Atakapas say culture still alive

By: Mike D. Smith

BEAUMONT, Texas — Thousands of years before Southeast Texas was even a concept, strong men and women fished its waters, hunted its game, walked its forests and thrived off raw nature. They were the Atakapas, the group that history says traded with colonists and helped them fight wars before vanishing in the early 1900s.

But Texans and Louisianans claiming to be of Atakapan descent who say the culture is alive and well are mounting an effort to scratch their ancestral name off the federal government's extinct cultures list.

The Atakapas were hunters and gatherers who occasionally roamed from present-day southern Louisiana, through Southeast Texas to Matagorda Bay, said Pam Wheat, executive director of the Texas Archaeological Society.

"What's pretty amazing is that they did what they did and survived as long as they did by using their natural resources," Wheat said.

The Smithsonian Institute sent linguist Albert Gatschet to the Gulf Coast during the late 1800s to write an Atakapan language dictionary before the last known native speakers died, McNeese State University history professor Ray Miles said.

Gatschet found a native speaker in Lake Charles, La., but gave up after he couldn't trace the language's origin. The project stalled until anthropologist John Reed Swanton came along in the 1930s.

"By the time he (Swanton) came here, he claimed there was only one person left that could speak the Atakapan language," Miles said.

Swanton finished the dictionary that today is in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
"He basically said they were an extinct people," Miles said. "That was the perception in Washington, D.C., and that perception is going to be very difficult to break down."

The whole story can be found here: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5139005.html