Southeast Nations

The Southeastern nations — including the Cherokee, Creek (Muscogee), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, often called the 'Five Civilized Tribes' by European colonizers — built some of the most complex societies north of Mexico. The Mississippian mound-building tradition, centered at Cahokia and extending throughout the Southeast, represented a civilization of tens of thousands. The Cherokee developed their own syllabary, written by Sequoyah in the 1820s. The Trail of Tears (1830s) forcibly removed most Southeastern nations to Indian Territory (Oklahoma), but remnant communities persisted in the Southeast, and the removed nations rebuilt their societies in the West. Their mythologies feature rich traditions of animal tricksters, origin stories tied to specific landscapes, and cosmologies connecting the Upper World, This World, and the Under World.