Office of Environmental Management

The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians

The Choctaw are part of the Muskhogean linguistic family which includes Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, Apalachi, and other smaller groups. There are currently more than 9,100 enrolled members of the Mississippi Choctaw. Ancestral lands of the Mississippi Choctaw included present day Mississippi, Alabama, and the western Florida panhandle. The Mississippi Choctaw reservation contains some 35,000 acres of tribal lands located in ten different Mississippi counties.

There are seven officially recognized communities within the Tribe which include the Pearl River, Red Water, Bogue Chitto, Standing Pine, Tucker, Conehatta, and Bogue Homa communities.  The Pearl River community is the largest and is the site of the Mississippi Choctaw government headquarters. The Mississippi Choctaw government structure has been in place since 1943 when a Tribal constitution was ratified and a representative, democratic form of government was established with equal representation among all seven Mississippi Choctaw communities. The Tribe was federally recognized in 1945.

The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians have the largest unified Indian K-12 school system in the United States. Additional information on the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians is available on their website: http://www.choctaw.org/.