The Muscogee, also known as the Muskogee, Muscogee Creek, Creek, Mvskokvlke, or the Muscogee Creek Confederacy (pronounced [məskógəlgi]) in the Muscogee language, are a group of related indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands. Their original homelands are in what now comprises southern Tennessee, all of Alabama, western Georgia and part of northern Florida.
Like the Cherokee in northeastern Alabama, most of the Muscogee people were forcibly removed by the federal government from their original lands in the 1830s during the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Some Muscogee fled European encroachment in 1797 and 1804 to establish two small tribal territories in Louisiana and Texas, continued today by their descendants. Another small branch of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy remained in Alabama, and their descendants formed the federally recognized Poarch Band of Creek Indians.
Numerous Muscogee people moved into Florida between roughly 1767 and 1821, trying to evade European encroachment, and these people intermarried with local tribes to become the Seminole people. By a process of ethnogenesis, they emerged as a group with a separate identity from other parts of the Creek Confederacy. Muscogee people in these waves of migration into Florida were also fleeing armed conflict in their former home territories. After warfare waged against them in Florida by the federal government, the great majority of the Seminole were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma in the late 1830s, where their descendants are a federally recognized tribe. Ancestors of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida moved south into the Everglades, resisting removal. These two tribes gained federal recognition in the twentieth century and remain in Florida.