Featured Tribe - Hitchiti of Georgia

Hitchiti (Creek: ahítchita, 'to look upstream'). A Muskhogean tribe formerly residing chiefly in a town of the same name on the east bank of Chattahoochee river, 4 miles below Chiaha, and possessing a narrow strip of good land bordering on the river, in west Georgia.

When Hawkins visited them in 1799 they had spread out into two branch settlements, one, the Hitchitudshi, or Little Hitchiti, on both sides of Flint river below the junction of Kinchafoonee creek, which passes through a country named after it; the other, Tutalosi, on a branch of Kinchafoonee creek , 20 miles west of Hitchitudshi.

The tribe is not often mentioned in history, and appears for the first time in 1733, when two of its delegates, with the Lower Creek chiefs, met Gov. Oglethorpe at Savannah. The language appears to have extended beyond the limits of the tribe as here defined, as it was spoken not only in the towns on the Chattahoochee, as Chiaha, Chiahudshi, Hitchiti, Oconee, Sawokli, Sawokliudshi, and Apalachicola, and in those on Flint river, but by the Mikasuki, and, as traceable by the local names, over considerable portions of Georgia and Florida.

The Seminole are also said to have been a half Creek and half Hitchiti speaking people, although their language is now almost identical with Creek; and it is supposed that the Yamasi likewise spoke the Hitchiti language. This language, like the Creek, has an archaic form called "woman's talk," or female language.

The Hitchiti were absorbed into and became an integral part of the Creek Nation, though preserving to a large extent their own language and peculiar customs.