“Ishak Words: Obstacles to Language Renewal for a Historic Gulf Coast Tribe”
Jeffery U. Darensbourg, Ph.D., Tribal Council Member and Head of the Alligator Band,
Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas
Introduction
On behalf of Principal Chief Edward Chretien, Jr., the Tribal Council, and the members of the
Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas, I express my gratitude at
being invited to talk here at Tulane about our language and its current status. While not a
linguist, I am a tribal member interested in preserving our heritage. Members of our tribe have
come to the area currently known as New Orleans for several centuries in order to trade goods,
and to be able to trade ideas here in Nun Ush, as we call it in our language, “the Big Village,”
continues that tradition, and I am honored to be a part of such.1 I shall first discuss the tribe itself
and then discuss its language status at present.
Part 1: Ishak People
When speaking about our tribe, it is necessary to note that we carry two names for it presently,
viz., “Atakapa,” a name given to us by Choctaw speakers on our traditional Eastern borders, and
“Ishak,” our own name for ourselves. “Atakapa,” in various spellings (especially “Attakapas,”
as was used to designate a political region under three separate colonial governing bodies, most
recently the United States of America after the Louisiana Purchase), is from the Choctaw “hattak
apa,” meaning “cannibal.” This slur was likely an attempt to disparage a society, such as ours,
with a strongly decentralized governance, without the strong hierarchies of the agricultural
societies of some of our neighbors. There is little evidence of actual cannibalism amongst our
tribal members, and a 16th-Century European visitor, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who lived
with our tribe following a shipwreck, observed Ishak opposition to cannibalism amongst
shipwrecked Spaniards.2 Our own name for ourselves is “Ishak,” which means simply “Human
Beings,” something common among many different tribes, as noted by Vine Deloria, Jr.3 The
1 A well-known artistic depiction of Native People visiting New Orleans, the 1735 drawing “Desseins de Sauvages
de Plusieurs Nations” by Alexandre DeBatz, currently housed at Harvard University, depicts an Ishak man (labelled
“Atakapas”) holding a calumet and standing on the banks of the Mississippi River. See the pamphlet by David I.
Bushnell, Jr., “Drawings by A. DeBatz in Louisiana, 1732-1735,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections
80(5):1927.
2 Enrique Pupo-Walker, editor, and Frances M. López, translator, Castaways: The Narrative of Alvar Núñez Cabeza
de Vaca (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Cabeza de Vaca refers to the Ishak as the “Han” people,
taking a name for a traditional tribal dwelling as the name of the tribe. For more on the question of alleged Ishak
cannibalism, and the reliability of the sources for such, a notable article is Joseph T. Butler, Jr. “Atakapa Indians:
Cannibals of Southwest Louisiana,” Louisiana History 11(2):1970, pp. 167-176. From a non-academic, tribal
perspective on the alleged cannibalism and the social impact of the slur upon tribal members, see Hubert Daniel
Singleton, The Indians Who Gave Us Zydeco: The Atakapas-Ishak of Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas, 3rd
edition (self-published, 2005). Lacking for this question is a contemporary analysis of the question making use of
historiography from the standpoint of critical studies of ethnicity and colonialism.
3 Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1988) p. 103.
tribe should be referred to as “Ishak,” rather than by any slur, or “Atakapa-Ishak” if referring to
the current tribal organization. Other names self-applied by tribal members include “Les
Sauvages,” “French Indians,” “Creole Indians,” “Catholic Indians,” and, from the Ishak language
itself, “Ishak Yukiti,” the latter approximately meaning “Ishak Natives.”4
The Atakapa-Ishak Nation was reorganized in 1996, with much of the work being carried out by
tribal member Hubert Daniel Singleton of Lake Charles, Louisiana (1926-2009), who also
published several non-scholarly volumes of tribal history and lore, volumes that are quite useful,
and certainly indispensable to the researcher who wishes to understand Ishak People from the
point of view of the tribe itself. The tribe has played an important role in the culture of the
present-day states of Louisiana and Texas, lending cultural influence in music (especially
zydeco), food (especially maque choux), and place names (see below). At a national level a US
Navy vessel (the USS Atakapa ATF-149) bears the tribe’s name. In spite of historic importance,
efforts to increase recognition of the living contemporary existence of the tribe are ongoing.5
The tribe does not currently enjoy recognition at the federal level, but it does have a bid for
recognition with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and tribal members participate regularly in
cultural events such as powwows, especially within traditional tribal areas in Louisiana and
Texas.6
Part 2: Ishak Words
The Ishak language, as far as can be ascertained by research among tribal members, is currently
“asleep.”7 As far as I can tell, the last speaker of Ishak walked on sometime between 1946 and
1970. Some tribal members have memories of long-deceased relatives who “spoke some
Indian,” but documentation is lacking, and difficult to locate if extant. Tribal members who
speak a language other than English, especially as a first language, generally speak Louisiana
French or Louisiana Creole. Speakers of our language were studied in Lake Charles, Louisiana
and environs by Smithsonian researcher Albert Samuel Gatschet in 1885, and by his colleague
John R. Swanton in 1907. Their resulting volume, A Dictionary of the Atakapa Language
Accompanied by Text Material,8 is the largest collection of Ishak vocabulary, and also has a
small, but significant corpus of Ishak narratives. What it lacks is anything like a phrasebook of
the language, which is unfortunate because Gatschet and Swanton had access to speakers who
could have assisted in the creation of such, unlike the contemporary researcher. Most of what is
known of the Ishak language comes from this one volume. It does not seem that a translation of
the Bible was ever done into Ishak, and as such, there is no larger-sized 19th-Century dictionary
4 Singleton, The Indians Who Gave Us Zydeco, pp.15ff.
5 However, tribal members did make a blip in the national media consciousness after the 2010 BP oil spill in the
Gulf of Mexico. National Public Radio produced a report by reporter John Burnett on the effects of the spill on the
Atakapa-Ishak fishing village at Grand Bayou, Louisiana, available at
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127902879
6 For maps of traditional tribal areas see both William W. Newcomb, Jr., “Atakapans and Neighboring Groups” in
Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 14: Southeast (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2004) pp.
659-663 and also John R. Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of
Mexico (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911).
7 I am particularly grateful to Miami scholar Wesley Leonard for his remarks at the conference regarding this term.
8 Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932.
for Ishak such as, for example, there is for Choctaw, as would have been necessary to
accomplish a task requiring the translation of a large collection of texts of various genres. 9
Additionally, several shorter works of linguistic analysis have been published either entirely or
partially about Ishak language of the sort familiar to researchers in linguistics.
The aforementioned Ishak tribal member, Hubert Singleton, discusses Ishak language in all of
his self-published works, and especially in his magnum opus, The Indians Who Gave Us
Zydeco.10 In that volume Singleton, who carefully studied published accounts of the language
and its grammar, adds to the corpus of the language with translations of Roman Catholic texts
into Ishak with prayers such as the Pater Noster and Ave Maria, and Christmas carols such as
“Silent Night” and “Away in a Manger.” Singleton also notes the influence of Ishak language on
the English and French of tribal members in an area of Lake Charles, Louisiana, formerly known
as the “Dummyline,” a moniker given due to the presence of a short rail line in the area.11 In
particular, Singleton notes the repetition of short adjectives in speech, e.g., “I felt bad-bad
yesterday with a cold, but today I am good-good and ready to work,” something I myself can
confirm hearing in Lake Charles among Ishak people even today. Other remnants of Ishak
pointed out by Singleton include place names in traditional Ishak territory, with Singleton going
beyond those noted by Read to include Lacassine (“End of the Prairie”) and Faquetaic (“Foot
Path”).12
Prospects and Conclusion
While there are no fluent, or even near-fluent, speakers of Ishak presently, there are language
resources, and there are living Ishak people who carry on the tribe’s culture. Some of these
people have expressed interest in language materials of the basic, practical sort. With the
involvement of persons with the desire and, importantly, expertise to make reawaken the Ishak
language, the culture of this historic, and living, tribe can be better preserved, enriched, and
emboldened. My hope is that this can come to pass, and that a pathway for such can be found.
9 I’m thinking here of missionary Cyrus Byington’s A Dictionary of the Choctaw Language, edited by John R.
Swanton and Henry S. Halbert, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 46 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1915).
10 Cf. pp. 84-89. The text of the Pater Noster, in Singleton’s translation, reads “Yukit Hitet Otsitat, Natt En Hiteush.
N Natt Nun Hiweush oken. N Natt ko kul kanen, ne monkin nak hitanskin. Shokwak hanta ayil ishmish, n shok
hatsimesh katsel ka ishueto nak shok hatsimesh ishuesel heu holkish kaul ha. N ka ya poking kso pel shok hatsimeh
ishyaush. Anak.”
11 Singleton’s memoir, The Dummyline: A Neighborhood Unique…Atakapas-Ishak Indians and Others at Lake
Charles, Louisiana, in the 1930’s (self-published, 1996), is a good source for descriptions of Ishak culture during the
1930’s and beyond.
12 Cf. The Indians Who Gave Us Zydeco, pp. 62-67 and also William A. Read, Louisiana Place Names of Indian Origin:
A Collection of Words, edited by George M. Riser (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008). Read has
entries for Ishak names such as “Calcasieu” and “Mermentau.”