Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, July 29, 1997

Settlers found levee 2,000 years ago

by Jim Bradshaw

These people lived well. Swamp critters provided a steady and reliable food source, and these levee dwellers had no need to plow or plant. They made a good living just fishing, hunting, and collecting wild plants.

They may or may not have lived here all year long. Archaeologists say that pieces of bone from deer and rabbit the settlers ate suggest they were surely there during the fall. We don't know where they went during other seasons of the year (if they went anywhere), nor do we know where they went when they suddenly moved after several hundred years at the site.

The ever-changing Atchafalaya Basin (perhaps responding to a change in the Mississippi River's course) apparently changed in such a way that it now flooded the Bayou Amy village. The people moved away, into the mists of time.

The Atchafalaya Basin itself was the home of the Chitimacha Indians when Europeans first began to settle in Louisiana hundreds of years later.

The original Chitimacha tribal territory formed a triangle in the middle and lower Atchafalaya Basin. It was once bounded by three sacred cypress trees at Vermilion Bay, Lake Dauterive, and Lower Lafourche. However, few Native Americans were living in the Atchafalaya Basin when Europeans began to settle there. In 1706, some Chitimacha murdered the French missionary Jean Francois Buisson de St. Cosme, which led to a retaliatory raid by colonial French settlers. The resulting fighting nearly annihilated the Chitimachas.

Two neighboring tribes to the Chitimachas were the Opelousas and the Attakapas. There is a story that the fierce, war-mongering Attakapas dominated the area, preying upon their neighbors until the Chitimachas and the Opelousas finally got fed up. They banded together against their murderous neighbors and fought it out on a hill about 6 miles west of present-day St. Martinville. The Attakapas were virtually wiped out, according to the story.

All of this supposedly happened before the coming of Europeans to the area. But this is improbable. First, the Europeans named the region after the dominant tribe: the Attakapas. Second, the lands named for the Attakapas were barely explored by the French, partly because they were put off by the Attakapas' fierce reputation. Third, the Attakapas were still cohesive enough to seek trade ties with the French in New Orleans as late as 1733.

An Attakapas delegation went to New Orleans and promised that they would trade deer pelts, bear oil, and horses smuggled from Spanish Texas for French goods. But Gov. Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville did nothing about it, partly because he thought they were a backward people, and partly because he thought they were cannibals.

The Acadians who came to present-day St. Martin Parish apparently had little trouble with however many Attakapas neighbors there were. Most of the exiles had maintained good relations with the Micmac Indians in old Acadie, and Micmacs had allied themselves with the Acadian guerrilla fighters who remained behind after the expulsion.

Those Acadians who came to the Attakapas region were accustomed to dealing with Native Americans and had no fear of them. There are even old stories in a south Louisiana family of Afro-Indian descent that the Attakapas treated the Acadians with herbal remedies when smallpox and fever threatened to wipe out the new arrivals.

There is an early account, written perhaps in the late 1700s, of a place called Indian Bend, said to be about 25 miles above "where the meandering Teche flows into the Atchafalaya." Indian Bend got its name for a little cluster of cabins that were occupied by what was believed to be some of the last Native Americans in the area.

"Here for more than a century has dwelt the remnant of the once powerful tribe of Attakapas, once the terror of all other red men hereabouts, for it was told of them that they devoured the flesh of their fallen foe," says the old account.

Other, and more likely, accounts say these were Chitimachas. William Coleman, writing about the time of the arrival of the Acadians in 1765, said that the men were dark-complexioned with high cheekbones and eyes "keen and quick of movement."

"... their expression is one of self assurance, if not boldness," he wrote. "They are fully up to the average height of the white man, and their broad shoulders show that they come from big-framed people."

Coleman said the people at the Indian Bend community dressed like everyone else in the region, with the men in cottonade (a light, homespun cotton cloth) pants and calico shirts, and the women in calico skirts and brightly colored blouses. He said they spoke a Creole patois, but also that among themselves they used a language that sounded "like the twittering of birds."

He found their basket weaving to be remarkable, both in workmanship and color. The cane baskets were highly prized, decorated with stripes so small and delicate that they appeared to have been woven of the finest material.

"With their fingernails they strip off the hard cuticle from the ordinary wild cane, and the different dyes are applied before the weaving begins. These dyes are imperishable, and notwithstanding many temptations held out, they still refuse to divulge the secret of their manufacture," he wrote. "Such is their ingenuity of design that no two of these baskets are alike. Squares, triangles, curious heirographies and geometric patterns in white, red, chocolate, yellow and black, make each piece of work unique, and all so wrought that there is unity in the composition evincing a remarkable high order of taste. The larger baskets are double, the outside being covered with designs, while the interior is plain, and such is their fineness that they would hold water."

Coleman said that unlike most tribes, the Chitimacha recognized female equality, and the 25 or 30 Indians that were left at Indian Bond were then ruled by a queen since the chief had died.

By the time the 1766 census of the Attakapas District was taken, the Attakapas tribe had apparently disappeared, though the late Breaux Bridge historian Grover Rees speculates that "it is possible they had lost their identity as a tribe (but) had been moved to the four Indian villages mentionedin the census and called Bexmellon, La Encina, Kalkikin, and Chekinas, containing a total population of 160 and located in the southern part of the (Attakapas) district."

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