Ryan Spring

And so the village chief, called the miko,

And the servant chief called the Tishamenko helped run all of the political affairs for the village.

The war chief would run all affairs when it came to war, attacking, defending the community, that sort of thing.

But all the day-to-day life was run by the women.

And so our kinship is passed matrilineally, which means all of our bloodlines go through our women.

And so each village had two ixa.

Ixa is the word that we have for our moiety and also for our clans.

And so moiety is the closest word that we have.

There's not many tribes that organize themselves like the Choctaw did.

And so we borrow that Scottish word for moiety.

And it basically means that each village had two groups in there.

You had the beloved people and the people on the other side, also known as the divided people.

And so that basically just means, you know, underneath those two Ixa were several clans.

But that's how our communities and that's how our, you know, our tribe was organized.

Yeah.

We can see in our identity as Choctaw people, we're tied to the land directly.

And so our language, our knowledge...

our stories, our entire worldview as Choctaw people comes from the interactions that our ancestors have had with the land and have had with God.

Over 14,000 years.

Yeah.