Chickasaw Indians

Link to Adair in modern English type.

Adair ancestry page and bio

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Excerpts from Gibson, Arrell M.. The Chickasaws, Univ. of Oklahoma Press (1971) (See Kindle)

Appearance:

One observer, in characterizing the southeastern tribes, called the Chickasaws the “Spartans” of the lower Mississippi valley, for “martial virtue, and not riches” was their only “standard for preferment.”

Chickasaw men were hunters and fighters first and agriculturalists only on occasion. Their women and Indian slaves performed the menial tasks of clearing land, caring for crops, and gathering firewood.

Early visitors described Chickasaw warriors as “tall, well-built people,” with reddish brown skin, raven black hair, and large, dark eyes, their actions exhibiting a superior and independent air.

The women and older men wore their hair long.

The warrior hairstyle was to shave the sides of the head, leaving a roach or crest which the wearer soaked with bear grease.

Both men and women plucked all hair from their faces and bodies with tweezers made in early times of clam shells and later of wire. Chickasaw warriors painted their faces for ceremonies and war, the color and design indicating their clan association.

They wore ear and nose ornaments and decorated their heads and shoulders with eagle feathers and a mantle of white swan feathers, the ultimate badge sought by every warrior.

Europeans described Chickasaw women as “beautiful and clean” They gave much attention to their appearance, “never forgetting to anoint, and tie up their hair, except in time of mourning,” and bathed daily except during periods of menstrual seclusion.

Clothing

The basic male garment was the breechcloth; in the heat of summer their only clothing with a shirt of dressed deerskin.

Long shaggy garments of panther, deer, bear, beaver, and otter skins, the fleshy side out, warmed them in winter.

Hunters wore deerskin boots reaching to the thigh to protect against brambles and thorny thickets.

Chickasaw women wore dresses made from skins sewed together with fishbone needles and deer sinews. In winter they wrapped themselves in buffalo-calf skins “with wintery shagged wool inward.”

After English traders brought cloth to the Chickasaw towns, native women made a loose petticoat, fastened with leather belt and brass buckle, which reached “only to their hams, in order to shew their exquisitely fine proportioned limbs.” The women made shoes for their families from skins of deer, bear, and elk, carefully tanned and smoked to prevent hardening.

Time

This tribe’s immersal in nature was demonstrated by their method for calculating time, which was based largely on lunar cycles. The first appearance of every new moon was a time of tribal observance and rejoicing.

An early observer noted that on this occasion “they always repeat some joyful sounds, and stretch out their hands towards her.” The Chickasaw year began at the first new moon of the vernal equinox.

They divided the year into the four natural seasons, applying to each a descriptive designation: for autumn, “Fall of the Leaf.” Chickasaw elders were the keepers of time and tribal lore generally.

They numbered years by units of lunar months and seasons and commonly used “winters” to designate a span of years.

The Chickasaws constructed primitive calendars consisting of knots on cords or thongs and notched sticks.

Tribal leaders distributed these among headmen of the different towns to number the winters, moons, sleeps, days in travel, and the appointed time for a tribal council or for a campaign against the enemy. As each day passed, holders of the common calendar loosened a knot or cut a notch.

Religion

The substance of Chickasaw religion was contained in their deity concept, creation epic, migration legend, and eschatology.

Over all the Chickasaw natural and social universe was a supreme being—Ababinili—a composite force consisting of the Four Beloved Things Above, which were the Sun, Clouds, Clear Sky, and He that Lives in the Clear Sky. This composite force made all men out of the dust of mother earth.

Its earthly agents performed various creative and service functions useful to the Chickasaws. The crawfish brought up earth from the bottom of the “universal watery waste” and formed the earth. Other creatures produced light, darkness, mountains, and forests.

That part of the composite force closest to the Chickasaws was the Sun, the great holy fire above. It was represented in each town by a sacred fire. Guardian priests watched over this fire and dispensed coals for household fires. This had the effect of bringing the composite force into each home.

In addition to the supreme composite force, the Chickasaw pantheon contained several lesser deities, the Hottuk Ishtohoollo and Hottuk Ookproose.

The Hottuk Ishtohoollo were good spirits who inhabited the higher regions.

The Hottuk Ookproose were evil spirits residing in the dark regions of the West.

The Chickasaws also believed that certain supernatural beings resided in their immediate environment.

These included Lofas and Iyaganashas. Lofas were giants, ten feet tall, who carried off women, beat men, and vexed the Chickasaws by driving deer away, hiding game from hunters, and causing personal disasters.

Iyaganashas were little people, three feet tall, who helped the Chickasaws. They trained Indian doctors, transmitting to them their special curative powers, and taught hunters how to pursue and catch deer and other game.

Chickasaws also believed in witches who took on various forms in nature. Like the Lofas, witches caused personal misfortune and illness.

The Chickasaws observed ceremonies, taboos, and sacrifices as religious exercises to placate and win the favor of the composite force and lesser deities. Their diagnosis of illness and healing practices were steeped with spiritual overtones. They explained natural phenomena in a celestial context. Most tribal legends, transmitted by priests and elders, were conspicuously religious in theme. The Chickasaw social system, based on clans and totemic associations, as well as tribal institutions, were suffused with divine ordinance.

Shamans & Clerics

The worldly intermediaries between the Chickasaws and their deities were two Beloved Holy Men, the Hopaye, one chosen from each of the two great divisions of the tribe. Lesser priests assisted the Hopaye in performing their sacred duties. These included presiding at tribal ceremonies, principally the busk festival and the picofa ritual; supervising observance of the holy ordinances of the Great Composite Force; and advising tribal leaders on questions of great moment.


Death, Burial and After-Life

Chickasaw eschatology included a belief in an existence after death and implied a judgment and consignment by the celestial composite force to a life of joy in the sky or a life of torment in the Chickasaw hell.

Their mortuary practice and mourning formula were essential steps in preparing the departed for the journey to the judgment. When a person died, the family dug a grave inside his house. They washed the corpse, anointed the head with oil, painted the face red, and dressed him in his best clothes. His gun, ammunition, pipe, tobacco, and a supply of corn were buried with him. The body was placed in a sitting position facing west “for otherwise it was thought that the soul would lose its way.”

The mourning formula included extinguishing the fire in his house, removing all ashes, and starting a new fire. The formal mourning period lasted twelve moons for about two hours a day. The widow or widower wept over the grave just before sunup and sundown for a month. Women played an important role in the extended obsequies as mourners. Those skillful at lamentation wailed. Warriors shot arrows near the grave to keep off evil spirits.

Relatives commonly slept over the grave to “awaken the memory of their dead with their cries” and if “killed by an enemy, this helped to irritate and set on fire such revengeful tempers to retaliate blood for blood.”

The Chickasaws believed that the ghosts of those slain in battle haunted the dwellings of the living until revenged. In the Chickasaw eschatology, souls of the dead traveled west to the judgment. Those who had been good ascended to the sky world to live with the Great Composite Force. Evil ones were consigned to the western quarter of the Chickasaw universe, “from which came witchcraft.”


Busk (Green Corn) Festival

[Notes:  Corn planting in the low country would start much earlier than elsewhere -- March 15.

Silking

Silking is the stage when the tassles or corn silk emerges from the ear of the corn. This usually occurs around 55 to 66 days after the corn seedling emerges from the ground. At this stage, the corn plant is ready to be pollinated. The pollen from the top stamen of a corn plant mixes with the silks from the ears of the corn to fertilize the corn. The more silks that are fertilized, the more kernels there will be per ear.

Blistering

Blistering is the next stage of corn development. After pollination, the kernels begins forming within the ears of the corn cob. The cob will be almost full size, and the silks of the ear will begin to darken and dry out. This stage begins around 12 days after pollination has occured.

Milking

Milking is the stage when the corn ears are ready to be harvested. This stage usually occurs around 20 days after silking or fertilization of the corn. At this point, the kernels will have begun to yellow on the outside and will contain a runny, milky liquid inside. The kernels will be almost fully grown, and they will be at an 80 percent moisture level.]

The busk festival was observed each year at the beginning of the first new moon when the green corn was ripe.

1760 Low Country would have been 12 July.  Full moon before on 28 June and half moon on 6 July


The Hopaye and their attendants extinguished the old sacred fire, removed the ashes, and struck a new sanctified fire.

On this primitive altar the priests offered a bit of tobacco, button snakeroot, and several ears of new corn to the fresh flames.

After a two-day fast, the people drank an emetic of boiled cusseena, button snakeroot, or red root. This caused them to vomit, the purpose being to purge all evil from their bodies.

Following purification, they feasted on roasting ears.

Tribal leaders used this four-day observance to conduct all manner of national business. The Hopaye prepared and blessed the medicine to protect the people’s health in the year ahead.

Warriors who had distinguished themselves were recognized and awarded the white swan mantle. A general pardon was declared for all criminals except those accused of murder.

The Hopaye and clan elders admonished parents to maintain honor in their households and instructed youth in tribal traditions and lore. Ball games and dancing provided a lighter side of this otherwise serious observance. The Chickasaw green corn festival was deityordained for national “renewal and perpetuation of health.”


Medicine Men / Aliktce / Picofa Ceremony for the seriously ill

A paraspiritual class in Chickasaw society, partaking of the great spiritual powers of the Hopaye, were the Aliktce—the healers. Their religious connection was derived from the Chickasaw belief that sickness was due to the invasion of the body by an animal spirit. It was the function of the healers to know the secret ways to exorcise the illness-bearing spirit and transfer it to another animal. Thus the Aliktce had to have the talent to blend their power over the spirit world with the accumulated Chickasaw materia medical.

To be worthy of their office and to be effective as healers, the Aliktce had to be pure. This was accomplished by enclosing the candidates in “a hot house for four days, to live on amber, strong drink made of tobacco and water.” Next, the preceptors brought them out, fed them corn gruel, and returned them to the hot house for four additional days after which they were “suffered to come out emaciated.” Then, they were required “for twelve moons [to] abstain from women, meat, fat, and strong drink.” Finally they were accredited healers.

Helped by the Iyaganashas, the Aliktce learned to mix spiritual formulas with secret knowledge of Chickasaw pharmacopoeia: spice wood, ginseng, and cottonwood, sarsaparilla, huckleberry, red willow, black locust, and button snakeroots, skunk tree bark, mistletoe, yarrow, common dock, crushed melon seeds, ends of cedar limbs, elder, mint, and cusseena, as well as various herbs and berries. With these they compounded potions, teas, poultices, emetics, and drenches. Their preparations, administered internally, treated toothache, stomach disorders, snakebite, headache, dysentery and constipation, back and leg ache, cramps, fever, swelling, the itch, and eye trouble. They had remedies for female disorders and miscarriage preventive.

Their incantation-treatment formula required a gourd rattle, healing songs, and special terpsichorean routines to deal with particular spirits. To exorcise a disease-carrying spirit, they commonly danced three times round the sick person, contrary to the course of the sun. . . . Then they invoke the raven, and mimic his croaking voice. . . . They also place a basin of cold water with some pebbles in it on the ground near the patient; then they invoke the fish, because of its cool element, to cool the heat of the fever. Again they invoke the eagle; . . . they solicit him, as he soars in the heavens, to bring down refreshing things for their sick and not to delay them, as he can dart down upon the wing quick as a flash of lightning.

The martial tradition of the Chickasaws required the healers to spend much of their time treating battle casualties. Often the Aliktce diagnosed a wounded warrior as “witch shot.” After bathing the patient with a prepared solution, the Aliktce would “suck and bite the skin, beginning at his forehead, and extending on the face, neck and trunk to the navel, professing in that this way they can suck out the witch ball.”

The Picofa ceremony was an extended Chickasaw healing fast presided over by the Aliktce for the purpose of giving special treatment to one seriously ill. The Aliktce spent three days with the patient administering their emetics and potions. On the third day the patient’s clan, both men and women, gathered near his dwelling by a sacred fire. They danced and sang to drums. The women wore dried terrapin-shell rattles containing a few pebbles below the knee. The dance leader wore the feather or skin of the animal “believed to be responsible for the patient’s trouble. This is to strengthen the medicine.”

The repertory included the turkey, duck, bear, buffalo, rabbit, snake, and eagle dance, and were “propitiatory . . . performed as prayers to the various animal deities and totems for the relief of the afflicted person.”

At dawn the Aliktce declared that the spirit had migrated from the patient to one of the dance subjects, and the attending clan feasted.

Chickasaws did their own doctoring, too. Women used home remedies for treating common ailments in their households. They had secret herbs to thwart pregnancy and wore beaded strands of buffalo hair on their legs for ornaments “as well as a preservative against miscarriages, hard labor, and other evils.”

Chickasaw warriors wore personal charms and carried small medicine bundles to counter certain spirits, draw on supernatural power, and receive good fortune.

Common items in the warrior medicine bundle were consecrated pieces of bone and small exotic stones.

Bundles sometimes included a “shadow fighting knife,” for use in “spiritual encounters,” which might be interred “with the dead to help him in fighting off enemies on his way to the world of spirits.”

Taboos

As additional safeguards against arousing the displeasure of the many forces in their spiritual universe, the Chickasaws observed certain taboos and sacrifices. Taboos were observed as spiritual ordinances to guard against personal pollution. An impure person was unworthy of deity favors and was thus unprotected against invasion by evil spirits which brought misfortune, illness, and even death.

The principal taboos were associated with food and women. “They reckon all those animals to be unclean, that are either carnivorous, or live on nasty food; as hogs, wolves, panthers, foxes, cats, mice, rats. And if we except the bear, they deem all beast of prey unhallowed, and polluted food. . . . They abhor moles so exceedingly, that they will not allow their children even to touch them for fear of hurting their eyesight.”

They believed that spirits in nature had the power to transfer to humans the qualities of the animals they consumed. Thus, he who feeds on venison, is according to their physical system, swifter and more sagacious than the man who lives on the flesh of the clumsy bear. . . . This is the reason . . . their greatest chieftains observed a constant rule in their diet, and seldom ate of any animal of gross quality, or heavy motion of body, fancying it conveyed a dullness through the whole system, and disabled them from exerting themselves with proper vigour in their martial, civil, and religious duties.

The most stringent and elaborate tribal taboos were associated with the female. The Chickasaws held the mysteries of her cycles and processes in great awe. She was required to separate herself each month, the lunar retreat, in a menstrual hut near her household. She also had to reside in her menstrual hut in isolation from her family and the tribe at childbirth and for a postnatal period of two months. During both times, touching food others consumed was regarded as contaminating.

Indeed, a woman’s very presence made her husband shunned as a risk on the hunt or warpath. At the end of her period she could return to her household, but only after she had bathed and observed the purification formula.

Tribal sickness, misfortune, defeat, or other disasters could be blamed on non-observance of these taboos. Thus her quarantine, if violated, ranked in weight of offense with “breach of marriage law,

Myths and Oral Tradition

These explanations crystallized into myths and tales. Successive generations of tribal elders preserved and transmitted them. The regular presentation of these myths provided spiritual instruction as well as entertainment and storytelling. Elaborate requirements surrounded their telling. Some could be told in particular seasons. The workings of natural phenomena were accounted for in such tales as “How day and night were divided,” “Why the opossum has no hair on his tail,” “The origin of corn,” and “How the Chickasaws got tobacco.” Some Chickasaw myths lauded warriors and stressed the Chickasaw martial tradition, and others explained supernatural themes—‘“Visit to the world of the dead.” Encounters with nature, especially with animals, and conversion to another life form, such as “The man who became a Snake,” were popular story subjects. Social themes—“The unfaithful wife”—and human caricatures—“The wicked mother-inlaw”—also appeared in their myths.

Recreation and Games

The pervasive Chickasaw religion even colored tribal recreation and entertainment. Their music (made by singing and instruments), dances, and games served spiritual as well as social and recreational purposes. The principal instruments were pot and log drums, hand rattles, terrapin-shell knee rattles, and flutes. Chickasaw games included toli and chunkey, played only by the men, and akabatle where men and women opposed each other.

Ceremony and pageantry, which preceded the contests, provided spiritual overtones. The Hopaye blessing was followed by singing and dancing. Toli, chunkey, and akabatle were played on prepared courts. Toli resembled lacrosse, but in toli each player used two rackets. The ball was made from a scraped deerskin stuffed with deer hair and sewed with deer sinew. The court was about five hundred feet long with a goal at each end.

Chunkey was played with a rounded stone “kept with the strictest religious care, and from one generation to another and . . . exempted from being buried with the dead.”

Chunkey stones “belong to the town where they are used and are carefully preserved.” As the stone was rolled across the court, warriors cast lances at it, the winner being the one to place his lance closest to the stone when it came to rest.

In akabatle, men and women gathered about a single pole placed in the center of the court. The object of the game was to strike an effigy atop the pole with a ball. Great feasts for the players and the spectators followed the games.

Tribe Divison and Clan Organization

The tribe was divided into two grand divisions or moieties—Imosaktca and Intcukwalipa.

The Imosaktca had precedence over the Intcukwalipa, which meant that the High Minko, the nation’s principal chief, came from that division of the tribe.

Each moiety was divided into clans or gentes, groups of blood-related families. The number of clans in both moieties has varied in Chickasaw history from seven to fifteen. They included the Minko—Chief, Shawi—Raccoon, Koishto—Panther, Spani—Spanish, Nani—Fish, and Hashona—Skunk gentes. Each clan or gens claimed a mythical origin and traced its genealogy to a common animal ancestor, a totem which served as patron saint or special guardian for clan members.

Chickasaw clans were exogamic in that members were required to marry outside their clan and matrilineal in that descent was traced through the female line. Moiety and gens protocol included specific assignment by rank to each clan’s location in the tribal town or encampment.

For identity, the Imosaktca group painted across and above the cheek bones, the Intcukwalipa below the cheek bones.

The principal clan in each moiety provided the Hopaye. His spiritual aides were selected from the lesser clans.

Marriage Customs

A Chickasaw family was formed when a suitor from one clan wed the maid of his choice in another clan. He declared his matrimonial intentions by sending her a small present, perhaps a trinket or fine deerskin garment. Her acceptance meant engagement.

The simple marriage ceremony was described thus: the groom takes “a choice ear of corn, and divides it in two before witnesses, gives her one half in her hand, and keeps the other half to himself; or otherwise he gives her a deer’s foot, as an emblem of the readiness with which she ought to serve him; in return, she presents him with some cakes of bread, thereby declaring her domestic care and gratitude. . . .

When this short ceremony is ended they may go to bed like an honest couple."

Monogamy prevailed but polygamy was permitted. Commonly a man with plural wives had chosen a woman with several sisters, and he wed the lot. The advantage of this type of arrangement was that he needed to maintain only one household. Otherwise the polygamist established separate residences and visited his women on a circuit. A European writer observed that the Chickasaws in their natural state “were fond of variety, that they ridicule the white people as a tribe of narrow-hearted, and dull constitutioned animals, for having only one wife at a time; and being bound to live with and support her, though numberless circumstances might require a contrary conduct.”

Also he found that the Chickasaws permitted a form of companionate marriage. A young warrior “strikes up one of those matches for a few moons, which they term Toopsa Tawa, a make haste marriage,’ because it wants the usual ceremonies, and duration of their other kind of marriages.”

Widowhood Custom & Adultery

A Chickasaw widow faced the ordeal of remaining single for four years, closely watched by her husband’s clan to make certain that she did not falter.  She had to remain inside her house in unkempt clothing and disheveled hair. Only her late husband’s sisters and brothers could suspend this stringent law. A sister, by arranging a marriage between the widow and her brother, or he, by lying with the widow one night or by taking her as his wife, freed her from the penalties of widowhood.

A widower had to endure about the same restrictions, though for only four months.

Chickasaw law permitted both separation and divorce and defined adultery as a serious offense. The man seldom suffered punishment except that administered by his wife’s clan or an irate husband. The woman could be whipped, her hair shorn, and her face disfigured. An adulterous couple able to elude tribal authorities until the next busk festival was assured a pardon during the propitiation ceremony. To promote harmonious domestic relations, the Chickasaws practiced son-in-law and mother-in-law avoidance.

Child Rearing & Rights of Passage

Chickasaw child-rearing practices reflected the tribe’s matrifocal system and martial tradition. Male children were placed on panther skins, in the hopes that “the communicative principle” of the skins would convey qualities they desired the man-child to have—strength, cunning, smelling, and a prodigious spring. “They reckon such a bed is the first rudiments of war.

But it is worthy of notice, they change the regimen in nurturing their young females; these they lay on the skins of fawns, or buffalo calves, because they are shy and timorous.”

Children were related to the mother’s household and clan, not the father’s. Women had authority only over the girls.

 A disobedient son was sent to the oldest uncle of the mother’s gens. For punishment, the elder might simply scold the youth, impose a small penance, appeal to his “feelings of honor or shame,” or pour cold water on him. One punishment situation arose when an old uncle charged his nephew with being “more effeminate than became a warrior and with acting contrary to their old religious rites and customs.” For this he was lashed with a whip of plaited grass. Mischievous or thievish children might be scratched on the back with dried snake’s teeth.37

There was a precise division of responsibility by sex in the instruction of children. Women were responsible for the proper upbringing of girls. Boys between the ages of twelve and fifteen, the “age of proper discrimination,” were assigned to village elders “who instructed them in all necessary knowledge, and desired qualifications to constitute them successful hunters and accomplished warriors”: the arts of swimming, jumping, running, wrestling, and use of weapons. Their warrior ordeal included plunging into water at the coldest season and eating special herbs to increase their strength.

Government & Law

The clans and towns were self-governing and confederated in a single political unit—the tribe—for purposes of promoting the general welfare and protecting common interests. Officials in the tribal government, both local and national, held their positions because of clan status. Each clan was governed by a council of elders and a clan Minko or chief, sometimes called Capitani, selected by the clan council.

At the top of the Chickasaw political hierarchy was the High Minko, a principal chief selected from the ranking clan of the Imosaktca moiety of the tribe. Assisting the High Minko was the Tishu Minko, the national council speaker and principal deputy and adviser. The national council, composed of clan chiefs and certain other esteemed and wise elders, shared the function of tribal government at the national level. This group met on the call of the High Minko at the advice of his Tishu Minko, who sent runners to all towns summoning clan representatives to the national capital at Chukafalaya, site of the national council house.

The Chickasaw national council was less a law-making body and more a consultative and policy-forming group for particular issues and situations of tribal concern.39 The weight of political authority rested lightly on Chickasaw citizens.

A European observer commented that they were “governed by the plain and honest law of nature, their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty.” They “have no words to express despotic power, arbitrary kings, oppressed, or obedient subjects,” and “they have exquisite pleasure in pursuing their own natural dictates.”

But with all the latitude of freedom enjoyed by Chickasaws in their natural state, they were reported to have taken their responsibilities and duties of citizenship seriously. “When any national affair is in debate, you may hear every father of a family speaking in his house on the subject, with rapid, bold language, and the utmost freedom that a people can use.”

And “they are equal—the only precedence any gain is by superior virtue, oratory, or prowess; and they esteem themselves bound to live and die in defence of their country. A warrior will accept no hire for performing virtuous and heroic actions. . . . The head-men reward the worthy with titles of honour, according to their merit in speaking, or the number of enemies scalps they bring home. Their hearts are fully satisfied, if they have revenged blood, enobled themselves by war actions, given cheerfulness to their mourning country, and fired the breasts of the youth with a spirit of emulation to guard the beloved people from danger, and revenge the wrongs of their country.”

The Chickasaws’ “plain and honest law of nature” was a direct and viable corpus juris. A basic precept was that the tribal domain was held in common ownership, a sacred gift from the Great Composite Force and thus inalienable. There was no private land ownership in the Chickasaw natural system. Each town had its common fields, and local citizens were required to work together in sowing and cultivating the crops at these public farms. They stored the yield in public granaries for issue in time of need.

Private land use was permitted: families selected and farmed small plots of their own for household subsistence. The local council of elders served as an arbitration court, settling disputes arising out of private land use.

Chickasaw citizens were required to assist in erecting public buildings, such as council houses and religious shrines, and in preparing ceremonial grounds, ball courts, and town defenses.42 Proscribed actions in Chickasaw law included homicide, theft, blasphemy, and adultery.

The tribe practiced a mixed system of private and public punishment for law violation. The clan council of elders passed judgment on most crimes. Since retaliation and vengeance pervaded their legal customs, more often than not the council simply served as a detached tribunal to see that the aggrieved or his family did their duty in exacting proper retribution. In cases of theft, the local clan council supervised the punishment of the offender by public whipping.

In homicide cases, where private action was a public duty, the relatives of the victim had a holy mandate to seek out and kill the slayer. If he could not be found, his brother could be substituted as a sort of sacrifice to the law of retaliation. This ended the matter. Adair claimed that Chickasaws would “go a thousand miles, for the purpose of revenge . . . to satisfy the supposed craving ghosts of their deceased relations.”

Crimes of blasphemy reflected a respect for religious ordinance as well as the very practical consideration of sanitation. Chickasaw citizens were expected to be clean in their homes and persons. Regular bathing was a religious and civil duty even in the coldest months. When the ground was covered with snow, Adair watched them leave their warm houses at dawn “singing their usual sacred notes” and plunge into the river. They returned home “rejoicing as they run for having so well performed their religious duty, and thus purged away the impurities of the preceding day by ablution.” Those careless of personal and household cleanliness could expect to have their legs and arms raked with dried snake’s teeth.

Adair rated another form of blasphemy—nonobservance of the requirement that females isolate themselves during menstrual periods—as a crime ranking in seriousness with homicide and adultery. He wrote that “should any of the Indian women violate this law of purity, they would be censured, and suffer for any sudden sickness, or death that might happen among the people, as the necessary effect of the divine anger for their polluting sin, contrary to their old traditional law of female purity.”

Adulterers could expect both public and private punishment. In earlier times both parties were forced to run naked through the village exposed to the taunts and whips of righteous citizens. By Adair’s time, the mid-eighteenth century, the male party to the act suffered only such private physical violence as the outraged husband could inflict. The woman could expect a beating from her husband, facial disfigurement and hair cropping, and banishment from her household. Adair asked the Chickasaws “the reason of the inequality in their marriage law, in punishing the weaker passive party, and exempting the stronger, contrary to reason and justice.” He was told “it had been so a considerable time—because their land being a continual seat of war, and the lurking enemy forever pelting them without, and the women decoying them within, if they put such old cross laws of marriage in force, all their beloved brisk warriors would soon be spoiled, and their habitations turned to a wild waste.”

Hunting and Gathering

In their natural state the Chickasaws derived sustenance, shelter, clothing, and other simple needs from nature’s bounty by hunting and gathering, agriculture, some trade with other tribes, and plunder from their ubiquitous wars.

Next to being a fighting man, the Chickasaw was a hunter. He mixed his invocation of spirit power and supernatural approval for success on the game trails with the familiar nature crafts of tracking, trapping, and using decoys and calls. The most extended seasonal hunt occurred in the autumn. If successful,

Chickasaw hunters turned most of their skins and smoked meat over to their households, although customarily they used a portion of the meat for feasts and as food gifts to old people in the village. Chickasaw youths hunted wild turkeys and other small game near the villages as a part of their training.

Diet and Animal Use

The basic natural food items in the Chickasaw economy were the deer and bear and, in earlier times, the bison. Of these, the deer was the most esteemed. Its flesh was eaten fresh or dried and smoked for winter’s use. Its skin served as the principal material for clothing.

Antler tips often were used as arrow points, and dried deer sinew and entrails were twisted and used for bow strings and as thread for sewing and weaving fishnets.

Indian women used deer brains for softening and tanning skins.

The bear ranked next in usefulness. Chickasaw wives fashioned heavy winter robes and bed coverings from bearskins. The tough hide was made into strong moccasins and hunting boots, and dried bear gut was a favorite with the warriors as bowstring material. They pierced bear claws for ornaments and necklaces.

An important item derived from the bear was oil. Women took the slabs of fat from the bear’s carcass, rendered it over fires “into clear well-tasted oil, mixing plenty of sassafras and wild cinnamon with it over the fire, which keeps sweet from one winter to another, in large earthen jars, covered in the ground.” This easily digestible oil had a wide use in cooking and was popular as a “nutritive to hair” and as a body rub for common complaints.

At certain seasons, fish was a popular food item. The Chickasaws compounded fish drugs from devil’s shoestring, the buckeye, and crashed green walnut hulls which they cast into deep holes in the rivers and creeks near their villages. When catfish, drum, perch, bass, and suckers surfaced, they caught them by hand, speared them, or retrieved them with arrows fitted with a special barb and a hand line.

 Chickasaw fishermen also placed creels and nets on the edge of deep holes and on the river’s riffles to trap fish.

In season, Chickasaw women and children gathered wild onions, grapes, plums, persimmons, mulberries, strawberries, and blackberries, as well as walnuts, chestnuts, pecans, acorns, and hickory nuts. They dried plums and grapes into primitive prunes and raisins and pressed dried persimmons into bricks or cakes.

Boiled sassafras roots made a popular tea.

Chickasaws gathered salt from local licks and springs and robbed bee trees for honey, used as sweetening for the Indian household. They felled the bee tree and placed comb and liquid in a sewed deerskin container.

Agriculture matched hunting in importance in the Chickasaw economy. Their public farms and household gardens were situated near the villages on meadow and prairie plots and cleared tracts in the timber. They cleared forest patches by deadening trees. Workmen cut a ring through the tree bark with notched stone axes and burned the dead trees, saplings, and undergrowth.

Corn was the principal food crop.

Between the grain hills in the corn patches, Chickasaw farmers planted melons, pumpkins, sunflowers, beans, peas, and tobacco.

The women served green corn as roasting ears and processed ripe corn into porridge, grits, gruel, hominy, and meal for bread. They crushed the corn with a long-handled pestle in a mortar made from a chunk of hollowed hickory.

The Chickasaws were inventive in adapting the many items in nature to meet their clothing, aesthetic, household, ceremonial, and shelter needs. Their primitive crafts included fashioning local clays into pottery vessels for cooking and for storing food and water. They spun thread and yarn for textiles out of the inner bark of mulberry trees and animal fur.

They converted eagle, hawk, and swan feathers into elegant decorative pieces, notably the warrior’s mantle.

They colored textiles and finely tanned deerskins with an eye-catching yellow dye derived from sassafras roots and red, yellow, and black dyes from sumac.

Walnut hulls yielded a rich, dark dye used to color baskets and to mix with bear’s oil to anoint their hair.

The thick forests of the Chickasaws’ Tombigbee homeland yielded many products useful in their crafts.

Wood & Rivercane Crafts

Large logs were hollowed by fire, the charred insides scraped with clam shells or sharpened stones and fashioned as river boats.

From pines they took material for framing their houses and made pitch torches to illuminate the night.

Cane was another important plant in Chickasaw crafts. They wove cane baskets and mats, used woven cane for house siding, constructed cane fish traps, sieves, and fences, and made blowguns from hollowed cane pieces.

The hickory tree had a number of uses in the Chickasaw economy. Besides using the nuts for food, they split hickory logs into strong resilient withes and wove house walls and heavy containers.

Hickory was an important firewood, its bark was used to cover shelters, and craftsmen, respecting its strength, used it to make arrow shafts and bows.

White hickory ranked with black locust as the favorite bow wood.

Red hickory was used for making the pestle and mortar sets for grinding grain.

Chickasaw Town

A Chickasaw town consisted of several compounds or households. Each household contained a winter house, summer house, corn storage building, and menstrual hut.

Some Chickasaw towns were reported to have numbered over two hundred households. In addition, each village had a log palisade fort, council, ceremonial and ball grounds, and a ceremonial rotunda and council house for the conduct of religious exercises and local government.

The Chickasaw winter house was circular, about twenty-five feet in diameter, with an earthen floor excavated three feet below the surface. It was framed with pine logs and straight slender poles lashed with bark or thongs. Walls and roof were covered with woven hickory, oak, or cane withes. Chickasaw craftsmen covered the walls inside and out with a thick plaster made from clay and dry grass; thatched the roof with long dry grass; and whitewashed the walls inside and out with a substance made from decayed oyster shells, coarse chalk, or white clay.

The Chickasaw summer house was rectangular, with reported dimensions of twelve by twenty-two feet, partitioned into two rooms with porches attached. Walls of this seasonal structure were ventilated by small orifices in the woven mat wall coverings. The gabled roof was covered with bark or grass thatch. An early visitor to the Chickasaw towns wrote: “When they build the whole town, and frequently . . . neighboring towns, [they] assist one another. . . . In one day they build, daub with their tough mortar mixed with dry grass, and thoroughly finish a good commodious house.” He rated their homes “clean, neat, dwelling houses, whitewashed within and without.”

Home interiors included beds constructed around the walls on elevated frames of strong poles on short posts, and covered with mats and skins. Other household furnishings included small wooden seats or stools, wooden and ceramic dishes, wooden ladles and spoons, and bison-horn and shell scoops.

Each household had sanitation facilities essential for group living, including pits for disposal of garbage and other wastes.

Chickasaw Council House

Trade & Diplomacy / Gift Giving

Chickasaw economic life was enriched by commerce with other tribes. Chickasaws counted quantity by tens, the number of their fingers. Chickasaw traders exchanged deerskins, Indian slaves, and bear’s oil sealed in clay urns with merchants from other tribes for special materials required in the construction of war implements; for conch shells, used as ceremonial chalices; and for pearls and sheet copper for making ornaments.

Division of Labor 

There was a precise division of labor in the Chickasaw economic universe.

Women did most of the menial work, cultivating fields and fetching firewood and water, as well as the customary household tasks. Prizing the Indian slaves captured in their tribe’s many wars, Chickasaw women could be expected to urge their men to more fury, more raids, and more slaves, which changed their status from laborers to overseers of slave laborers. To prevent escape from Chickasaw bondage, they mutilated the slaves’ feet by cutting nerves or sinews just above the instep. Thus they could labor but could not flee.

Chickasaw warriors labored on the public farms and other civil works, constructed houses, and made tools and implements of war. They spent most of their time on the game trail and warpath or resting from their exertions and watching their women and slaves toil.

European traders condemned the warriors as slothful. They charged that a Chickasaw male bestirred himself only “when the devil is at his arse.”  But it was universally acknowledged that “they are the readiest, and quickest of all people in going to shed blood.”

Warfare and Blood Vengance

The most scrupulous and elaborate preparations were made for a strike against the enemy. The only occasions of total war, involving the entire tribe, were defensive operations to protect their homeland from invasion.

Offensive wars were conducted by small squads of warriors, generally formed from particular clans and seldom numbering over fifty men.

An essential preliminary to making war was achieving sanctification to assure support of the deities. To accomplish this, the warriors joining the campaign leader fasted for three days and nights, regularly purging themselves with draughts of button snakeroot drink.

During the fast, each warrior attended to his individual medicine bundle and inspected his bow, arrows, lance, warclub, and tomahawk.

The clan war leader was required to undergo a more arduous fast and purification process because he and his “beloved waiter” carried into battle the clan medicine bundle, the “holy ark” described as a small box of charms and sacred pieces in which resided the latent medicine power of the clan.

As the end of the fast approached, the warriors received their holy charge. A celebrated old chief or noted old warrior, with the war pipe in his hand . . . delivered a speech to the war-going company, in which he rehearsed his own exploits, not in the spirit of self-adulation but as an honest exhortation to them to emulate his deeds of heroic valor; then encouraged them to go in trusting confidence; to be great in manly courage and strong in heart; to be watchful, keen in sight, and fleet in foot; to be attentive in ear and unfailing in endurance; to be cunning as the fox, sleepless as the wolf, and agile as the panther.

Propitiatory dances by the war party members concluded the preparation. They departed with great ceremony, and they returned with great ceremony, brandishing the scalps of slain enemies and displaying their captives and plunder.

John R. Swanton, a distinguished scholar who intensively studied the lifeways of the tribes comprising the lower Mississippi ethnological province, concluded that the “material culture of all the southeastern tribes was . . . much alike.” His studies show that the same could be said for the region’s non-material culture. Thus the primitive Chickasaw lifeways were quite similar to those of their neighbors.

But the Chickasaws in their natural state did have one unique quality which loomed conspicuously and which distinguished them from neighboring tribes—they were unconquerable. Their preoccupation with the warpath generated a vigorous and galvanizing pride. Time and again Chickasaw warriors crushed native armies raised from the more populous tribes on their borders. And they inflicted such regular and humiliating defeats on invading French columns that French administrators in Louisiana abandoned their determined attempt to force the Chickasaws to serve that nation’s purpose. The holy charge to Chickasaw warriors, a continuum of pride transmitted by tribal elders through a chain of many generations, sustained the Chickasaw uniqueness.

Chickasaw Horses

13 hands (4.3 ft) 

Chickasaw Words