PEOPLES OF THE SOUTHEAST The Southeast region was the original home of many American Indian nations This map shows the areas where some of them lived before Europeans arrived in the region Monacan Monacan e e e e k k c c u u Y Y hi hi C C h h ero ero Catawba Catawba CreekCreek Seminole Seminole Timucua Timucua Chickasaw Chickasaw Tunica Tunica OfoOfo Natchez Natchez Choctaw Choctaw Biloxi Biloxi Chitimacha Chitimacha CULTURAL AREAS Plains Southeast Northeast Other Cultural area border International border State province border Calusa Calusa people may have come from the north Others may have come to the Southeast from Mexico and Cuba Peoples such as The Mississippians or Mound Builders built temples of huge mounds of earth as early as 800 CE The biggest Mound Builder city called Cahokia was built on the Mississippi River in present-day Illinois The city’s largest mound 66
The Nanih Waiya Mound in Mississippi is 140 feet 43 m wide covered 16 acres 6 5 hectares and stood 100 feet 31 meters high The remains of Mound Builder settlements have been found in Mississippi Louisiana Georgia Arkansas and Florida The Choctaw Natchez NATCH-is and other groups probably descended from the Mound Builders The Creek who call themselves Muskogee muss-KOH-ghee are a union of several peoples who also descended from the Mound Builders This union is sometimes called the Creek Confederacy Language Families Historically the Southeast Indians spoke languages from four language families Some groups spoke languages called isolates which are unlike any other in the world The Calusa cuh-LOO-suh Tequesta tuh-KESS tuh and Tunica TYOON-uh-cuh spoke isolate languages 7
LANGUAGE FAMILIES OF THE SOUTHEAST PEOPLES LANGUAGE FAMILY PEOPLES Muskogean Choctaw Chickasaw Creek and Seminole Iroquoian Cherokee Siouan Catawba Ofo Biloxi Yuchi Santee Monacan and others Caddoan Caddo Traditionally peoples that belonged to the same language family lived near one another The Creek spoke a Muskogean language People who spoke this language lived across the Southeast Their land was dotted with hickory trees which they used for firewood They used the nuts for oil and for making nut milk and soup The Choctaw Chickasaw and Natchez settled in present-day Mississippi and Louisiana The Cherokee CHAIR-uh-key were the only Iroquoian speaking people of the Southeast They settled about two thousand years ago in the Appalachian Mountains of present-day Tennessee North Carolina South Carolina and Georgia Peoples who spoke Siouan languages included the Catawba keh-TAW-beh Biloxi buh-LOX-ee Yuchi YOO-chee Monacan MON-uh-kin Ofo oh-foh and Santee san-TEE The Catawba settled along the river valleys in modern-day North and 88
South Carolina They gathered herbs berries and nuts They ate fish from the rivers and deer and elk from the forests The only Southeast members of the Caddoan language family were the Caddo CAD-oh The Caddo settled along rivers in present-day Louisiana Texas and Arkansas They traveled by river in dugout canoes carved from the cypress trees on their land European Arrival In the mid-sixteenth century Europeans began to arrive in the region The lives of the Southeast Indians changed forever Europeans wanted to live on land that was sacred to the Southeast Indians The Europeans also brought diseases the Southeast Indians could not fight In the 1830s the US government forced most Southeast Indians to move west But Southeast peoples remain tied to their homelands their languages and the traditions that were shaped by the land 9
