The Alabama-Coushatta's Life: Endangered........Submitted by SpaceCase

I know it's LONG, but please read, escpecially if you are a Texan...then go to www.alabama-coushatta.com to find out how you can help!! They are a part of American history, and Texas history as it was Sam Houston who recomended that they were given land in the territory. :) SO please, it's an interesting read :)



A tribe blends old and new

Despite centuries of cultural loss, the Alabama-Coushatta Indians have managed to keep their languages and other traditions alive

An oral tradition:

Some Alabama and Coushatta words and phrases

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Sunday, November 9, 2003

LIVINGSTON -- Basketball has replaced stickball. Jesus has supplanted Abba Mingo, the great chief of earth and sky. The old stomp dances are pretty much forgotten. The vast hunting lands have been subdivided and paved.

It's no surprise that the Alabama-Coushatta Indian tribe has lost much of its traditional culture. After all, the first contact with a European, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, occurred in 1540, ushering in more than four centuries of social and political upheaval.

Yet some of the old ways survive. The Alabama and Coushatta languages are still spoken. Traditional fried bread, tender and slightly sweet, is a staple at social gatherings. Everyone knows whether he or she is in the beaver clan, the turkey clan or one of seven others. The principal chief and the second chief are still elected for life.

For the Alabama-Coushatta tribe, cultural preservation has taken on greater urgency in recent years, reflecting a trend throughout Indian country. Next year, the tribe will mark the 150th anniversary of the establishment of its reservation in the East Texas pines, an occasion for further reflecting on the past and on what makes the tribe distinctive today.

Language classes for students 5 to 18 years old are scheduled to begin this week. Adults are learning weaving and other crafts. Tribal members plan to spruce up a 200-year-old cemetery, where some of the headstones are made of wood.

Among the events planned for the anniversary are a play about the tribe's history and a demonstration of stickball, a kind of forerunner of lacrosse.

All this comes at a time when the little-known tribe is awaiting word from Congress on whether it will receive millions of dollars for the loss of ancestral lands. Such a windfall could not only allow construction of new houses, sewer lines and a nursing home, but also beef up cultural programs.

Priority: language

Keeping the languages alive is the top cultural priority. Although more than a third of the tribe's 998 members speak at least one of the native languages, few of those speakers are younger than 45.

"When I was a child, children made fun of each other for speaking English," said Janie Rhinesmith, 61, the tribe's education director, who learned both languages at home because her mother was Alabama and her father Coushatta. "Now, students make fun of each other for speaking Indian. Many of us on the reservation are afraid we are going to lose the language if we don't teach our kids."

Tribal leaders plan a series of ongoing classes, for adults as well as for youngsters in day care. It's no small challenge. Neither language has a written form, and pronunciation is tricky, involving abrupt pitch changes, a heavy "th" sound and forceful exhaling, said Beryl Battise, who chairs the cultural committee and oversees tribal documents.

A friendly language competition modeled loosely after the TV game show "Jeopardy!" was held recently at the tribe's multipurpose center, which also hosts basketball games. Teams scored points for translating English words into the native tongues. Elders served as judges, and fruit baskets were awarded to the winners.

Jonathan Hook, author of "The Alabama-Coushatta Indians," said the tribe's language skills are impressive.

"I think they are in better shape than other tribes, because there are so many fluent speakers," Hook said.

The tribe's physical isolation has helped. The reservation is adjacent to the Big Thicket National Preserve and roughly midway between two small towns, Livingston and Woodville.

The tribe's bylaws also promote a tightly knit society. Tribal membership is restricted to full-blooded American Indians who have at least one Alabama-Coushatta parent. A tribal member who marries a non-Indian is not permitted to live on the reservation. About half of the tribe's members live off the reservation.

"Our members are scattered throughout the U.S., whether for jobs or the military or attending school," said Sharon Miller, the tribe's public relations director. "The job market here in Polk County is not that great."

The per capita income for tribal members is $10,465, compared with $15,834 for the county as a whole and $19,617 statewide, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau figures.

Perhaps the tribe's greatest achievement is surviving while holding fast to some part of Texas soil. Nearly all other tribes in the state were evicted or slaughtered.

W.E.S. Folsom-Dickerson, in his 1965 book "The White Path," explained the tribe's persistence in words that still ring true: "The Alabama-Coushatta developed a modest yet sturdy, rock-like, near-Puritanical cast of character that even today defies assault."

Not that change hasn't been forced on the tribe or that the tribe hasn't adapted to survive. The forces of cultural change have been both religious and secular.

Spiritual switch

The Alabama-Coushatta's traditional spiritual life emphasized dance and song to give thanks to the creator for a good crop or a successful hunt. Nature itself was the church.

That model, the product of perhaps a millennium of social evolution, underwent dramatic changes starting in 1880, when Presbyterian missionaries established a church on the reservation's old dance grounds. Within 20 years, the entire tribe had converted to Christianity. Yet traditional dancing continued off and on in the woods for decades.

Jack Battise Sr., a retired auto mechanic, is, at 76, a respected elder and one of the most knowledgeable on the old ways.

"We were spiritual people here," Battise said. "My grandfather used to say, `Don't ever mistreat a tree and just cut it down. Before you cut the tree, you ask our great spirit, our great master, and you sprinkle tobacco on the ground as an offering.' He provided the tree. Mother Earth nurtured that tree. This is something our young people don't know."

One folktale is reminiscent of the biblical account of Noah's ark and the flood. People and wildlife hastily climbed onto a raft, and the floodwaters rose so high that a woodpecker's head was burned by the sun, turning its feathers red. The bird was henceforth known as the red-headed woodpecker.

Scholars say the tribe practiced purification rites such as sweats, in which believers sat in a very hot, enclosed space to cleanse their spirits. The annual green corn festival forgave all crimes but murder, which was punished with death.

Many tribal members are now devout Christians. Virtually every meeting or event begins with prayer, frequently offered in a native language. The Presbyterian church still operates on the reservation, along with an Assembly of God church. A Baptist church was established just off the reservation.

Native American choirs from all three churches performed gospel songs, such as "Amazing Grace," one evening recently at the multipurpose center. A piano player, a guitarist and a drummer provided backup. Between songs, some speakers bemoaned efforts to take God out of schools, the Pledge of Allegiance and public life generally.

The gospel singing and the language competition were among a series of events held last month during what the tribe calls its annual Indian Week.

In addition, about 100 preschoolers in the tribe's Head Start program saw an impassioned performance of dancing set to a drummer's thumping and chanting. The war dance, the buffalo dance and other steps showed off fluid, prancing styles, as well as colorful costumes decorated with feathers and beads.

Boredom, prejudice

Secular pressures to assimilate have been strong. In the old days, community welfare was paramount. It's still important, but an outside world that emphasizes individual achievement has had an impact.

Boredom is a problem for young people. Some turn to alcohol and drugs, said Travis Crosby, 21, an attendant at the multipurpose center who said he got the job in part because he passed a drug test.

Prejudice is another challenge. Miller said she gets the cold shoulder when she shops in Livingston.

"It's not anything they say to you," she said. "They turn their back on you. They won't wait on you. They don't say 'thank you' when they give you the receipt."

Education is increasingly emphasized as the key to economic and personal success.

Students go to public schools off the reservation, but the tribe hires a tutor who helps some of them with homework. Nine of 12 students who graduated from high school in the spring enrolled in college.

Thanks to federal grants and the tribe's oil and natural gas revenue, any tribal member who gets into a college can attend for free. Many suffer a severe case of homesickness the first semester.

"It's culture shock," Rhinesmith said. "I feel that children around here are pretty much protected under mom and dad's wings. They hate to let go."

Many Texans don't know that the tribe exists. To spread awareness, tribal leaders keep up a busy schedule speaking to school groups. Several visited McCallum High School in Austin earlier this year, explaining that the Alabama-Coushatta were among the earliest Texans.

The first Texans

It was in the late 1700s when they moved from Louisiana into what is now East Texas to avoid the British.

Though separate tribes at that time, the Alabama and Coushatta were always culturally one people, intermarrying frequently and speaking similar languages.

More organized than the indigenous tribes, they quickly established villages and farms. They were brilliant woodsmen, roaming comfortably through 20-foot-tall cane brakes where it was impossible to see beyond 20 yards.

Their network of trails included the Coushatta Trace from the Sabine River on the border with Louisiana to Goliad, then known as La Bahía, about 250 miles away.

It became an important middle road for smugglers and other adventurers between the better-known Atascosito Road along the Texas coast and the Old San Antonio Road farther inland.

Alabama-Coushatta leaders were courted by world powers in the early 1800s, according to the papers of Howard Martin, a white man who served as the tribe's official and unpaid historian until his death in 1995.

The Spanish welcomed the American Indians as an outer fortress against the French and, after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, against the Americans.

So when the Native Americans visited the Spanish trading post at Nacogdoches, they received clothing, guns and knives.

The Americans also sought the tribes' loyalty. And so the Indians paid visits to the American post at Natchitoches, La., where President Jefferson's Indian agent gave them gifts.

It wasn't long, though, before non-Indian settlers swept into East Texas, seizing the land.

The attitude of many settlers and Texas officials was that "the only good Indian was a dead Indian."

Thanks to their nonviolent nature, the Alabama-Coushatta were spared the worst. They were forced onto a reservation of 1,111 acres in 1854, and it has since been expanded to about 4,600 acres.

But that is a small fraction of the tribe's historical domain of several million acres, a point the tribe has been pressing in court and other forums for more than 30 years.

The tribe won a stunning victory in October 2002: The U.S. Court of Federal Claims recommended that Congress award the tribe $270.6 million for oil and natural gas production, timber harvesting and trespassing by non-Indian settlers and their descendants.

The court based its recommendation on well-established law concerning tribes. On the one hand, a tribe is a sovereign entity, a nation within a nation, with broad powers to govern its internal affairs. In the case of the Alabama-Coushatta, a seven-member tribal council calls the shots.

On the other hand, tribes are also wards of the federal government. And the government breached its responsibility by allowing settlers to seize the Alabama-Coushatta's land and other resources without compensation, the claims court found.

The claims court has no power, in a case of this type, to compel Congress to pay. So far, Congress has not taken any action on the court's recommendation.

[email protected]; 445-3604

Show all stories by   Author:  53836 ( Click here )