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#58 --- Pages 105-107 of Albert S. Gatschet's book "A MIGRATION LEGEND OF THE CREEK INDIANS", contains the following account concerning the emergence of the Cha'hta ‘Indians’:

     "The Cha'hta trace their mythic origin from the ‘Stooping, Leaning or Winding Hill,’ Nani Waya, a mound of fifty feet altitude, situated in Winston county, Mississippi, on the headwaters of Pearl river. The top of this "birth-place" of the nation is level, and has a surface of about one-forth of an acre.

    "...The curious tale of the origin of the Cha'hta from Nani Waya has been often referred to by authors. B. Romans states that they showed the ‘hole in the ground,’ from which they came, between their nation and the Chicasa, and told the colonists that their neighbors were surprised at seeing a people ‘rise at once out of the earth.’ (p.71)

     "...Other legends conveyed the belief that the emerging from the sacred hill took place only four or five generations before (Missionary Herald, 1828, p.215.).  The emerging of the human beings from the top of a hill is an event not unheard of in American mythology, and should not be associated with a simultaneous creation of man. It refers to the coming up of primeval man from a lower world into a preexistent upper world, through some orifice. A graphic representation of this idea will be found in the Navajo creation myth, published in Amer. Antiquarian V, 207-224, from which extracts are given in this volume below. Five different worlds are there supposed to have existed, superposed to each other, and some of the orifices through which the ‘old people’ crawled up are visible at the present time."

 

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