#1 - Introduction

In this first episode, I give a brief history of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana and explain how I fit into its story. I describe some of the cultural preservation work/activism I have done up to this point, as well as what this podcast will be about and why I am making it.

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Socials
Twitter: @BayouIndian
Email: BayouIndianRadio@gmail.com

Transcript

My name is Eli Langley, and you are listening to Bayou Indian Radio. Bayou Indian Radio is a brand-new podcast, in which I will be discussing issues big and small in Indian Country, not always by myself. For my uninitiated listeners, especially those outside the United States, or even the many Americans who haven’t had much exposure to the indigenous population of this country, the term “Indian Country” refers to the sum of all Native American tribes in the United States. The term is used especially when describing tribal lands, tribal governments, and Indians themselves. Some of the most common topics discussed in Indian country are economic ventures (such as the infamous ‘Indian casino’), intertribal relations, and relations between tribes and the federal government. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You must be wondering: who is this guy? Can I trust him? Why is he talking about Indians? Should he be saying the word “Indian” so liberally? What is a “Bayou Indian?” All valid questions.  

Let me begin by telling you the story of my people. I am a member of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana. We call ourselves “Kowassaati” in our own language, which, incidentally, is also the name of the language itself: Koasati. We first met European explorers in the 1500s, but by our own estimation, we were here long before that. Our oral history dates our existence before modern history, and is being verified by recent archaeological evidence such as cave paintings millennia old in regions we previously inhabited featuring our famous alligator gar symbol.  

The Koasati language itself is ancient, focused primarily on action rather than categorization – a supremely practical tongue that has survived relatively unchanged for hundreds of years. Written down by the tribe for the first time ever in the 21st century, it had before been a purely oral tradition. The fact that this language survived with roughly 300 speakers when so many others perished in the post-Columbian era is a blessing we thank God for daily. The effort to begin categorizing historical and cultural material began a foray into the deep history of our people, carried out with the stark reality in mind that our tribe was dwindling in numbers.  

Once tens of thousands of members strong in the pre-Columbian southeastern United States (primarily the Tennessee River valley region), we constructed enormous mound structures which provided practical, religious, and societal utility. Archaeological material collected in the last half-century has directly connected us with those ancient mound building societies, but we knew that long before the record showed it. We are one of the Muskogean tribes of the South East, a group that includes others such as Muscogee Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Hitchiti-Mikasuki, Apalachee and the tribe most closely related to mine -- Alibamu (Alabama in English). All our languages, cultures, and histories are connected. We did business with these tribes. We formed alliances, such as the Creek Confederacy, a powerful contingent of tribes in the South East that rivaled the Iroquois Confederacy in population and overall significance. 

The first European to make a record of contact with the Koasati people was Hernando DeSoto. He met a group of Coushattas in 1540 on the Tennessee River. In the following centuries, the Koasati relocated regularly to avoid European encroachment. By the 18th century, the tribe had settled near the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers in Alabama and was at that time a major player in Creek politics. Multilingual Koasati chiefs, such as Alexander McGillivray and Stimafuchkee (or “Good Humored One”), brokered deals between the Creeks and the Europeans, who, by this time, were far too close for comfort. It is worth noting that even as Coushatta influence in the Creek Confederacy grew, our tribe retained its unique identity, culture, and language. 

In 1797, the Coushatta chief Red Shoes led around 400 Coushattas to Louisiana (then controlled by the Spanish), and seven years later 450 more Coushattas joined them. For much of the rest of the 19th century, this group of Coushattas moved repeatedly, establishing villages in the Neutral Territory between Louisiana and Texas, until eventually in the 1880s, roughly 300 Coushattas used Homestead Laws to settle at Bayou Blue near Elton, Louisiana, my hometown. This group would come to be known as the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, but not without resistance. At the advent of the 20th century, Coushatta tribal leaders, including my great-grandfather Jackson Langley who was tribal chief in the early 1900s, began to lobby the United States federal government for assistance. Their efforts paid off in 1935 when the federal government granted tuition funding to Coushatta youth, and in 1945 when the government gave Coushatta tribal members contract medical care.  But in 1953, this amicable relationship with the federal government began to unravel when the United States Congress passed the Termination Act. No Tribe was safe from being considered for Termination, and the Coushattas, along with other Louisiana tribes, were listed as “good candidates” to be terminated, or stripped of federal recognition. Shortly thereafter the federal government stopped all services to our Tribe – despite having absolutely no legislative approval to do so. 

Shortly thereafter, in 1965, Coushatta community members came together to form Coushatta Indians of Allen Parish, Inc. and created a trading post to sell traditional Coushatta pine needle and cane baskets. In 1970, Coushatta tribal leaders such as Ernest Sickey began to petition the Indian Health Service (IHS) to provide healthcare once again for tribal members – these efforts came to fruition in 1972, the same year that the Louisiana Legislature granted the Coushattas state-level recognition. Then, the following year in June 1973, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana was formally granted federal re-recognition by Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton, who served under President Richard Nixon. 

Federal recognition opened many more avenues for the tribe to pursue economic self-sufficiency. Chief among these pursuits is the Coushatta Casino Resort, a gaming and hospitality enterprise that opened in 1995 in Kinder, LA, which is now among the largest private employers in the state of Louisiana. Some of the smaller enterprises include health, educational, social, and cultural programs that are influential in the Southwest Louisiana region. The modern-day Coushatta Tribe owns over 5,000 acres of land in Allen Parish and more than 1,000 acres in nearby parishes. The tribe utilizes this land for housing, crawfish and rice farming, the development of non-gaming business ventures, and buildings for tribal government, such as fire, police, and health departments. Hundreds of years of uncertainty and migration culminated in self-sufficiency for the Coushatta Tribe entering the 21st century, but with the advent of gaming revenue, many tribal members feared that our language and culture would diminish in importance over time. 

And so, I connect to Indian Country by way of this tribe, which has found a way to survive at every pivotal turn in the last few hundred years. Our legacy is one of resourcefulness, diplomacy, and cooperation with our neighbors. For my people, the poverty of the 20th-century has given way to relative prosperity of the 21st. But that newfound security has its drawbacks. With the tribe opening up more to the world in the last 50 years, tribal members have increasingly married non-tribal members, which, while not inherently a negative thing, has made it more difficult for the Coushatta people to maintain traditional folkways, such as the Koasati language, rabbit tales (or “ chokfathihilka” in Koasati) which are traditional fables and the primary vehicle of Coushatta storytelling, and material cultural practices such as basket weaving and pow-wow or stomp dancing. I do not say any of this with malice or judgment, and am well-positioned to comment on this shift because my birth is one in line with this very trend. My mother is an Ashkenazi Jewish woman from Boston, a first-generation American, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. As a result of the common language between my parents being English, I did not speak Koasati as my first language growing up. I understood simple words when I was younger, but could not speak or really understand the language until I took an immersion class at 17.  

That immersion class was the result of nearly a decade of work in the Coushatta Heritage Department, a tribal department headed by my parents Bertney and Linda Langley, who also spearheaded the Koasati Heritage Project which began in 2007. We spent hundreds of hours recording native speakers of Koasati, transcribing stories, archiving old photographs and building a database of linguistic material to ensure that this knowledge would not fade away forever. At the time, the youngest native speaker of Koasati was in his 30s, which meant that no native speaker had been produced in decades. Also, to our knowledge, no one had learned Koasati as a second language during that period, either. 

So after compiling a dictionary, phrase book, teaching grammar, and numerous other materials, myself and a few other Coushatta young adults enrolled in an immersion class for our tribal language. We spent hours in full immersion every week day for several weeks. By the end of that summer, I had spent enough time in class as well as speaking with elders in their homes to be essentially conversational. This was the summer of 2016, between the end of my senior year of high school and freshman year of college at Harvard. 

I spent the next 2-and-a-half years petitioning Harvard to let me use my knowledge of Koasati for my ‘foreign language credit,’ a requirement for undergraduates to graduate. This had never been done before for a Native American language. It had been done for Native Hawaiian, but a language like mine with a smaller number of speakers posed unique challenges because Harvard did not have a professor fluent in Koasati who could administer an examination for me, nor are there professors of Koasati anywhere. The wording of the language requirement for Harvard College called for a “professor from Harvard or a comparable university” to administer a language exam “in written and oral form,” then for that professor to give Harvard a recommendation on whether to award the student language credit for the exam.  

 After a prolonged period of back and forth with administration members, the combined efforts of myself, proponents of American Sign Language, and classics lovers who petitioned for the acceptance of Ancient Greek, as well as an outcry from academics at other institutions, the College changed its strict language requirement to one more flexible. Soon after, I took an exam in which I spoke with tribal elder Lorenda Poncho in Koasati for the better part of an hour, and then took a written exam also completely in Koasati, both of which I passed. Harvard accepted the word of Dr. Jack Martin, of William and Mary, a pre-eminent linguistic scholar of Muskogean languages who worked tirelessly for decades to document Koasati and other southeastern languages, and who agreed to monitor my exam and collaborate with Mrs. Poncho to determine my grade. This combined effort meant that when I finished my degree in 2021, I was the first Harvard undergraduate to graduate with a diploma stating that I had received “language competency” credit for an indigenous American tribal language.  

In the time between the immersion class and gaining recognition for Koasati, I practiced ceaselessly, speaking to whoever would talk to me – myself included – memorizing conjugations, vocabulary, studying the teaching grammar and phrasebook until I had reached a point of near bilingualism. Now I can have full conversations with native speakers without pausing to translate from English mentally, though I still make some occasional mistakes with things like tense and word choice, it would be fair to call me a Koasati speaker, as the members of my community do. For the first time in decades, add 1 to the number of speakers. Not enough to overtake the number of speakers who die every year, but a start, for sure. If I haven’t made this explicit, our language is sacred to our people. It is our lens through which we view the world, describe the places we have lived in, and connect with the Creator as we understand him. It is a language especially suited to prayer. It is the blowhorn by which we call out to “Abba Chokkooli” -- the Koasati word for God, which literally translates to ‘He Who Sits on High’ -- whom we have asked for protection and deliverance from our enemies from pre-history until now. Those prayers in this language appear to be working, given that we are still here. To this day, acquiring the language of my people is my proudest accomplishment. 

My objective in these pursuits was to raise awareness for the hundreds of endangered languages in the United States and the thousands around the world today – language extinction is an imminent crisis that intensifies with the passing of every single tribal elder in America. My tribe only has 200 or fewer speakers left of Koasati, and as far as we can tell, I may be the youngest among them at 23 at the time of this recording in February 2022. The urgency of language extinction necessitates that other universities must follow Harvard’s lead and allow undergraduate and graduate students to pursue Native American languages for degree credit. This change could begin a shift that trickles down with more language nests, immersion schools, and programs offering Indigenous languages for credit in high schools, especially on tribal lands. Tribal colleges should not be the only institutions of higher learning leading the fight to preserve invaluable linguistic traditions right here in America. 

This discussion segues perfectly into my rationale for starting this podcast. I want to speak openly about issues in Indian Country, not just in linguistic and cultural preservation, but in economic development and in legal and political affairs for the 574 federally recognized tribes and 63 state recognized tribes in this country. I do not think there is enough media being created by indigenous Americans about our world, and though that is beginning to change, there is still much ignorance about our peoples. The more awareness that is raised about Indian issues, the better it is for our communities as well as our non-Indian neighbors.  

And that brings me back to another question I rhetorically asked at the top of this episode – why do I use the term Indian, when other terms seem to have supplanted it in academic discourse? I prefer ‘Indian’ for a few reasons, but truthfully the primary motivation is one of comfort and familiarity. Growing up on my reservation, tribal members generally do not say ‘Native American’ or ‘Indigenous American,’ but rather, we often call ourselves ‘Indians,’ we call our tribal lands “reservations” (often shortened to ‘The Rez’), and we call the network of all tribes ‘Indian Country.’ Most people that have corrected me about my use of this term are themselves not Native American, and for those offended by its use on our behalf, I would suggest asking one of us before jumping to conclusions. My father likes to joke, “When I learned English, they told me I was an Indian. I am too old to think that I am something else now.” 

 In fact, when he started his cultural goods and services business in the 1990s, he named it “Bayou Indian Enterprises.” After all, he figured, he was an Indian from the southern Louisiana bayou, and our people had lived and survived along the bayous in the Southeastern United States for centuries. He had a store named Bayou Indian, started a large festival featuring Indian dancers also named this, produced his own seasoning spice with this name, and went around telling stories and promoting Indian culture all throughout the country under this business name. I draw the title of this podcast from that legacy. While growing up, I supposed I would never do anything my father did – I wanted to chart my own path and make something else for myself. But now, after graduating college and living my life caring about and fighting for the same issues he did, I decided it's best to embrace my roots. Perhaps I am “Bayou Indian Jr.” At least for a while, as I prepare to take the LSAT and apply to law school, I thought it would be the perfect time to start this passion project. “Bayou Indian Radio” it is. Full steam ahead. 

Until next time. Thanks for listening. In the very near future, I will right back here with more to talk about and more people to talk about it with. Stay tuned. 

Bayou Indian Radio is researched, written, recorded, and produced by me, Eli Langley. Special thanks to my script doctors and sounding boards Margaret Wilson, Jacob Ott, and my mom Linda Langley, who makes sure I get my history right. Find us soon on all social media @BayouIndian. Atokloma – until next time!