Nanih Waiya (the sacred mother-mound)

Nanih Waiya is a Middle Woodland platform mound in Winston County, Mississippi, that the Choctaw revere as the mother of their people and the locus of their origin. Two principal traditions are recorded. In the emergence version, gathered by Halbert from Choctaw narrators at the close of the nineteenth century, the ancestors of the Southeastern peoples came up out of the earth at the mound or through a nearby cave, dried themselves on its slopes, and dispersed, while the Choctaw remained at Nanih Waiya as its own children. In the migration version the people journeyed eastward guided by a sacred leaning pole, the Iti Fabvssa, which finally stood upright at the mound, marking it as their appointed home. Choctaw women made pilgrimages to the mound, and it remains a living centre of Choctaw identity; control of the site was returned to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in 2008. It is included here as a named numinous power-place rather than an anthropomorphic god.

Domains

• origin and emergence
• sacred landscape and pilgrimage

Powers

• to bring forth the first Choctaw people from the earth

Epithets

• Nanih Waiya Ishki

Sources

• Halbert, Henry S. 'Nanih Waiya, the Sacred Mound of the Choctaws.' Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, vol. 2 (1899): 223-234.
• Swanton, John R. 'Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life of the Choctaw Indians.' Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 103. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1931.