(Speaking in Choctaw) Hello, I greet you in the beautiful Choctaw language. Boyd Mound is a symbol of the indigenous people who were and still are deeply connected to this landscape in Mississippi along the Natchez Trace. It was a burial, it was monumental architecture, and it was a sacred place for people hundreds of years ago. To those people, it was a part of the symbol of home. From Choctaw oral histories, we know that we were created at an earth mound from the very beginning; we were created from yellow clay on the banks of the Nvnih Waiya River in present-day east central Mississippi. God took this clay and he shaped our bodies, and after we were shaped, we came out through a cave at the base of a natural hill. But that was a natural earth mound; that was one that was created by God. It’s a sacred site.
Today, Choctaw people who are descended from those original indigenous people that built Boyd Mound are still connected to it through our blood, through our culture, through our language, through our spirituality. We are not just an ancient society. The descendants of the people who built that mound are still around today, and we still have a vibrant culture. Every generation has contributed something new. Every generation has faced different challenges. So like anything living, our society and our culture have grown and changed and developed through time. Boyd Mound is one piece of that, one part of that. Even though we’re Americans like anyone else, we have a unique way of existing and looking at the world, embraced by our culture and our language and we’re still here.
The Choctaw Spirit, Upper Choctaw Boundary, Milepost 128
Speaker: Ian Thompson, Director of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma Historic Preservation Department.
(Speaking in Choctaw) Hello, I greet you in the beautiful Choctaw language. Choctaws left for each of the first three removals in the early 1830s in the wintertime. They were exposed to a number of diseases. Choctaw people came to poorly provisioned camps, some had absolutely no shelter, and people may or may not have had any clothing to wear. It was extremely harsh.
Today, the Trail of Tears is talked about in different ways, but the most common term for it in Choctaw is (speaking in Choctaw), and that basically means the path where the eyes cried a lot. It’s a translation of the Trail of Tears. The Trail of Tears separated us from our indigenous homeland. There have been other forced exoduses in world history, but this one affected us; and it’s more than just being forced to leave a home that you have been in for a generation or two. It’s one that forced us to leave the land that we’d interacted with for 500 generations, that helped create our culture and language and help make us who we are; so it was an extremely, extremely traumatic event.
Even more so because it the Choctaw way of thinking, west is the direction of death. That’s the direction that people travel after they have died and left this world, so having to move towards the west in particular made it even more traumatic for Choctaws because it was moving toward the land of the dead.
Choctaw people have survived all of that, and done so mostly without becoming bitter. And that speaks to the resiliency of the Choctaw heart and the Choctaw spirit, being able to do that without becoming bitter and still looking forward to the future.
Our Community, Chickasaw Village, Milepost 261
Speakers: LaDonna Brown, Tribal Anthropologist at the Chickasaw Nation; Pauline Brown of the Chickasaw Language Committee and Chickasaw Nation Historical Society.
L. Brown - (Speaking in Chickasaw.) Hello. My name is LaDonna Brown. I am the tribal anthropologist at the Chickasaw Nation.
P. Brown - My name is Pauline Brown. I am a Chickasaw. (Speaking in Chickasaw.)
L. Brown - I would like to greet you at the Chickasaw Village Site on the Natchez Trace Parkway. (Speaking in Chickasaw) Welcome to our village. This is a place that we think of as our home. This is our community. This is a place where we live. It’s not only a place where we live, but a place where we take care of each other. In our community, if one person is hungry, everybody is hungry, and the hunters would go out and they would hunt, and they would bring animals back and everybody would eat.
P. Brown - The Chickasaw people didn’t only work and strive to feed; there was joking and talking and laughter under some of the trees. The old people got together and discussed different things, and the children were out there playing. The women would have a big black pot going with some kind of dish like what Chickasaws called pashofa—it’s corn boiled in water—and they add pork to it. Then there was the dance. L. Brown - So you have many different things going on in the village. You also have traders who are traveling all across this continent from coast to coast, from east to west and from north to south, and who are trading with all these different tribes, people who have different cultures than us, people who have different languages than us, and they are trading for what we call exotic trade good items. And they’re bringing all of those items back into our village, and they’re trading their wares to the community members.
P. Brown - And then the Chickasaws not only did all of that, but they were holy people. (Speaking in Chickasaw) Their land was very holy. (Speaking in Chickasaw) They were happy.
A Spiritual Place, Pharr Mounds, Milepost 286
Speakers: LaDonna Brown, Tribal Anthropologist at the Chickasaw Nation; Pauline Brown of the Chickasaw Language Committee and Chickasaw Nation Historical Society.
L. Brown - (Speaking in Chickasaw.) Hello. My name is LaDonna Brown. I am the tribal anthropologist at the Chickasaw Nation.
P. Brown - My name is Pauline Brown. I am a Chickasaw. (Speaking in Chickasaw.)
L. Brown - When our ancestors looked for specific land features to create places for communities, they really based that knowledge upon our spiritual belief system. What our ancestors did was they consulted, they prayed about it. They fasted over it, Our spiritual leaders would have to pray, fast, do ceremonies, all of these types of things before they could even begin to even consider a place as the perfect place to have a mound site or to create a community, a village. That’s why those places are so important to us, because we know that our ancestors put so much time and effort into choosing these types of places. Pharr Mounds is a very sacred place.
What we would like to request for visitors to do is to just respect the mounds. Respect the mounds as if they are at a cemetery. The cemetery becomes more like a holding ground. It becomes like an area that people begin to wait for their journey to this afterlife, so it’s like the change over to the spiritual life. They’re really – to us, they’re still alive. Their spirits are alive, and they’re going to this afterlife.
P. Brown - When I go there, I’ll say (speaking in Chickasaw) “I am a Chickasaw. I’ve come to visit all of you."
The Removal, Cave Springs, Milepost 308
Speaker: LaDonna Brown, Tribal Anthropologist at the Chickasaw Nation
Hello. My name is LaDonna Brown. I am the tribal anthropologist at the Chickasaw Nation.
I really can't imagine what my ancestors had to go through whenever the concept of removal came to them through the federal agents. I can't imagine being ripped from my home. I can't imagine being taken from the land that we believed that God had given to us. I can't imagine, um, having to leave the land of my ancestors, the places where my ancestors were buried because burials are very, very important to us. All of the things that we know as our medicine plants, the animals that we knew that were always so plentiful—we didn't know what it was going to be like in Indian Territory and it definitely did not look like our homelands there in that area.
Um, and so, it's just very hard to even try to begin to grasp the concept of removal.
Forcibly Removed, Lauderdale, Milepost 328
Speakers: Jack Baker, Member of the Cherokee Nation; Male Narrator for Missionary Reverend Daniel Sabine Butrick’s writings
[Male narrator] In March of 2000, Jack Baker described the Trail of Tears based on stories that had been passed down to him.
“I'm Jack Baker, I’m a member of the Cherokee Nation.” “Through the early 1800s, there was a lot of pressure brought to bear on the Cherokees to give up their lands in the East and remove to the West. But since that was our ancestral homes, we did not want to give them up... …May 23, 1838, General Scott and his troops began the roundup of the Cherokees. They literally went into the homes and forced the people out, with them allowing them to take whatever they could carry with them and that was it, and herded them into the concentration camps and then later they were moved to certain points to be removed to the West. One was on the Tennessee River.”
[Male narrator] In June of 1838, Missionary Reverend Daniel Sabine Butrick wrote about the removal: [Description of Cherokee removal read by a male narrator] “There was, we understand, a flat bottom boat, 100 feet long, 20 feet wide, two stories high, fastened to an old steam boat. This was so filled that the timbers began to crack and give way, the boat itself was on the point of sinking. Some of the poor inmates were of course taken out, while this boat was lashed to the steamboat, and some other small boats were brought to take in those who had been recalled. Twelve hundred, it is said, were hurried off in this manner at one time. Who would think of crowding men, women, and children, sick and well, into a boat together, with little, if any more room or accommodations than would be allowed to swine taken to market?”
Last updated: January 16, 2023
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Contact Info
Mailing Address:
2680 Natchez Trace Parkway
Tupelo,
MS
38804
Phone:
800 305-7417
The Parkway Visitor Center near Tupelo, MS, is open 9am-4:30pm seven days a week. The visitor center is closed Thanksgiving, December 25th and January 1st.
