Nanih Waiya
The Choctaw believe that this mound of earth in Winston county Mississippi is where the first Choctaw emerged crime the earth. My father took me there as a child and told me this is where life began and I returned many times to wander this site in my search for the truth.
The settlers lived side by side with Native tribes. The main tribes on the western edge of Spanish West Florida were The Choctaw, The Creek, The Natchez, The Pascagoula, The Mobilia, The Acolapissa, and The Biloxi. The settlers were educated by the remants of the ancient civilization they stumbled into and many of their customs and traditions persist to this day. The natives had become accustomed to this environment many generations ago and they were able to relay some of their culture and skills down to the settlers who would listen.
The natives had engaged in games of chance and skill for many generations, it was endemic to their way of life. These games demonstrated either physical ability or mental acuity, and sometimes a combination of both. An example of this is The Plum Stone Game, a game of intuition and chance involving dexterity and skill. Games such as this and The Moccasin game played an important role in their culture by promoting socialization through competion, a process by which young people earn critical social skills they'll use well into adulthood, like taking turns, empathy, and tenacity.
The newcomers had no choice but to adapt to this new way of life. Many of the settlers rose to the challenge and they adapted and flourished in the warm tropical environment, thousands of miles from the comforts of Europe. Control of the area changed hands many times over the following years as settlers from different European countries arrived but the Italian families who came in the mid 1800's dug in deep and by the 1900's they were entrenched in all aspects of business. The settlers displaced the natives but, in many ways retained their ways of life. Games of chance flourished throughought the southeast into the 2000's with many Vegas style casinos lining the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
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