Ryan Spring

So our stories place the Choctaw people in the southeastern part of the United States since time immemorial.

And so we are a Western Muskogean speaking people.

That's our language group.

And so we speak the Choctaw language, which is in common with some of our related tribes that are still here with us today.

Yeah.

So in the 1831 Armstrong rule that the U.S.

government took of Choctaw people, they estimated Choctaw was around 20,000.

But we know that our people...

were much larger than that.

So while our homelands are in Mississippi and Alabama, we had several Choctaw people that were living in Louisiana and Arkansas.

And so a lot of those people had left the tribe and they had made new homes to the West.

How was this society organized?

So our society on a large scale level was made up of three districts, which we call Ulfti.

These districts each had a district chief.

And

Each district chief represented all of the individual village chiefs that were under him.

So we see at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, there's over 60 chiefs in attendance.

Wow.

So that means that each district had, plus or minus, about 20 villages underneath them.

And so each of these villages would have a village chief, and they had a war chief.