ATAKAPA-ISHAK INDIANS IN S. W. LOUISIANA
1. Lake Charles (A. The Lake; B. Prien Lake; C. The Dummyline Neighborhood)
A. The Atakapa-Ishak Indians lived in six bands, or groups, across Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas, from Galveston and Trinity Bays in Texas to Vermilion Bay in Louisiana on the Gulf's coast, and up away from the coast in both States, as far up as above Alexandria in Louisiana and about Jasper in Texas. These Indians' ancestors were inhabitants of that large area in the Gulf's northwestern crescent for thousands of years before their historical era began with the intrusion by Europeans, first Spanish, then French. The name Atakapa is a Choctaw Indian slur shunned by the native people in
S. W. Louisiana but widely propagated by the European intruders, especially the French, for its demoralizing effect on the native people. The name Ishak is the native people's own name for themselves. The lake lying alongside I-10 is called Lake Charles today. The Indians called it Tul Teu ("End Lake"). They lived all around Tul Teu on its curving shoreline.
B. Prien Lake can be reached off I-210, Lake Street exit. The Atakapa-Ishak Indians called it Yukiti Tul ("Indian Lake"). In 1885 the Smithsonian recorded the Atakapa Language at a village site that sat on Yukiti Tul. A small park at the lake's edge is convenient for the tourist. It has been reported that in 1924 the last Indian dwellers around Yukiti Tul were chased off their ancestral lake by Lake Charles' powers. A third lake is Calcasieu Lake. It lies about 12 miles south of Yukiti Tul on the Calcasieu River's southward flow. It is prominent in the lives of the Atakapa-Ishak Indians in the Lake Charles City Area. The Indians' name for it was Tul Hets. That means "Big Lake." Descendants of the Atakapa-Ishaks living in Lake Charles still tend to call that lake "Big Lake" instead of Calcasieu Lake. Diggings show that Tul Hets' shore line was heavily inhabited by the Atakapa Ishak Indians.
C. The Dummyline neighborhood, which is drive-by viewing only, can be reached off both I-10 and I-210 at the Enterprise Boulevard exits. From I-10 exit, go south on Enterprise Boulevard for less than a mile to Mill Street. At I-210 exit, go north on Enterprise Boulevard for about 4 miles to Mill Street. Mill Street is the east-west axis of The Dummyline ghetto's grid of streets. That grid of dirt streets was scraped out of the empty prairie which lay a couple of miles east of the fledgling Lake Charles City snuggling in at Tul Teu's west shoreline. The grid of dirt streets became home to Atakapa-Ishak Indians of the Calcasieu River Band, Indians chased away from their lakeshore dwelling sites. By the turn of the 1900's their numbers were growing with the arrival of more Atakapa-Ishak Indians from their other five Bands, especially from the large, prairie-dwelling Opelousas Band. These Indians came to Lake Charles City for jobs in the growing, young town. A tour of Mill Street's eastward stretch will bring the tourist to a railroad crossing. That railroad is a switching track called the Dummyline. The neighborhood took its name from the rail line. In time, The Dummyline became the home also of descendants of Africans. All the inhabitants of that neighborhood were termed "coloreds" by the city's powers, even on legal documents! "Coloreds" afterwards then "legally" were equated with "Negro", then with "Black", and now with "African American".....a very sure way toward blurring the racial lines that really existed between Native Americans and descendants of Africans! Observant tourists in The Dummyline will notice the wide range of complexions among the so-called "Creoles" there. While Southwest Louisiana long has considered the "Creoles" descendants of Africans because some of them show a dark brown complexion, that consideration really runs against the correct racial identity of the Atakapa-Ishak Indians. These Indians prominently show a wide range of complexions, as do all the North American Indian Tribes! That range of complexions can show even among siblings! It is not necessarily the result of interracial mixing between Indians and descendants of Africans!!! Geneticists and specialists in Indian studies now tell us Indians wide range of complexions is the result of the intertribal mixing that went on through the length and breath of the North American continent through thousands of years before Europeans intruded here!!!
The complexions of Indians genetically range from dark brown to ivory. (Source: Leacock and Lurie, The North American Indians in Historical Perspective). Glimpses of the people and of life in The Dummyline can be seen in two works by Lake Charles' Atakapa-Ishak author, Hubert Daniel Singleton: By and By on the Atakapa Prairie and Atakapa Tamale Man.
2. Lacassine Prairie
From Lake Charles go I-10 east 15 miles to LA Highway 99. Exit and park where safe on the shoulder of that rural road. The open land lying all around is the Lacassine Prairie, an ancient hunting ground for the old Atakapa-Ishaks, probably going back even into prehistorical times. The area is grazing and resting grounds for flocks of migratory wild ducks and geese. Long before descendants of European intruders into Southwest Louisiana, this prairie land was recognized as the area's Indians hunting grounds. Because the area lies midway between the Calcasieu River Band of Atakapa-Ishak Indians and the Mermentau River Band both tribes probably hunted here. The Indians' name for the area was Lok o'shin. That means "at the prairie's edge". The French phoneticized that Indian name to Lacassine. The name is topographically correct, for the area lies where the pine woodlands of Calcasieu Parish to the west meet the flat, relatively treeless prairielands of Jeff Davis Parish. The ancient Indians would have perfected the use of Blinds to find themselves within an arrow's range of the birds. An abundance of exquisitely made bird points are generally found wherever their artifacts are unearthed. In historical times the Indians quickly adopted the Europeans' firearms for hunting. They called a shotgun pem kat tsik. That means "a shooter with two mouths".
3. Mermentau Town and River
From the Lacassine Prairie drive east on I-10 about 8 miles and exit at LA Highway 26 to the south. Join U. S. Highway 90 there and continue east for about another 8 miles to the town and river called Mermentau. You are now at the heart of the ancient dwelling site of the Mermentau Band of Atakapa-Ishak Indians. Their village sites lay all up the Mermentau River to the north and down its flow to the south where it forms Lake Arthur before flowing farther south to the Gulf. The name Mermentau has a very interesting etymology. It is the now unrecognizable name of the Historical Atakapa-Ishak chief Inmantau. The name's change to Mermentau is due to five alterations in the form of the chief's original name. The etymology of the name is too lengthy to present here, but it is carefully detailed in Hubert Daniel Singleton's work, The Indians Who Gave Us Zydeco.
4. Crowley
From Mermentau continue eastward on U. S. Highway 90 to the city of Crowley, about 11 miles. Crowley calls itself the Rice Capital City. It lies in Southwest Louisiana's widespread rice growing area. The city has long seen many Atakapa-Ishak Indians of the Mermentau River Band among its citizens, but like the Atakapa-Ishak Indians of the Calcasieu River Band back at Lake Charles, they are not recognized as Indians by the European descended population (Cajuns to a large percentage). Cajuns, especially, by some particular mindset of their own, considered these Indians' wide range of complexions a sign of an obnoxious (to Cajuns) racial admixture with descendants of Africans. Cajuns allowed themselves no clue that the wide range of complexions in the Atakapa-Ishak Indians, as in all the Indians of North America, is due to the native peoples' prehistorical, millenia-long intertribal mixing. Crowley, too, long has forced its Atakapa-Ishak Indians into a ghetto like The Dummyline in Lake Charles where they lived side by side with descendants of Africans. The tourist can find that ghetto in Crowley by driving to the vicinity of St. Theresa Catholic Church for but a drive-by view of the church and its neighborhood. A Catholic church is found in the ghetto of many of the sizeable towns in Southwest Louisiana for Atakapa-Ishak Indians have been Catholics since the late 1700's.
5. Eunice
From Crowley drive LA Highway 13 northward to Eunice, about 19 miles. Halfway to Eunice the highway leaves the territory of the Indians' Mermantau Band and enters that of the Opelousas Band. Approaching Eunice the highway cuts through the flat terrain of the Faquetaic Prairie. That now almost forgotten stretch of prairie was so named by the Indians of the Mermantau Band. It lay on the route of their ancient foot trail which branched northward from their villages on the lower Mermentau and Nezpique Bayou to intercept the east-west tail that led to the Atakapas' trading post at Opelousas. Faquetaic is one of the Atakapa-Ishak Indians' terms for "trail". Its literal meaning is "footsteps straight". Eunice lies near the heart of the Atakapa-Ishak Indians' homeland. Many of the people in and from the Eunice area remain aware of their Indian identity and their roots in Southwest Louisiana. The Atakapa-Ishak Indians' gift to the nation, zydeco, is a lively dance that has come down from the Indians' prehistorical era. It is their good-time dance. Some of its most ardent promoters live in the Eunice area today. They show the physical features of the Atakapa-Ishak Indians including a wide range of complexions. Eunice, too, has a ghetto where descendants of the area's Indians and descendants of Africans long were forced by law to live together. The Catholic Church that serves the ghetto's Catholics at Eunice is St. Mathilda Church.
6. Mamou and Pin Clair
From Eunice continue north on LA Highway 13. The town of Mamou is 10 miles away. It is an old habitation area of the Atakapa-Ishak Indians' Opelousas Band. The Atakapa name Mamou means "where to come to", or, approximately, "destination". To Mamou was relocated the little Catholic Church that once served the Atakapa-Ishak Indians at the settlement of Pin Clair. To reach Pin Clair's site, continue north on LA Highway 13 to its junction with LA Highway 10, about 6 miles north of Mamou. Turn left (west) on LA Highway 10. Pin Clair's now empty settlement site lies about 3 miles west on LA Highway 10, about where pine trees begin to line the highway's north side. The settlement's inhabitants have gone their separate ways now, but back in the 1920's one of the Mother Katherine Drexel's rural schools stood there. A short distance west, on the highway's south side, Pin Clair Cemetery lies partly hidden by untrimmed shrubbery. Katherine Drexel was the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania heiress to a fortune who founded a religious order for serving Indians and descendants of Africans. When the foundress entered Southwest Louisiana to open small schools at Pin Clair and elsewhere she was not cognizant enough to recognize that the people there, of a wide range of complexions, were Indians, not descendants of Africans. Or if she did recognize their true race, she and her nuns never acknowledged the Indians among their charges as Indians. To some extent, then, Mother Katherine's and her nuns' indifference in the matter contributed to the confusion so many Atakapa-Ishak Indians' descendants today suffer about their true racial identity.
7. Oakdale
From the Pin Clair area continue west on LA Highway 10. The Atakapa-Ishak Indians' old settlement called Beaver and its Delafosse Cemetery (watch for small sign north side of the highway) are about 10 miles away. Six miles west beyond Beaver is the town of Oakdale. All this area was more heavily inhabited than it is today by the Atakapa-Ishak Indians of the Opelousas Band. They were called 'Blackfoot Indians', a localized name that had nothing to do with the Blackfeet Indians of the U.S. Rocky Mountains. The name 'Blackfoot' came from the Opelousas Band's custom of painting their lower legs black for mournful ceremonies. That same custom existed among the Atakapa-Ishak Indians elsewhere in Southwest Louisiana/Southeast Texas, but it seems that no other Band besides the Opelousas Band was called "Blackfoot" for it.
8. Grant
From Oakdale continue west on LA Highway 10 for about 19 miles to the intersection with LA Highway 112. Go south on Highway 112 for about 12 miles to the settlement of Grant. At Grant stands the last Indian mound in the Atakapa-Ishak homeland.
9. DeRidder
From Grant drive LA Highway 112 about 20 miles westward to the city of DeRidder. Visit the private museum of Velmer Smith. View her collection of Atakapa-Ishak Indians' arrowheads. These Indians did not import their arrowheads. They made their own from blanks or chunks of hard rock (preferably flint from North Central Texas). Notice the careful craftmanship. A commendation to the Atakapa-Ishak Indians was executed in form of a roadside marker of acknowledgement to the Indians for their ancient system of foot trails connecting their six Bands through Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas. The foot trails crossed numerous streams in the Indians' old homeland. Indications are that some sections of their foot trails became the precursor route for stretches of modern era highways. The roadside marker was erected at the Junction, intersection of US Highway 190 and LA Highway 111, between DeRidder and Merryville.
10. Merryville
From the Junction, site of the historical marker, continue on US Highway 190 to Merryville. Merryville sits squarely in territory shared by both the Calcasieu River Band of the Atakapa-Ishak Indians and the Indians' Neches-Sabine Rivers Bands.
11. In "No Man's Land"
From Merryville, drive LA Highway 110 southeast about 15 miles to its junction with LA Highway 27 at the settlement of Singer. Turn right (south onto Highway 27 and drive about 37 miles to the junction with I-10 at Sulphur, Louisiana. On the drive down Highway 27, stop at a safe spot and gaze around. You are in the famous (or infamous) "no man's land" that once lay disputed between Louisiana and Texas. For a long time neither State could lay claim to a strip of land paralleling the Sabine River's east bank, beginning at the river's mouth and extending up to a point about one hundred miles north of Merryville. The discrepancy over rightful claim traced back to conflicting lines recognized by the earlier European claimants, Spain and France. One nation had held the Sabine River to be the line of demarcation. The other nation had held that the mouth of the Rio Hondo (Calcasieu River, about 25 miles east of the Sabine) to be the line of demarcation. While the dispute over the strip lingered on over the decades, no governing authority could establish controlling laws there, and with the consequent lawlessness the strip became a "no man's land" for safety. The Atakapa-Ishak Indians, of course, were the ultimate victims in the dispute. What descendants of Europeans totally disregarded in the entire dispute was that these Indians were the original, undisputed owners of the land. When the United States finally arranged a settlement between Louisiana and Texas over boundary claims, "no man's land" was advertised for sale to all comers as far away as Europe. No Atakapa-Ishak was consulted about the matter; although several hundred had been counted at Lake Charles at the time!
Provided by: Hugh Singleton, Atakapa descendant