Houma Erotic

The Houma are a bayou people by circumstance rather than by origin. When the French first wrote them down in the 1680s they were living well upriver, on the east bank of the Mississippi near the mouth of the Red River, in country that is now Mississippi and northeastern Louisiana. The name comes from the Western Muskogean word for red, and Iberville's journals record a red-painted boundary post marking the line between Houma and Bayogoula hunting grounds. That post is where Baton Rouge got its name. Within a century the Houma themselves had moved almost the whole length of the state, pushed down the Mississippi by war, disease and colonial settlement until they reached the marshes of Terrebonne and Lafourche, the last land anyone else wanted.

What they built there is the thing that defines them now. Houma families settled the ridges along the bayous, spoke French rather than English, married French, Acadian and other Native neighbors, and made a living from water: shrimping, oystering, crabbing, trapping muskrat and nutria, gathering and curing Spanish moss for mattress stuffing. Palmetto is still coiled into baskets and hats by a small number of makers using a half-hitch stitch that is theirs and not their neighbors'. The Muskogean language did not survive the move. A Louisiana French dialect took its place and held for two centuries, and English is only now finishing the job. Catholicism arrived with the French and stuck, though Methodist missions at Dulac and Grand Caillou drew congregations of their own, and the traiteur, the treater who prays over a burn or a sprain, still works in some communities alongside the parish priest.

Two things sit at the center of Houma life in the present. One is recognition. Louisiana recognized the United Houma Nation in 1972, and roughly 17,000 people are enrolled across six coastal parishes, but federal acknowledgment has been sought for decades without success, and several bands have separated to press their own claims. The other is the ground itself. Houma children were kept out of white public schools in Terrebonne and Lafourche until the 1960s, a segregation that cost a generation its schooling, and the land those same families held is now dissolving. Levees starve the marsh of sediment, oil company canals let salt water in, and hurricanes take what is left. Isle de Jean Charles has lost most of its land since the 1950s and became the subject of a federal resettlement program. Ida flattened much of the parish in 2021. People rebuilt anyway.