Chitimacha Veterans' Monument

The Chitimacha homeland once stretched from the Atchafalaya Basin to the lower Mississippi and the New Orleans area. Sitimaxa, their language, was once endangered and has been revived. It is taught at the Tribal School and Learning Center in Jeanerette, and tribal members can study it through software from Rosetta Stone's endangered-language project. Weavers kept Chitimacha basket-design names alive when few other words survived into the early 1900s. This monument stands in Charenton, on the Chitimacha reservation, and was raised in 2005 by the Sovereign Nation of the Chitimacha.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chitimacha Museum — steps away
  The Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Charenton: the tribe's account of its territory, the French wars and enslavement, the land held in trust, and river cane baskets.
• Grevemberg House Museum — 6.2 mi
  Franklin's 1851 Greek Revival townhouse, the official St. Mary Parish museum, saved from demolition by one vote and set in the Franklin Historic District on Bayou Teche.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 19 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• Wedell-Williams Aviation and Cypress Sawmill Museum — 20 mi
  A Louisiana State Museum in Patterson on the world's largest cypress sawmill town and the Wedell-Williams racing planes, with a theater and changing exhibits.

More markers nearby

• Welcome to Charenton and the Chitimacha Reservation — 0.5 mi
• The Massé - Darby House — 3.7 mi
• Jefferson Davis Louisiana Association — 5.6 mi
• Donelson Caffery — 6.2 mi