Our Native American Heritage | Mississippi Roads | MPB

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- [Voiceover] On this edition of Mississippi Roads we're taking a look at diverse Mississippi Indian heritage. We're up in Neshoba County at the Chahta Immi Cultural Center. We'll travel to some of our important Indian mound sites then we'll revisit a classic story about the annual Choctaw Indian Fair. Take a look at the Winterville Mounds up in the Delta, then we'll hear about recent work by the Choctaws to promote home grown produce and promote healthy eating. - [Voiceover] Support for the arts segment of Mississippi Roads comes from the Mississippi Arts Commission whose mission is to be a catalyst for the arts and creativity in Mississippi. Information available at www.arts.ms.gov. - [Voiceover] Mississippi Roads is made possible in part by the generous support of viewers like you. Thank you. ♪ Down Mississippi Roads ♪ Mississippi Roads ♪ - Hi, welcome back to Mississippi Roads. I'm your host, Walt Grayson. This week we're at the Chahta Immi Cultural Center in Pearl River, Mississippi, in Neshoba County. I'll give you a quick Walt Grayson translation of Chata Immi. Immi means lifestyle or life ways, Chata is the word the Choctaw have for themselves. So this is a place that studies and houses and has exhibits about the life ways of the Choctaw Nation. There are about 10,000 members of the Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians who live in eight reservation communities here in nine counties in central Mississippi. When the Europeans began settling in America in the 1600's, the Choctaw were already living here in the southeast. They lived off the land as hunter-gatherers, and as farmers living off corn, nuts, fruits, as well as deer, bear and fish. The Choctaw had a long tradition of conducting business very successfully I might add, having established trade with European explorers as early as the 1700's. Throughout the 18th century the Choctaw had immense land holdings all over the southeast but ceded more and more land to the newly formed United States of America during the 1800's. The treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek signed in 1830, marked a major transfer of land to America and outlined the removal of much of the Choctaw tribed lands set aside in Oklahoma. The present day Choctaws who live in central Mississippi are direct descendants of those strong willed and proud people back in the 1800's who just absolutely refused to leave. Matter of fact, that same kind of self determination that you saw in the ancestor can be seen today in the descendants. Of course, there were a lot of other tribes in Mississippi back in the day other than the Choctaw, and we're finding out a lot about them through the work of archaeologists and historians as they study present day Indian mounds. Let's take a look. (peaceful beat) - The Mississippi Mound Trail actually had its beginnings probably something on the order of like four years ago. And it looks like we're gonna have about 40 mound sites on it and of all different kinds we have sites which consist of a single, relatively small mound to sites which are some of the largest mound sites in the southeast United States. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History was able to gain funding through MDOT from the Federal Highway Administration Office here in Mississippi. And the project officially started the, it would have been the fall, late fall of 2012. And we selected a number of sites for possible inclusion on the trail and one of the things that we had to do is that there were a number of these sites all up and down the mound trail from Wilkinson County, where we are now, all the way up to DeSoto County not 50 yards from the Tennessee line. - Part of our job here at archives is to record all the known sites in the state so we do a lot of surveying and we keep them all in a database and what Cliff was able to do was to put this whole layer of maps into the GIF's and he printed this map for us which is the background of it is the physiographic region of the state and you can see the concentrations of mounds in the state. Along rivers and over here in the delta. This map over here is a map of the Mississippi Mound Trail sites. Which sites will be on the trail and you can see it goes from Wilkinson County all the way up to DeSoto County following Highway 61 and Highway One. Follow this area right through here, right through the concentration of mounds on the western side of the state. - My name's John O'Deer. I'm retired from Mississippi State University a few years ago. And as far as the mound trail goes I'm working as a consultant to the Department of Archives and History. My title is Manager of the Mound Trail Project which is actually a pretty big job 'cause we start out, trying to tackle, within a period of a year, a year and a half, tackle 40 mound sites. Which is kind of ambitious and a piece of work like this hasn't really been done since the Smithsonian sent down crews into Mississippi in the 1890's. And so we're really trying to put Mississippi on the map. Both in terms of the mound trail and in terms of doing, kind of cutting edge research on this group of mounds (peaceful music) Emerald Mound, we're fortunate that it's already well interpreted by the National Park Service to kind of be one of the anchors, you might say, of the Mississippi Mound Trail. Very impressive site and we're now on top of the largest mound that's on top of the mound. And you can see the other large mound in the distance. There would have been six more mounds, lining the plaza out here. We're not sure, exactly, what went on here. Except that there was a building on top of where we're standing right now and probably a building of some sort on top of that mound and on the other mounds that were in here. There are midden deposits, basically Indian garbage, which are interspersed with the mound construction layers in this large platform out here so there was some village activity or there were things going on on top of here but there haven't been that many excavations into the flat top of it to really get a good idea exactly what was going on. We think that the Indian Chiefdom that controlled this whole area, 1500, maybe up to 1530 AD, was centered at this site. This was the capital. And we know that it was a very large political organization because when Hernando DeSoto's troops made their exit from the Mississippi Valley and the Mississippi River which is a couple miles from here, the political entity in this area was able to send 100's of large canoes out to harass them and basically speed them on their way to the Gulf of Mexico. And they almost were defeated again on the water on the Mississippi River, probably by troops, you might say, from this site. - This is one of the more interesting and kind of more exotic finds you'll, you'll uncover at some of these sites that date Mississippi in time period and that's roughly from about 1,000 AD up until DeSoto then tried to cross the southeast in 1540, somewhere in there. This is a pipe. Made out of clay. And it's what we call an effigy pipe, it has a depiction of, you know, human characteristics, sometimes in combination with animal characteristics. But this would have been an actual smoking pipe. It would have had a long wooden tube here. Put the material in there to light the fire and start smoking but you can see by its face this was meant to portray a human, very human face. And these kinds of objects that are, were heavily used in ceremonials purposes and so, and you really see these, in these later mound period times, especially when we have those flat top mounds which is what you do have in Pocahontas. You'll see these kind of objects that are really highlighted in the ceremony. And the social gathering aspects of these areas as big social communities and social gathering spots. These finds are fairly rare to find and especially finding them intact. - Opportunities like this don't come you know, don't come by every day. Being able to do this, this level of research, even though our individual, our research at individual sites is relatively small, we're working on so many sites that it basically becomes a set of information we just didn't have. - One of the mounds that you can find out about here at the Cultural Center is a very significant mound to Choctaw culture and that's Nanih Waiya Mound. It was built by their prehistoric ancestors. The historic mound still stands just down the road in Winston County. It plays a central role in the tribe's origins and is considered the heart of the Choctaw people. Known to be their mother mound there's also a cave right next to it. That's revered as the birthplace of the Choctaw people. The tribe has named August 18th of every year as a holiday to celebrate this historic site. And while we're talking about Indian mounds, there's another group of mounds that you might want to check out. They're very accessible here in Mississippi over in the delta. It's on a 42 acre site a few miles north of Greenville at Winterville. And the Winterville Mounds still contain 12 mounds today and two plazas plus they have a nice museum there. Let's take a look back at the story that I did about the Winterville Mounds and my growing up in the area. Here it is. - These are the Winterville Indian Mounds. They're just north of Greenville on Highway One. This was one of our play places when we were kids growing up here. Along with the levee and of course any empty lot we could find in the neighborhood. We'd ride our bikes out here and play all over the place. Used to climb the mounds and slide down them on cardboard and I can't recall not knowing what they were. I mean, I always knew they were Indian mounds and we were told the people were buried in them. And that's not quite true. Although, some of the smaller mounds are burial mounds but the biggest of them is not. But it was long after cardboard slides and bike rides had been set aside that I became aware of the significance of my childhood play place. It's kind of like ripples in a pond radiating when the rock hits the water. Our awareness of our world grows and expands from the place where we hit. Our first comprehensions, I guess, concern our own home. Later we learn about our street, and our neighborhood. And then after a few visits to Grandma's we start to take on a sense of personal history. And then we get old enough to go to school and we learn there's a bigger world out past the world we've known about so far. And discover that that bigger world has its own history. And its history goes back a lot farther that we even know there was a farther to go back to. But then sometimes, we find that something in that larger world we're discovering, intersects with something we already knew about in our own, personal world. Only, we knew it under another context, maybe. And that happened for me when I found out how important of an archeological site is my former playground: the Winterville Mounds. Two worlds collided. It's not exactly like, but it may be something akin to when a child of a movie star one day discovers that their mommy's famous. And a lot of people know Mommy. But on the other hand, they don't know Mommy like you know Mommy. That's the way it was with me and the Winterville Mounds. Learning that they're among the top five most significant Native American mound sites in the nation is awe inspiring. But knowing that you can get airborne if a gust of wind catches your cardboard as you gain momentum about half way down from the top of that big mound is personal knowledge. And I bet that's knowledge that none of the archaeologists scrutinizing and sifting and cataloguing this place even know about. I wonder if they found my pocket knife that I lost out here while they were surveying? So who's world is this really then? Oh, I'm fully aware that the prehistoric Native Americans painstakingly built these mounds a basket load of dirt at a time over 1,000 years ago. And they used them for whatever it was they wanted them for and then abandoned them. But the last practical uses of the mounds for something other than an outdoor museum piece like they are now, was us kids who slid on them a few decades ago before they were fenced up and rescued and put on display. Now hey, that may not be important now, but think about it, 1,000 years from now, archaeologists will think it important that mounds were built and used for maybe 400 years and then abandoned for 600 years and then put back into use again for a short period of time as a playground by children of an entirely different culture than the culture constructing them. And you thought we were just wearing the mounds away by sliding on them. What we were actually doing is making an asterisk in the more inclusive continuum of archaeology, thank you very much. By taking a leftover handed down to us and putting it to another use. Like taking a depot and turning it into a restaurant after the railroad is abandoned. But a little more far-fetched. Aw, in reality I know that we were ignorantly misusing something of a significance that we didn't understand. But thankfully, we didn't wear them to the ground and some of the very same kids who used to slide here, are now members of the Friends of the Mounds Organization who now are helping to restore and preserve and show off our old childhood buddies. And it's right that they are. I mean, because some of you who just recently discovered this wonderful archaeological site in Mississippi Delta over the last little while, need to know that for some of us out here, we and the Winterville Mounds go way back. Now this is always a lot of fun. Highly anticipated Choctaw Fair happens every year on the reservation. The Fair is an event that helps to preserve and celebrate the journey of the Choctaw. There are historical and cultural displays, social dancing, tribal arts and crafts, Choctaw stick-ball, the granddaddy of all field sports, as well as the Choctaw Indian Princess Pageant and delicious, traditional Choctaw food. Let's take a look back in the Mississippi Roads rear-view mirror at a story we did a few years back about this fun-filled festival. - [Voiceover] The Choctaw Indian Fair began generations ago as the Green Corn Festival. It has since grown into one of Southeast Mississippi's top ten attractions. Through this annual event, visitors get a glimpse into the Native American culture. This experience is enhanced through the cultural arts demonstrations and classes such as basket weaving, friendship beading, and traditional Choctaw cooking which is still done outdoors over an open flame. These elements are an integral part of the fair. - Events like this entice young people to learn more about their own culture, demonstrate their culture and we have some traditions here that are really outstanding. - [Voiceover] The annual Choctaw Indian Fair truly has something for everyone. - Would you pick a lane or what? What's your problem? - [Voiceover] For the young at heart, or just the fun at heart, there are daily puppet shows at Grandpa's General Store, circus clowns and a little red firetruck train ride. You can even visit the Museum of the Southern Indian for a look at authentic Indian dress and history of the Choctaw Indians. Few tribes in the United States have held so tenaciously to the dress of 100 years ago as the Choctaws of Mississippi. Worn daily by many older women, the hand made Choctaw dresses have a full skirt requiring up to six yards of fabric. Beaded necklaces are added for dress up occasions. The rules of the traditional Choctaw's stickball game have been handed down from generation to generation. The ball game has a long and violent history as a sport and method of settling wars and disputes. - We call it the oldest game in America. And it is. The young people, young men, like to play the game and they have competitions by communities going on. - [Voiceover] This idea of a serious game played to win just may be the Choctaw's greatest contribution to American sports. Another long standing tradition is the Choctaw Princess Pageant and the crowning of the new princess. - The new Choctaw Indian Princess for 1999/2000, is contestant number seven. (inaudible) (cheering) - [Voiceover] Just because the sun sets, does not mean that the fun has to end. This marks the beginning of the senior stick ball championships. (cheering) Protective equipment is not worn. A player depends upon his or her speed to avoid the manhandling tactics of the opposing team. But what's a fair without food and rides? If you still enjoy the adventure of a good old fashioned fair ride, then this Ferris wheel is for you. - It's easy to see how the Choctaw Indian Fair has made it to its 50th anniversary. And what, with so much education, entertainment, and culture wrapped into one event, I'm sure we can look forward to many more. - While the Choctaw people are firmly rooted in the traditions of the past, they're very quick to embrace new ventures. Choctaw Foods has been around for a while, but one of their new ventures is to promote healthy eating. And what they're doing is they're trying to get the youngsters to plant, grow, produce, and harvest healthy produce. In our next story, let's take a look at another way the Choctaws are getting involved with this whole foods movement. They've got a program that delivers fresh produce almost to your doorstep. Take a look. - [Voiceover] Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians in Philadelphia, Mississippi has started an agricultural program aimed at getting fresh produce available to tribe members. Program's Director Dick Hoy has been working with the Choctaws for the last three years. And has seen the impact of the program's success. - Choctaw Fresh Produce started as an idea of being able to grow and distribute food locally. We got a grant to start this program to where we could grow produce for the resort property, for local consumers, and it just took off from there. We built six high tunnels with intentions to building 18, we're now up to 17. It's just been slow, going in three years. We um, got the first six up and running the first year. Then we increased to 12. Every year we add in two or three more greenhouses and high tunnels. About six months ago we made the decision to transition from conventional-grown produce to organic. Choctaws are historically, they were outstanding farmers. That's why they thrived when other tribes didn't. And to see them getting back into agriculture it just really excites me. - [Voiceover] As more and more greenhouses were added, a surplus of produce was the result. And this surplus has now been made available to other communities through CSA's. In Jackson, these CSA's can be purchased at the Broad Street Baking Company and Cafe in Banner Hall. - Well, we have a CSA, which is Community Supported Agriculture. You buy a membership, each week you receive a box of whatever is fresh and ready that week. It typically runs eight to ten different products in a box. We extended our CSA into Jackson and it's been a huge success. We sold about 80 shares there in two weeks and we've got a waiting list of about 100 people ready for the fall. - Well, what we do is we pick them Mondays and Tuesdays and we box everything up on Wednesdays and then Thursday mornings we take the boxes and put them in the van and we deliver to Jackson. We have 77 customers here that have purchased a CSA and I bring them, I deliver, drop them off and they have a sign in sheet up at the front and they pick up their box, sign off on it, and that's their box for the week. - It's great. You never know what's gonna be in the box. So that's been kind of a, an interesting aspect. And we have to tailor our menus to suit that. - Oh my goodness, that's an awful lot. - My husband grew up on a farm so he really likes all the fresh produce coming in and the spices, the dill, and the cilantro. It's just so fresh and easy to prepare meals with. - I really enjoy cooking. And so, and we of course love the fresh produce. We go to the Farmer's Market pretty frequently. And so when the, we saw this opportunity which supports local farmers we thought that that would be a good thing. We subscribed and you know, anxiously awaited the first delivery. - I just feel like we should support our Mississippi farmers and try to help them have a good year. - It's as much a matter of supporting something as it is what you get of it. You know, the produce is better quality than anything you can get. It's, it wasn't picked three weeks ago and trucked in here from Mexico. So you know, it's high quality food. Particularly the greens that we've been getting earlier. (inaudible) - [Voiceover] You know, heck, why would you not want to support local farmers? If you like to eat, you like to cook, well it's a no-brainer. - Well, that's about all the time we have for this visit to Pearl River in Neshoba County. If you'd like information about anything you've seen in the program you can always contact us at mpbonline.org/MississippiRoads or you can become the coolest person in your neighborhood by liking our Mississippi Public Broadcasting Facebook page. That way, you can be one of our peeps. You know, actually you find out a lot of things that's going on around MPB because there's something going on all the time and if you didn't know that it's because you haven't liked that page yet. So, do that. And until next time, I'm Walt Grayson. And I'll be seeing you on Mississippi Roads. (theme song playing) - [Voiceover] Mississippi Roads is made possible in part by the generous support of viewers like you. Thank you.
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Channel: Mississippi Public Broadcasting
Views: 18,968
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: mpb, mississippi, mississippi public broadcasting, etv, Chata Immi Cultural Center, Indian Mound Sites, Choctaw Indian Fair, Winterville Mounds, Choctaw Fresh Foods
Id: d6d0dWNLzJ8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)
Published: Fri May 06 2016
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