The Poarch Band of Creek Indians (/pɔːrtʃ/ PORTCH;[3]) are a federally recognized tribe of Native Americans with reservation lands in lower Alabama.

Intermarriage was a strategy of assimilation that was common across the history of southeastern Indigenous nations in the U.S. Predominant lineages and surnames in the group include the names Weatherford, McGillivray, Durant, McGhee, Moniac, Cornell, Gibson, Colbert, Woods, and Rolin.

These elements included geopolitical shifts, a growing reliance on European trade and economy, inner rifts within the Creek Nation, and escalating colonial presence of British, Spanish, and U.S. forces.

Among the Poarch ancestors, the Weatherford and Woods lineages were active participants in the Red Stick rebellion and allied with the traditionalists.

However, several ancestors of Poarch members marched to Oklahoma, including Sam Moniac (Totkvs-Harjo) who was buried at Pass Christian in 1837.

[5] The Poarch Band experienced great poverty and struggled to make ends meet throughout the nineteenth century.

Along with traditional Creek foods like sofke and corn mush, they supplemented their diet with game and fish largely taken from neighboring public lands.

Jim Crow segregation and other forms of overt racism limited opportunities for economic advancement for group members.

Because they had stayed behind and not removed with the main body of the Creek Nation after the 1830s, members of the Poarch Band received no federal aid or recognition of their indigenous status at the tribal level.

These relations have enabled many among them to retain their connection to language and traditions like busk, stompdance, and chinaberry beading.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, local governments established segregated schools for Creek Indian children in southwest Alabama.

Finding that the Poarch Band was clearly a surviving Creek enclave, the Bureau agent recommended educational aid for the community.

[8] Through the lands claims litigation, Bufford Rollins and Eddie Tullis emerged as leaders of the Poarch Creek community.

Along with Calvin McGhee, they took part in major events that were happening due to increasing visibility of Indigenous people, nations, and literary and cultural aesthetics in the 1960s and early 1970s throughout the U.S. Calvin McGhee attended the landmark Chicago Indian Conference of 1961, an event that galvanized movements toward Indigenous rights and sovereignty.

McGhee was among the delegation that presented the Conference's "Declaration of Indian Purpose" to President John F. Kennedy at the White House in 1961.

Despite Mvskoke people not dancing powwow historically, Poarch members took advantage of the limited knowledge of Native American history in the United States to gain more funds and visibility for their Nation.

Afterward, the Band was able to have a 229 acre tract taken into trust as a federal Indian Reservation and to re-establish their own government under a written constitution.

[25] In late 2019, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians presented the state of Alabama with a grand bargain that would afford the tribe exclusive rights on casino gambling in exchange for $1 billion.