Welcome to our Mississippi State Facts section, part of an educational project
designed to provide information about indigenous people in different U.S. states.
Follow the links to the right of our tribal map for more information about the language, culture and history
of each Mississippi tribe, or scroll below the map for Mississippi Indian activities including a wordsearch,
fact sheets for kids about each tribe, and worksheets teaching words from the different Native American languages
of Mississippi. Feel free to print any of these materials out for classroom use!
American Indians in Mississippi
Did you know the name "Mississippi" is an Algonkian Indian word? It comes from
words meaning "big river" in Ojibway and other northern Algonquian languages.
The Mississippi River begins in northern Minnesota, where the Ojibway people live, and that is where the name of the river came from.
There were never any Ojibway people in the state of Mississippi.
The original inhabitants of the area that is now Mississippi included:
Most Native Americans were forced to leave Mississippi during the Indian Removals of the 1800's. These tribes are not extinct, but except for
the descendants of Mississippi Indians who escaped from Removal, they do not live in Mississippi anymore. They were moved to Indian reservations in Oklahoma
and Texas instead. If you click on the link for each tribe, you can find more information about them.
There is one federally recognized Indian tribe in Mississippi today: