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Locals celebrate, reconnect with Attakapas heritage

Cheryl Devall

OPELOUSAS – The federal and state governments do not recognize the Attakapas people as an official Native American tribe.

That doesn’t matter a bit to the people who visited the Opelousas’ Farmer’s Market pavilion Saturday for the tribe’s annual gathering. They browsed displays about traditional basket- and jewelry-making, listened to live flute and drum performances and joined the grand entrance to the accompaniment of recorded chants from a boom box.

The event attracted the committed — women and men dressed in the tribe’s regalia — and the curious, like Mary and Joseph Eaglin of Lawtell.

The couple said they believe that people on both sides of their family claim Native American heritage. “My mama was an Indian,” Mary Eaglin said. “But she didn’t tell us much.”

It is not unusual for African Americans to encounter dead ends amid roadblocks as they, like the Eaglins, try to research their family trees. History — recorded and oral — complicates the search.

As she watched the grand entrance, Norma Goodwin of Lake Charles mused, “I think these Indians are the same as the ones in my family.

“My daddy had a lot of Indian in him,” Goodwin said. “Everybody used to tell me I looked more like my daddy.”

Physical traits, ritual dances and wearing beads and fringe do not, by themselves, make someone Indian. Painstaking research and a strong sense of identity can. That’s how Amy Cormier, a Jennings-based psychotherapist and a spokeswoman for the Opelousas Prairie Attakapas, said she helped establish her family’s lineage five years ago.

“For so long we lived in hiding because it was not okay to be Native American,” she said as she sat at a picnic table, gently cradling a ritual cluster of eagle feathers. “My grandfather lived his whole life as an African American.”

That wasn’t unusual, Cormier said, because many of the original Attakapas who inhabited the Opelousas area centuries ago “hid out and married into the Choctaw and Houma tribes and with the African Americans.”

That intermarriage, she said, is one reason the federal government declared the Attakapas extinct. “But we’re here,” Cormier declared. “Native American is not a color.”

Her mother, Theresa Gobert, drummed and sang elsewhere in the pavilion while her father Nolan Gobert — a chief — greeted Attakapas descendants who’d traveled from Georgia, California and Washington State. Cormier’s daughter Phylicia Cormier sold red beans and rice, pork steak sandwiches and jambalaya from the concession stand.

The proceeds from those sales and other donations collected Saturday will go toward opening an office in Opelousas for the Attakapas who call themselves the “Sunshine People” to welcome visitors and tell their story.

“It gives us a chance to educate about our culture so future generations will know,” Amy Cormier said. Those generations include the girl her daughter is expecting.

“My hope is that my daughter continues to teach my grandchild the native ways,” Cormier said. “And if I have anything to do with it, she will.”