrived in the promised land. Even the isolated Choctaws of Bayou Lacomb in Louisiana, visited by Bushnell in 1909 and by myself in 1962, seemed to know of the holy status of Nanih Waiya. (They referred to it as Nanih Chaha - high hill.) When the Chickasaws were part of the main body, the location of Nanih Waiya would have been centered in the nation where it would be safest. Nanih Waiya is in Winston County, about ten miles southeast of Noxapater. As a State Park it is now in the protection of the State of Mississippi.


From Choctaw Chronology by Bill Ferguson