Do I Need to Migrate to Link my Database to Django
SHORT ANSWER: Yes. 
MEDIUM ANSWER: Yes.  But you will have to figure out how Django would have created the table, and do it by hand.  That's not terribly hard.
Django may also spit out some warnings on startup about migrations being needed...but those are warnings, and if the app works, then you're OK.
LONG ANSWER:  Yes.  But for the sake of your sanity and sleep quality, get a completely separate development environment and test your backups.  (But you knew that already.)
I'm working on a project that I inherited, and I want to add a table to my database that is very similar to one that already exists. Basically, we have a table to log users for our website, and I want to create a second table to specifically log users that our site fails to do a task for.
Since I didn't write the site myself, and am pretty new to both SQL and Django, I'm a little paranoid about running a migration (we have a lot of really sensitive data that I'm paranoid about wiping).
Instead of having a django migration create the table itself, can I create the second table in MySQL, and the corresponding model in Django, and then have this model "recognize" the SQL table? without explicitly using a migration?