About Us

The origins of our people began long before Europeans even ventured into North America. We trace our ancestry to the era of Native cultural development immediately prior to the arrival of Europeans to the Deep South known as the Mississippian period.  The Mississippian culture began approximately 900 AD somewhere in the Mississippi River Valley and eventually spread to the Gulf Coast.  The Mississippian peoples developed traits that dramatically differentiated them from earlier Native cultures that preceded it. Our ancestors, the Pascagoulas, lived on the west bank of the Pascagoula River in an area lying approximately 10 miles from the coast.  The name Pascagoula means “bread people” in Choctaw.  Our Pascagoula ancestors were directly descended from Native people that participated in the Pensacola regional variation of the Mississippian culture along the Gulf Coast that lasted from 1100 to 1700.  The Pensacola culture designation given to the culture of our ancestors by archaeologists was broken up in two phases.  Our direct ancestors in the Pascagoula River Valley participated in the local Singing River phase (1250-1550) and the Bear Point (1550-1700) phase.  Graveline Mound, which sits at the mouth of Graveline Bayou, illustrates the importance of the Pascagoula Mississippian antecedents to the region because it is the largest and most significant mound on the coast between the Bottle Creek Mounds in the Mobile Delta and the Mississippi River.  Possibly another mound was located in Ocean Springs, but it was destroyed in the twentieth century for development.