The Alabama Chactaw Indians

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The Choctaw Indians once lay claim to millions of acres of land and established some 50 towns in present-day Mississippi and western Alabama. With a population of at least 15,000 by the turn of the nineteenth century, the Choctaws were one of the largest Indian groups in the South and played a significant role in shaping the politics, economics, and armed conflicts in the region. Thousands of Choctaws remained in the Southeast even after removal and are known today as the federally-recognized Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and the state-recognized MOWA (Mobile and Washington County) Choctaws of Alabama. Other Choctaw people live in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, in Choctaw communities in Texas and Tennessee, and as families or individuals throughout the United States. The peoples who became known as the Choctaws (they call themselves Chahtas) originally lived as separate societies throughout east-central Mississippi and west-central Alabama and all spoke dialects of the Muskogean language. From at least the eighteenth century, there existed among the Choctaws a confederacy of three principal geographic and political groups: the western, eastern, and Six Towns (or southern). The villages of the western division were scattered around the upper Pearl River watershed in east-central Mississippi; the eastern division towns were located around the upper Chickasawhay River and lower Tombigbee River watersheds along the lower Alabama-Mississippi border; and the Six Towns were distributed along the upper Leaf River and mid-Chickasawhay River watersheds in southeast Mississippi. The members of the eastern division may have descended from the Mississippian peoples of the Moundville chiefdom of west-central Alabama around present-day Tuscaloosa. The western division peoples lived historically among the headwaters of the Upper Pearl River, and the Six Towns descended from
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