Chitimacha and Houma: Sovereignty on a Sinking Coast
Louisiana
The Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana has lived on this land for thousands of years. That is not a figure of speech. Archaeological evidence places Chitimacha ancestors in the Atchafalaya Basin and the coastal lowlands of south Louisiana for millennia before European contact. When the French arrived in the early eighteenth century, the Chitimacha were the dominant nation of the lower Mississippi, and the subsequent decades of French colonial expansion included a war, a period of Chitimacha enslavement, and eventually a treaty in seventeen eighteen that the tribe has spent three centuries defending.
The Chitimacha are the only Indigenous nation in Louisiana that never left its original homeland. Their reservation in Charenton, roughly ninety miles west of New Orleans, sits on land their ancestors have occupied continuously. They are federally recognized. They maintain an active language program for the Chitimacha language, one of the few such programs for a Louisiana Indigenous tongue.
The United Houma Nation tells a different story. With more than seventeen thousand enrolled members, the Houma are the largest Indigenous nation in Louisiana by population. They are state-recognized. They are not federally recognized, which means they cannot access the full range of federal tribal programs, federal healthcare funding, or the legal protections of federal Indian law. Their recognition petition has been pending with the Bureau of Indian Affairs for decades.
Both the Chitimacha and the Houma watch their coastal homeland disappear. Louisiana loses roughly a football field of coastal land every hundred minutes, a rate driven by oil and gas extraction that has broken the sediment supply chain, by the navigation canals that have allowed saltwater intrusion, and by the subsidence of land that has been drained and no longer receives fresh sediment from the river above. The Chitimacha and the Houma have occupied this coast longer than any other people in documented history. They are watching it sink.
