Wahalak: A Choctaw Word on a Creek That Witnessed a Treaty

Wahalak is an unincorporated community in Kemper County, Mississippi, named for Wahalak Creek. The word is Choctaw, meaning something like to spread wide, a fitting name for a watercourse in this low-rolling country. The community was founded in eighteen thirty-seven, three miles east of its current location, and once had a bank and academies for both male and female students.

The land it sits on was Choctaw territory until the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in eighteen thirty, when the Choctaw Nation ceded the last of their Mississippi holdings to the United States. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, whose reservation spans several central Mississippi counties including Kemper, are their descendants. Wahalak remains, a small community, a Choctaw name, on land that was always theirs first.