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Nice Indians I got no aidDULAC, La. (AP) — In pioneer days i the Houmas Indians were peaceful and lt;meek and turned the other cheek. What 1 did it get them? Not even federal aid. j Jan Curry and Marsha Byers, ( emmissaries from a pacifist religious ■ group, hope to line up that federal aid j by disproving an early anthropologist's , decision that the Houmas were not really an Indian tribe. JFederal requirements regarding Indian aid is that the Bureau of Indian Affairs deals only with a tribe. 4The two women were assigned by the Mennonite Central Committee to write a history of the Houmas within two years. About 6,000 Houmas live in lt;Terrebonne Parish, mainly back around the bayous.Right now the Mennonite study ' concentrates on trying to prove the * Houmas were, too, a tribe and deserve both federal recognition and federal benefits. .Miss Curry said the Houmas wound up down in watery Terrebonne when they picked up and left northern Louisiana areas in the 1720s rather than | put up with the belligerant Tunica Indians.The way she sees it, the Houmas had to learn French in order to get along lt;with the Cajuns and gradually lost their own language and their own culture.Proving all this will be something else. The Houmas were not writers. 4 And Miss Curry finds no sign of any i tribal memory of their history before the immigration.The only recollection of those days, she said, is in the dim memories of Rosalie Courteaux, a Houmas leader. Miss Curry says Rosalie apparently was a relative of the chief who led the Houmas down to Terrebonne.That’s not the official view.Back in 1909, J. R. Swanton, an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institute, looked over the Houmas and decided they were “the remains of several other tribes,’’ with a mixture of black and white blood as well.Another anthropologist, Frank Speck, lived with the Houmas in the 1930s and agreed with Swanton's view.Miss Curry, Miss Byers and the Houmas Alliance, Inc., hope to prove otherwise. It hasn’t been easy. The Houmas spent their time fishing and enjoying life rather than keeping track of where they came from. They have no written history.So the two young woman are looking for Indians with long memories, interviewing, checking for possible French documents.Why?It is, said Miss Curry, “my Christian committment and a simple lifestyle. ’'
Newspaper Details
Daily Star
Hammond, Louisiana, US
Wed, Nov 30, 1977
Page 95
Full Page
Clipped by
Wikimedia F.
California, DZ 16 Dec 2024
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