Chitimacha Erotic

The Chitimacha are the only Native people in Louisiana still living on part of the land they held before Europeans arrived. Their reservation sits at Charenton on Bayou Teche, at the western edge of the Atchafalaya Basin, and that fact shapes how they describe themselves: not a tribe that was removed and resettled, but one that held on. Their historic range was far larger, covering the swamps and bayous of the lower delta from Bayou Lafourche west to Grand Lake. They were water people, moving by cypress dugout, living on fish, shellfish, alligator and waterfowl, and building on the shell ridges above the flood line. Their own name for themselves translates roughly as men altogether red.

Contact with the French turned violent early. In 1706 a Chitimacha party killed a missionary, and Governor Bienville answered with a twelve-year war in which allied tribes raided Chitimacha villages and captives were sold in New Orleans. Chitimacha made up a large share of the Indians enslaved in early Louisiana. Peace came in 1718, but disease and dispersal did the rest, and by the early twentieth century the community at Charenton had shrunk to a few dozen people about to lose their last acres at a sheriff's sale. Sarah Avery McIlhenny of the Tabasco family bought the land in 1916 and had it placed in federal trust, which made the Chitimacha the first federally recognized tribe in the state. More than a thousand enrolled members, a tribal school and a casino now stand on that base.

The Chitimacha language is an isolate, related to nothing else known. Its last fluent speaker died in 1940, but the linguist Morris Swadesh had recorded it in the 1930s, and from those recordings the tribe rebuilt a curriculum, working with Rosetta Stone in the 2000s to produce lessons now taught to children at the tribal school. The other survival is basketry. Weavers split river cane into fine strips, dye them black, red and yellow with walnut, dock and other plant dyes, and work them into double-walled baskets, an inner and outer basket made as one piece, tight enough to hold water. Pattern names come from the swamp: alligator entrails, blackbird's eye, muscadine rind. Clara Darden and later Ada Thomas carried the craft through the lean decades, and it remains the tribe's signature art. Most Chitimacha today are Catholic, a legacy of Acadian and Creole neighbors, and daily life looks like rural south Louisiana, with regalia and older customs kept for tribal gatherings and powwows.