Nanih Waiya and the Land Beneath the Capital

Before there was a capital city, before there was a state, there was a mound. The Choctaw call it Nanih Waiya, which means leaning hill. It rises from the ground in what is now Winston County, about ninety miles northeast of Jackson, and the Choctaw have kept it sacred for as long as their oral tradition reaches back. One account holds that the Choctaw people themselves emerged from this place, rising from the earth through a great cave in the hillside. Another tells of a long migration from the far west, guided by a sacred pole that was carried upright each morning and planted at night; when the pole finally stood straight without leaning, the people had arrived. They arrived at Nanih Waiya. They had come home.

For centuries, the Choctaw nation governed the lands that would become central and southern Mississippi, a territory of rivers, pine forests, and rich bottomland. They farmed. They traded. They built political structures sophisticated enough that colonial powers made formal treaty relations with them for generations.

Then the Indian Removal Act was signed on May twenty-eighth, eighteen thirty. By September of that year, the United States was at the table. The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, signed September twenty-seventh, eighteen thirty, was the first removal treaty enacted under the new law. The Choctaw ceded roughly eleven million acres, nearly their entire Mississippi homeland, in exchange for land in what would become Oklahoma. Fifteen thousand Choctaw and roughly one thousand enslaved people made the journey to Indian Territory. Thousands died during the removal.

Some refused to go. They hid in the swamps and forests. They endured. Today the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, federally recognized in nineteen forty-five, governs more than thirty-five thousand acres across eight communities in central Mississippi, centered near Philadelphia. They are the only Choctaw community that never left. Nanih Waiya is now a state park. The mother mound is still there.

The city that was established on Louis LeFleur's old trading post at the Pearl River bluff in eighteen twenty-one, named for Andrew Jackson, was named for the man who signed the act that took the land. That irony is not subtle. It is structural.