Key Context

In the early 1600s, Europeans began trading with the Creek Nation and exchanged trade goods for deerskins. As the trade business flourished, the Creek Nation found itself with an influx of non-native people within its boundaries. With the clash of societal, spiritual, governmental, and cultural values between the Creek Nation and its non-native inhabitants came increasingly violent conflicts over control and power of the territory.

This ultimately resulted in millions of acres of Creek territory being ceded to the United States through multiple treaties, including the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814. However, one of the treaties rewarded those Creeks who actively fought alongside American soldiers by providing 640 acres in a land grant. Creeks on both sides—those who fought for the United States and those who resisted it—utilized treaty provisions that allowed some to remain, making every effort to hold onto their ancestral lands during Indian Removal.

In the years following Indian Removal, the few Creeks that remained on their ancestral lands in southern Alabama congregated in a cohesive settlement resembling tribal villages and maintained their traditional values. These Creek descendants became known as the Creek Nation East of the Mississippi, and then later, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians.

Beginning around the 1900s, Poarch Creek ancestors had to adapt to the changing economy and thus begin earning wages as farm laborers, cattle herders, sharecroppers, and workers in the timber or turpentine industries. Recognizing the hardships they were facing in a wage-based economy, they realized the only way to achieve a better life was through education. Though impoverished, they opened and supported schools within tribal communities for their children. Education became the spark that would lead to reform and self-determination among the Poarch Creek Indians.

After decades of diligent efforts, on August 11, 1984, the United States formally acknowledged that the Poarch Band of Creek Indians officially exists as a sovereign nation. This came four years after Poarch Creek Indians purchased Hickory Ground to regain some of their ancestral land. Almost all the pedigree charts of Poarch Creek citizens specifically tie into Hickory Ground through the well-documented Sehoy lineage, famously known through Alexander McGillivray, who was a prominent leader at Hickory Ground, also known historically as Little Tallassee.

To this day, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians remains the only federally recognized tribe in the State of Alabama.