Akokisa Erotic

The Akokisa were an Atakapan-speaking people who lived around Galveston Bay and along the lower Trinity and San Jacinto rivers in southeast Texas from before European contact until the late 1700s. By then disease and colonial disruption had broken them apart, and whoever survived was most likely absorbed by neighboring peoples. What made them a people was their place as much as their language. They were the Atakapa of the Texas side, at the western end of a language community that reached east along the Gulf marshes into Louisiana. The Spanish wrote their name as Orcoquiza.

Their country mixed bay shore, salt marsh, bottomland forest and coastal prairie, and they used all of it. Bands moved between the water's edge, where fish, oysters and clams could be taken in quantity, and inland camps where deer and plant foods were easier to find. The shell middens they left along the bay are still among the best evidence of how they lived, because the written record is thin. Only scraps of their language survive, enough to tie it to Atakapa but not much more. Almost nothing about their religious life was ever written down.

The Akokisa enter European history in pieces. In 1719 a French officer, Simars de Bellisle, was stranded on the coast and spent about two years among them before he made his way out to French Louisiana. French traders followed him to the lower Trinity in later decades. Spain was alarmed by them, and in 1754 it arrested one trader, Joseph Blancpain. It then built a presidio, San Agustín de Ahumada, and a mission, Nuestra Señora de la Luz, near the mouth of the Trinity in the mid-1750s. Together they were known as El Orcoquisac. The outpost was underfunded, unhealthy and torn by feuds among its own officials. Once Spain took over Louisiana and the French threat was gone, it was abandoned in the early 1770s. Some Akokisa had also gone to the San Xavier missions farther inland, where they lived alongside the Bidai and Deadose.

After El Orcoquisac closed, the Akokisa show up in the records less and less. Epidemics hit the upper Texas coast hard, and by the early nineteenth century the name no longer described a separate community. What remains is archaeology, including the site of the old presidio near Wallisville, and the wider Atakapan heritage claimed by today's Atakapa-Ishak descendants in Louisiana and Texas.