Ryan Spring

And so the story talks about how, you know, God just didn't create us, but God gave us our language, gave us our laws, and gave us what we call the Hinahanta or the bright path, which is a way to live by.

And as long as we would be in the lands that God gave us, we would be successful.

So in the early 1500s, Choctaw people are destabilized by a massive loss of life.

Waves and waves of diseases, diseases that have never been seen by Native communities in the Southeast, especially by Choctaw communities, started killing our people.

You know, over a 200-year period,

over 90% of the native population in the Americas was killed.

We're talking about millions of people are dying.

And so there's a lot of Choctaw people at this time living in West Central and West Southern Alabama.

And they're living a style of large corn agriculture, having these huge cities.

And they've started moving away from this lifestyle at this point, a choice that they had made.

But then diseases on top of that really push them away from it.

And so it's difficult to understand.

But imagine the town that you're from.

And imagine 90% of the people dying.

How does your community continue functioning?

And so what Choctaw people did is they moved out of these large river valleys, and they moved back into their place of creation.

Now, there's already Choctaw people living there.

And so these groups from the east, these large Choctaw populations in Alabama, especially around

what we call Moundville, which is one of our large urban areas, started moving west, and they started intermingling and melding back in with other Choctaw people that were near our place of creation.

And then we had people from southwest Alabama around Mobile Bay, living at the Bottle Creek area, and they started coming in and moving.