Chitimacha Museum

The Chitimacha Museum belongs to the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana and stands on the reservation at Charenton, beside Bayou Teche. The tribe's website says it preserves and promotes the heritage of Southern Louisiana's original inhabitants. In Chitimacha oral history the people have always been here, and the tribe places their old territory across the Atchafalaya Basin, west toward Lafayette, south to the Gulf and east to the New Orleans area. Their language is Sitimaxa, taught today at the tribe's school in Jeanerette.

The tribe's account of the French colony is plain. Slave raids on Chitimacha villages led to a war that began in 1706, when Chitimacha fighters killed the priest St. Cosme, and it ended with a treaty in 1718. Many Chitimacha were enslaved in those years, more than any other Louisiana people of the time, the tribe says. Families along Bayou Lafourche, then called the River of the Chitimacha, were pushed south and west to Grand Lake and the Teche. Of about 5,440 acres claimed on the Teche in 1826, the tribe held 261.54 by 1903, and that land was placed in trust in 1916.

Chitimacha weavers split river cane and dye it red, black and yellow, with pattern names such as alligator entrails and rattlesnake, and the Darden family of St. Mary Parish has woven for more than a century. The tribe regrew river cane on its own land, the first Louisiana tribe to do so. Admission is free and donations are welcomed. Call on arrival for access; Saturday visits need two weeks' notice.