Transcript: Kenneth H. York, Ph.D.
Swamp as a site of refuge and means of survial
- [York:]
- Many of our people who stayed, of course, they had homes, and from stories that we know, their homes—the settlers would come in and take over, so if a Choctaw family was out fishing, as an example, they would come back home, and a non-Indian family would be living in their homes. But what happened is a lot of our people went into the swamps of east central Mississippi, southern Mississippi, and the swamps that you see are filled with alligators and some of the animals, and many of the people today would consider maybe just the hunting area or fishing area, but our people went into those areas. They had dugout boats and rafts and other ways to get to an island within that swampy area, so they would find those places, and they would hid [sic] in those areas, and they would never come out until, say, one of the missionaries might help them, and the missionaries would hide them, so that people would not know that Choctaws were here.