Food is an important marker of ethnicity, region, and even national identity. It has been used to delineate national and cultural boundaries, and to communicate social prestige or economic wealth. Food can be an integral part of both individual and group identity. Sometimes, foods are simultaneously markers for more than one identity, and sometimes foods create walls or borders for identity.Everywhere food is associated with home, family, and security, but often takes on deeper communicative functions, conveying complex social messages (Anderson 2005: 125-128).

Sabine Parish has a dense geographical distribution of enrolled members of the Choctaw-Apache Tribe of Ebarb, and those eligible for membership in the tribe. The Choctaw-Apache Community has a cultural heritage rich in food traditions, and the tribe recognizes the importance of food as a part of their traditions (Pierotti et al, 1996).  These food traditions have long constituted an important ethnic marker for the community.However, these foodways are understudied, even at “face value”. Academic treatments of the Choctaw-Apache foodways as an investigation of ethnic identity are virtually non-existent.

I am a member of the Choctaw-Apache Tribe, but have lived outside the traditional communities of the tribe for the vast majority of my life. I am a student of history, anthropology and heritage resources and a lifelong food enthusiast. The foundation of this project thesis will be a kind of “food dialogue” between myself and people from the communities of Ebarb, Loring Lake, Grady Hill, Bayou Scie, Coon Ridge as well as the towns of Noble, Zwolle, and Many.

This study builds on Traditional Arts and Crafts in the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb and other relevant studies. The goal is to offer the tribe additional documentation of the foodways of our people, as well as new physical and analytical resources on this important aspect of ethnic identity.

Tribal members and elders write about themselves, from their own perspective to share with each other and the public. The Choctaw-Apache community has very strong food traditions. Pepper (green pepper and eggs, etc), tamales, sausage (chorizo), and Pondalote Bread. The booklet is the best single source on foodways of the community, and the entries are very compelling.

In addition to food, the booklet features many ancillary categories, including a chapter on hunting and fishing crafts, and another on farming, planting, and butchering. The book also has categories on traditional music, sewing, quilting and other handcrafts, stories and lore, and occupation lore, mostly dealing with the logging industry. Under the broad category chapters (listed above,) the book is arranged by entries by community member.

Two taped and transcribed  interviews include numerous food preparation and food preservation techniques, as well as informative family vignettes. She explains how to make tamales from scratch: “first you butcher your hog…,” to making homemade ash lye for lying the corn, to spicing the meat, to hand rolling seventy-five dozen tamales.

Preparation of, and eating chili peppers was a key part of family food culture. Fresh (green) and/or dried (red) peppers were eaten at every meal. Peppers were dried by stringing them or laying them out on tin roofs.  Pepper was prepared with eggs; fresh pepper with onions, garlic, and tomatoes, or as a spice in beans or peas.  Aunt Margie explains the preparation of corn and pepper using hand food grinders, and, historically, using a “metat rock.” She tells how to make pigtail gravy and how to make hominy, masa, and tortillas the old way.

I look forward to follow up conversations with her and the opportunity to accompany her on a visit to L& W Tamales, her favorite Tamale supplier in Zwolle. A thesis on foodways seems like a bunch of fun.  But it will inevitably be hard work too!

The Head Staff are as follows:
MC- Harold Comby
AD- Vance Beaver
Head Gourd- Travis Harris
Head Man- Ricky Garcie
Head Lady- Janelle Peavy
Drum- Frank Tongkeamba
Head Little Lady- Barbara Ramedies
Head Little Man- Trenton Malmay

SCHEDULE:
FRIDAY
9-9:30 Gourd Dancing
9:30-2 PM- Demonstrations
6 PM – Gourd Dancing
7 PM – Grand Entry
SATURDAY
10 AM Gourd Dancing
12 Noon- Lunch
1 PM- Grand Entry
5 PM – Dinner
6 PM – Grand Entry

This is a smoke, drug, and alcohol free event.

_________________________________________________________________________-

Photos from Saturday May 1:

Ernest Tubb at Municipal Auditorium

The Country music museum is absolutely worth the drive. The museum offers a Louisiana-focused  history of Country music, from its traditional folk roots to the 1970s. The story of the site is as compelling as it is troubling (see below for my thoughts on the troubling part).

The mission of the site was not entirely clear; however, interpreting the history of country music through the Louisiana Country Music Museum and maintaining the historic site marker seem to be obvious points. We visited on a cold morning and didn’t encounter any other visitors. The site is a wonderful resource on Louisiana Country music, provides some interpretation of the Civil War, and offers picnic tables, barbeque pits, a pavilion, and a large amphitheater (unfortunately, the site no longer regularly hosts music). The interpretive ranger was helpful, knowledgeable, and full of new ideas, including building a recording studio on-site for area aspiring musicians.

Megan joins on the keys

The museum pays tribute to early gospel, folk, and work-song influences, and does a splendid job of interpreting the early recorded era of Country music genres, including the Louisiana Hayride, KWKH, and KRMD in Shreveport. The museum does not interpret recent trends in Country music, country pop, or most anything after the “Urban Cowboy” phase.

My main concerns with the museum were in presenting Country music’s multi-ethnic roots. While one display notes that the guitar was of Spanish origin (via Mexico) and another shows the dissemination of the (Irish) fiddle, there is no mention that the mandolin came from Italian immigrants or that dulcimers, accordions and other squeezeboxes are from Germany and Central Europe, or that the banjo comes from West Africa.

Much more troubling are the possible links between music and commemorations to the Confederate solider.

The Confederate solider was separated from his unit and supposedly killed by three Union cavalrymen, while stopping at a spring for a drink of cold water.

General Taylor's Flag was usually 36" or 30" square

The Barnhill family buried the solider. A marker was placed on the grave in 1962, and annual memorial services grew to include live performances of Country music.

The narrative is telling, and parallels the narrative of southern defeat repeated for one hundred years: The federal government and northern industrialists, lacking any respect, gentlemen’s code, honor, or courtesy for the old ways of life, outnumbered and outresourced poor “Johnny Reb” and kicked him (them) while he (they) was (were) down. But a good family restored his (their own imagined) honor in death, and many people commemorate his (the lost cause’s) memory.

The early 1960s was the Centennial of the Civil War. The  late 1950s and early 1960s also saw a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan (after its brief post-war decline and infiltration by Stetson Kennedy) and a number of cases of local police and hate groups working together -essentially sanctioning state violence against Civil Rights groups.  The early 60s also saw the killing of Megar Evars in Mississippi. It was in this context that the so-called “Confederate Flag” came into wide use throughout the South. The placement of this flag near the door to the museum is problematic. The flag, similar to the Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (it is the Second Naval Jack, but colors of the Beauregard’s Battle flag), is often used as a symbol of racist hatred. The flag was placed on the statehouse in South Carolina in 1962; George Wallace flew it in Birmingham in defiance of Kennedy asking him to begin racial integration. A friend of the family told me the first time she saw them in numbers was the early 1960s. In race, amenities, and psychic income and elsewhere, Mwangi Kimenyi argues that the flag, “represents the mark of ‘old all-white’ traditions” and exclusionary feelings. The flag often acts as a marker saying “you are unwelcome.”

By the 1970s, the grave-site saw an annual memorial service “for the solider,” replete with live gospel and country music. The 1970s are noted as a time where racial-cultural war was fought with music. In Rock (a genre I am more familiar with), Neil Young indicted youth of the South with “Southern Man,” and Skynard  responded to Young in “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Louisiana has the second highest proportion of Black folks in the United States. Natchitoches Parish has a higher percentage of people of African ancestry than the state average (about 38% Black), but the Marthaville area is outside the Red River Valley in an area of Anglo “white” farmers and their descendants.  A place with those demographics seems obvious to commemorate country music. But rural transformation has affected Black and white families unevenly (see Southern Farmers and their Families by Walker, reviewed in Red River Valley Historical Journal 2007 (5) volume 5,  147-149), and in places where the slightest material advantages or  “psychological wages” seem like clear class differentiation, racism manifests as “common sense” among working class whites.

The placement of this flag near the door to the museum is problematic

Given this complex context, placing a “Confederate” Flag near the entrance to the museum invites  accusations. The placement of this flag near the door to the museum is problematic.

The state would do well to 1.) highlight contributions of ethnic immigrants 2.) highlight contributions of African Americans to country music (not just Huddie Ledbetter) and explain the African origins of the banjo, 3.) place the Civil War interpretation in context and, 4.) offer an annual music festival that highlights both country and the breadth of folk musics of Louisiana.

The Hatchery has been in operation since the early 1930s. Some 164,000,000 fish have been raised in its 53 ponds, each about .8 acres.  It is the third largest public hatchery in the southeast.  The hatchery has raised over 16 species, but currently focuses on the following categories:

1.) Recreation- Which includes largemouth bass, bluegill, redear sunfish, and channel catfish

2.)Restoration- These include striped bass, paddlefish, alligator, and snapping turtle

3.) Recovery- These are threatened and endangered species like the Pallid Sturgeon, and the Louisiana Pearl shell mussel

A small aquarium and museum is on-site. In addition to raising fish, the site conducts environmental education, cultural heritage education (including events on Caddo culture), and special events.

About ten years ago, an American Indian employee of the hatchery brought forth concerns about the desecration of the Caddo burial grounds.  The hatchery responded with a day of reconciliation and prayer, followed by a much higher level sensitivity to interpreting the cultural history of the Caddo village and burials that the hatchery sits on. The site is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Smithsonian has agreed to repatriate. I have details of the sequence of events from year 2000 to present in my field notes, but choose not to publish them here. More recently the Hatchery unveiled the Caddo Memorial Plaza. Karen Kilpatrick shared a slideshow that included a lot of information, including Winslow Walker’s excavation including Caddo horse burials.

Next, Regional Archaeologist Jeff Girard met us. He pointed out the location of his dig, which included a prehistoric site on the hatchery grounds that he excavated in 2007. It was apparently NOT associated with the earlier Caddo excavation. Girard began by giving us background of Winslow Walker’s excavation and the “direct historical method” (cf Bureau of American Ethnology; John Swanton). The site included a layer of dark soil associated with habitation, broken pottery and very few features. Girard used a water screening method, with flotation tank. This preserved plant remains and lightweight objects that would have otherwise been lost.  He found a high concentration of fish, turtle and deer remains, as well as hickory/ walnut, pecan shells, maize and persimmon. The pottery he found resembled pottery of Central Louisiana rather than Caddo. The excavation was near a proposed Caddo repatriation plot, so that’s all the detail I care to relay in this public setting. The meeting with Girard was very informative. I look forward to any opportunity to learn from him in the future.

This site visit, including the interaction with Karen Kilpatrick and Jeff Girard, is not typical of what public users (tourists) would experience. I am grateful for that, but it makes the visit difficult to translate to public end-users’ expectations. In any event, a visit to the hatchery is well worth it. There is a knowledgeable director, small but nice aquarium, museum and learning center, and friendly staff. Their website at http://www.fws.gov/natchitoches/ needs improvement, and if they continue down the road of working cultural resources into their mission they should work to acquire a staff dedicated to public interpretation and more aggressively promote visitation.

Publications of FWS on Natchitoches Hatchery and Caddo:

http://library.fws.gov/Pubs2/nativeamerican01.pdf

http://www.fws.gov/eddies/pdfs/EddiesSummer2008.pdf

http://www.fws.gov/southeast/SoutheasternCurrents/archives/2009/2009February.pdf

REGIONAL ARCHAEOLOGY PROGRAM

The Regional Archaeology program now includes four regional archeologists for the state, plus one for Greater New Orleans and another for Poverty Point. The program once had additional station archaeologists. The program is part of the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, CRT (department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism), and a map of the regions is available at their website http://www.crt.state.la.us/archaeology/regarch/regarch.htm.

See also http://www.crt.state.la.us/archaeology

FISH HATCHERY

Resources consulted include the hatchery’s website , Randall Hart’s “Caddo Heritage Day”, prior participation at heritage education events at the Fish Hatchery, and an untitled report by Jeff Girard: Girard, Jeff.  Untitled Report on Fish Hatchery.  http://www.crt.state.la.us/hp/nhl/parish35/scans/35029001.pdf

The location of the fish hatchery is 615 South Drive in Natchitoches, not far from Northwestern State University. It is owned by the US Government and managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The phone number is (318) 352-5324. The site is a working fish hatchery that includes an aquarium and limited interpretation of Native Americans that once occupied the site. The hatchery realizes that this is considered a sacred burial ground of  the Natchitoches band of Caddo, therefore, the Fish Hatchery management tries to cultivate a meaningful relationship with the Caddo Nation.

I don’t know what to expect of this visit.

The resource, including the interpretive center, seems under-utilized. Upon entering the visitors center, the artifacts and reproduction pieces failed to convey a cohesive story. However, my first impressions were still positive.
Luckily, the interpretive ranger did an adequate job of communicating key facts of the site before releasing us to visit our “off-site” archeology (this area is privately owned, but a historically important part of the fort).

The only other visitors during our trip pulled up as we were leaving. They were a retired couple enjoying a Friday drive. The man was doing genealogy on a forefather who was once stationed at Ft. Jesup.

I recommend:

1.)Interpretive Center: Create an interpretive plan to integrate available artifacts with existing resources, and to identify gaps in material culture that would help tell the story of the fort.

2.) The state to re-establish and fund the period costume workshop.

3.) That Dr. Haley consider integrating the public into some facet of archeology done in the area.

I enjoyed my visit and look forward to spending more time there.

Poverty point has been the location for a number of field schools for Tulane University, University of Louisiana- Lafayette (ULL), and Washington University in St. Louis, among others. The central hall of the dormitory area includes photographic testament of many of those field schools.

More recently, Mississippi State (Starkville) and University of Louisiana- Monroe have employed “high tech” methods  including magnetic graditometry and began limited excavation of the central plaza earlier this year.

Since our group constituted the visitors present early on Halloween morning, I chatted with the park rangers about their knowledge of the site and visitors’ usual questions. Interpretive rangers like to explain the Poverty Point culture and differentiate it from the later Coles Creek culture of Sarah’s mound.

Erosion is a major concern for preserving the site, and site workers are in a constant battle to reduce erosion.

The only recommendations I have are for the State of Louisiana to provide a larger staff to care for the site, and to implement credit/debit card machines in the gift shop.