It started with a thought… a fraction of a second… a golden idea!  It was prefaced with a need for more song leaders and the recognition that our treasured hymns and language was disappearing.  Our elder, um… I mean older, church members would tell us about how they missed hearing these hymns and that we needed to learn these hymns to help keep them alive.

Although many of us were raised around the Creek language none of us are fluent.  In fact, some of us knew enough to get us in trouble, while others did not know much at all.  Sooo… we embarked on a journey to learn the alphabet and its pronunciations.  We then took our new found knowledge and applied them to different categories of words.  We would learn a word for each category.   For example, one category was food… like that wasn’t a given!  We would learn words like… vce and then another would be animals… so we would learn fuswv.  We would just expand until we ended up with a general understanding and knowledge of at least some of the basics.  Once we felt that everyone had a general idea of how to pronounce these words we moved to Creek Hymns.  We started going over these hymns word by word and would take turns reading them and starting them, we even cross referenced the words using a dictionary and good old fashioned wisdom from our… older members.   We had a lot of good laughs but all in all we learned a lot.

So there we are sitting around one day and that golden idea started to materialize.  What if we created a CD so that those who are not able to hear these hymns could listen to them anytime they wanted… and while we are at it… why don’t we record them in a way that is clear and audible… heck… while we are at it why don’t we include the words for each song so that those who are out there and would like to learn them can listen and read and hopefully learn these hymns as we have??? 

Enter “POHOSATCE”!   We created this CD and started distributing them out to everyone who wanted one.  At first it wasn’t as apparent to us what was happening… but as time went on… we started hearing from people that would tell of how these songs brought back beautiful memories and how the CD has empowered them with songs they only heard when they returned to visit family and friends.  As far as we were concerned… Mission Accomplished!  Little did we know that this CD would take on a life of its own?

As time went on we started receiving invitations to attend various revivals and gospel singings, we were invited to OU’s Creek Song Fest.  We were invited to attend Mvskoke Creek Nation’s Immersion Camp.   All of these things started happening.  We hoped but we had no idea that our CD would be so meaningful.  We have remained humble and feel extremely fortunate that the Lord has blessed us in such a way.   To top it off we have recently been invited to the 37th Annual Poarch Creek Pow Wow and we had the privilege of having Miss Indian World visit our church.  Truly truly amazing!

We are still learning and hope to continue to learn and pass on what we learn to anyone who is interested.  We want to encourage you to get involved, no matter how small you think your idea is… get involved and help us and many others to preserve our culture and pass on the blessings to future generations.

We want to send a special thank you to those of you who support us and our church and hope that we can continue to build our relationships while working to preserve our culture.   Mvto!