Nanih Waiya is the place the Choctaw trace their beginning to. The name is usually given as leaning or sloping mound, and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians call it the Mother Mound. In one origin account people emerged from the mound: first the Muscogee, then the Cherokee, then the Chickasaw, and last the Choctaw, who chose to stay near it. In another, two brothers, Chahta and Chikasa, followed a pole that leaned the way to travel until it stood upright here. The tribe calls it perhaps its most important landmark.
The earthwork is about 25 feet high and some 218 feet long and 140 feet wide. Archaeologists place its first building in the Middle Woodland period, with use continuing to about AD 700. Greenwood LeFlore called a Choctaw assembly here in 1828, but within two years the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek and federal pressure forced the nation to give up its land, the mound among it. Plows were leveling parts of it by 1854. The state bought the site in 1959 and opened it as a park in 1962, and in 2008 Nanih Waiya was returned to the tribe.
This is a sacred site, and the tribe says so. The mound is open to the public, with a request that visitors respect its meaning to the Choctaw. The cave, about a mile away, is closed and can be seen only with the tribe's approval, on tours it offers by request. Come for the shape of the place and the quiet.
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