“They Don’t Like Indian around Here”: Chitimacha Struggles and Strategies for Survival in the Jim Crow South

In her presidential address to the Southern Historical Association, Theda Perdue recently declared that “Indians provide us with an opportunity to examine different experiences and perspectives in the history of the South, ones that do not follow the standard narrative but instead promise both to challenge and to enrich it.”¹ Although lagging behind the study of earlier periods of southern history, the call to confront and enrich what we know about the New South has been taken up by a growing number of accomplished American Indian historians. By including American Indians more centrally in analyses of race relations over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we now complicate a biracial emphasis that concealed their presence in the region for too long. Closer attention to how Indigenous people coped with segregation and miscegenation laws, moreover, raises new questions about the stability and uniformity of racial stratification in the century following the Civil War. The history of Jim Crow begins to appear, borrowing some imagery from historian Peter Wallenstein, more and more “jagged.”²

My purpose here is to illuminate a neglected interplay between race and class in the New South by exploring the struggle waged by the Chitimacha Indians for federal protection of their remaining land base during the early decades of the twentieth century. This south Louisiana tribe’s loss of territory between the Mississippi River and Bayou Teche over the previous century had been in large part a consequence of the region’s transformation into a plantation economy. Sugar planters had been carrying out accumulative and speculative practices for a long time, purchasing land cheap from smaller and weaker landowners and converting new possessions into cropland or capital. Acadian families in this region were the most numerous victims of land loss to large-scale plantations, but Indian groups faced this aggrandizement as well. Even in the Chitimachas’ last-ditch fight to preserve what was left after the Civil War, only a few hundred acres around the town of Charenton, they had to confront persistent pressure from Louisiana’s sugar industry. Although the priority of Jim Crow was undoubtedly disfranchisement of African Americans and control over their labor, American Indians were nonetheless deeply affected by and implicated in the most fundamental social and economic processes of the New South.

During the Chitimacha pursuit of federal recognition, in the face of persistent threats of dispossession from commercial interests, we discover an instrumental role being played by some southern elites who, without jeopardizing the political and social order that benefited them, selectively displayed a noblesse oblige toward their Indian neighbors. White rule by the upper class, in contest with more extreme and violent threats from classes below, operated for some Indian communities in ways significantly different from those directed at African Americans. Causes ranging from protection of Virginia Indians against racial integrity laws to advocacy of land rights for Mississippi Choctaws, as we know from new scholarship, found invaluable support from local elites during the Jim Crow era.³ For the Chitimachas in Louisiana, an alliance with the influential McIlhenny family on nearby Avery Island—largely determined and shaped by newly expansive interest in their split-cane baskets—proved crucial in defending themselves against hostile neighbors and achieving timely federal protection. Patronage of American Indian arts and crafts during the early twentieth century reflected a proactive effort by some sympathetic white southerners to find a privileged, yet still marginalized, place for Indian people in an increasingly segregated society.

As is already known in the Chitimacha case, cultural objects produced by Indigenous women became crucial for securing a network of relations that offered an effective, albeit peculiar, affirmation of their Indian identity and status.⁴ This deployment of material culture, however, must be understood in regard to how the Chitimachas sought some advantage from a widening difference between what white elites in the New South thought about American Indians and what they thought about African Americans. Even the most troubling of opportunities, as many other examples in history show, elicited serious consideration [End Page 90...