Chickasaw

Not to be confused with Chickasha.
For other uses, see Chickasaw (disambiguation).
Chickasaw
Chickasaw: Chikashsha
Total population
60,000[1]
Regions with significant populations
 United States (Oklahoma, formerly Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee)
Languages
English, Chickasaw
Religion
Traditional tribal religion, Christianity (Protestantism)
Related ethnic groups
Choctaw, Chakchiuma, Alabama, Koasati, Muskogee, and Seminole peoples

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.[2] 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.[3] 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.[3] 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.[4] 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.

  1. ^ No Job Name
  2. ^ Gibson, Karen Bush (2017-01-26). The Chickasaw Nation. Capstone. ISBN 9780736813655.
  3. ^ a b Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Chickasaws" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 130.
  4. ^ Swanton, John (1928). Chickasaw Society and Religion. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology. pp. 22–26. ISBN 978-0-8032-9349-6.