“All I Depend on Is the Lord”: Healing Words and Silence in Cajun Traitement

Rooted in Acadian French history and drawing on Native American and Creole cultures, traiteurs, or treaters, practice a form of healing that is based on verbal interaction, including knowledge of prayers. This article examines the verbal protocols of traitement or healing prayers, which structure the exchange of words in prayer form for illness, restoring an individual to a healthy state through initiating a material exchange. The understanding that one must ask to receive—that no thank-you is required—is the potentiality in the silence following traitement. Traiteurs use treatments to connect with the area’s past history of small farming communities, or voisinages, through a sophisticated display of reciprocity, and to articulate their relationship to a local notion of community. This pattern is an indication of a cultural level of addressing illness previously overlooked in French Louisiana.