Attakapa Indian

Attakapa is not what these people called themselves. They said Ishak, roughly the people; Atakapa comes from a Choctaw or Mobilian word that refers to people who eat human flesh, a charge historians read as a custom aimed at slain enemy warriors. A Frenchman bought land from an Eastern Atakapa chief in 1760. By 1805 an Indian agent counted about 50 Atakapa men in Louisiana, and epidemics, land loss and enslavement did the rest. Today the Atakapa-Ishak Nation, based in Lake Charles, seeks federal recognition; no group claiming the descent is federally or state recognized.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — steps away
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — steps away
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 0.9 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 6.9 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.

More markers nearby

• Ange Marie Jan — steps away
• St. Martinville — steps away
• St. Martin Catholic Church — steps away
• On This Site Lie Buried Officers of The Attakapas Militia — steps away