Indigenous Louisiana native's film to show at Sundance as tribe gets national spotlight
We call it an onion, the Louisiana French say oignon, but in the United Houma Nation they say "atufalaha."
So begins the short film by south Louisiana native Mariah Hernandez-Fitch being featured this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
The 8-minute film takes viewers into the home of Mariah's grandparents in Dulac, as they cook gumbo and tell stories about growing up in bayou country, shrimping, speaking French and going to an “Indian school.”
Their kitchen table — and the language of the United Houma Nation — is central to her short film “Ekbeh,” which gives visibility to the Indigenous experience in Louisiana during segregation.
It’s a new level of exposure for the Louisiana Native American tribe of about 19,000 people that has long sought federal recognition. And it’s one of several high-profile events for the tribe that has roots in communities across southeast Louisiana, including Jefferson, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes.
In December, the United Houma Nation was one of five tribes in Louisiana to host the 80th annual convention of the National Congress of American Indians, the country's oldest Native American organization, at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.
Chief Lora Ann Chaisson has recently been back and forth to Washington, D.C., for national events and panels. Elected as a southeast representative on the NCAI executive board, she was the first from the tribe to attend the president’s White House Tribal Nations Summit. She also spoke at the U.S. Secretary of Labor’s Native American Employment and Training Council, and a panel at George Washington University.
Meanwhile, Gretna native and University of New Orleans graduate Rachel Billiot-Bruleigh was recently named to the Environmental Protection Agency's National Environmental Youth Advisory Council.
Speaking a history
Hernandez-Fitch, 23, said she's excited to represent her hometown as part of Sundance's short film program scheduled for Sunday. The film will be available to the public online Jan. 25-28 at festival.sundance.org.
“I think it is such an honor the recognition this film is getting and is a testament of how powerful the bayou is at storytelling,” she said.
“Ekbeh” captures the stories Hernandez-Fitch's grandparents have told time and time again at their home in rural Terrebonne Parish. She grew up hearing their Louisiana French along with English and Spanish. But the Houma language, spoken before the French came along in the early 1700s, is more of a mystery because no one still alive speaks it.
“I was kind of sad I didn’t have an Indigenous language,” she said.
Hernandez-Fitch, who is now pursuing a master’s degree in American Indian studies at UCLA, said she was inspired by fellow Dartmouth College students who were learning how their ancestors spoke.
So she interned with the Houma Language Project, dedicated to uncovering the community’s language before European contact. It’s a difficult but not impossible process, said project founder Hali Dardar. It started with 1979 recordings of songs that had been passed down for generations, and a list of words from an anthropologist's 1907 visit.
Called Uma, the language is similar to Choctaw and Chickasaw. Unlike English, it revolves around verbs and action and the intonation of your voice.
“You have to completely detach your mind from English,” Hernandez-Fitch said. For example, when asking a question in English people raise their voice at the end. The opposite is true in Uma, Dardar said.
Started in 2013, the project’s work is slow-going but a passion project for a devoted few. Dardar said it likely won’t be finished in her lifetime.
“It took 350 years to destroy, it won’t be back within a year.”
Fight to be recognized
The NCAI brought over 2,000 tribal members from across the U.S. to New Orleans in November.
“It was a big deal for us as a state-recognized tribe,” said Sherry Parfait, who lives Uptown and was on the conference planning committee.
The Houma called what is now New Orleans home before spreading south and west, many of them eventually making a living harvesting shrimp and oysters. Chief Chaisson’s family used to sell seafood and vegetables in the French Market.
“The French Market was built by our Houma people,” she said, and it was a trading post for all of the nearby tribes — called bulbancha, the place of many tongues in Choctaw. City Park and Bayou St. John were hunting grounds. And Baton Rouge, the red stick, was so named because it was a boundary between the Houma and Bayou Goula tribe.
“We are tied to the city,” Parfait said.
But they’re still fighting for federal recognition, a process that started more than a century ago.
While the United Houma Nation is not yet recognized by the U.S. government, they are by Louisiana and France.
Over the summer, Parfait and tribal administrator Lanor Curole met with Chris Weissberg, a member of French Parliament who represents French people living in North America. He stopped by south Louisiana on a tour of the U.S. to better understand the Houma culture.
“The Houma Nation is historically connected to France and we need to preserve this precious bond,” Weissberg told The Times-Picayune in a statement.
Like Henandez-Fitch's grandparents, many tribe members were raised speaking French until they were forced to learn English in school.
“The French is not like ‘just French.’ It’s also very old, it’s mixed with our tribal language,” Chaisson said. “Our generation call it Houma French.”
Weissberg said that in 1990 the French government formally recognized the Houma people as descendants of the Indigenous tribes they encountered in Louisiana during the colonial era.
Federal recognition from the U.S. would come with more funding, benefits, services and protections from the government.
Indigenous pride
Like all Native American tribes across what is now the United States, the Houma history includes decades of discrimination and mistreatment. They couldn’t attend the same public schools as white children until the 1960s.
Instead of attending segregated schools for children of color, Indigenous kids often went to missionary schools that stopped after middle school. Chaisson’s dad received a third grade education, and her mom eighth grade.
Denied opportunities in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, many moved to parishes like Jefferson and St. Bernard, where they could sooner attend school and graduate and get jobs.
“There was places we couldn’t go, ‘No Indians allowed,'” Chaisson said.
And the discrimination doesn’t just live in history books.
“We still encounter racism, it’s a real thing to us,” Parfait said.
Chief Chaisson, now 58, said she was raised strongly in Houma community, but the disconnect is growing as people scatter from hurricane-battered areas.
People like Parfait, Dardar and Hernandez-Fitch are finding their own way to connect.
Parfait organizes a new newsletter that’s mailed to over 7,000 tribal members now scattered across the U.S.
“People are more proud of their Indigenous heritage now,” she said.
Dardar says the language project is a way to create a positive cultural touchstone for the Houma. And Hernandez-Fitch is inspired by meeting students from across the country uncovering histories that their parents and grandparents never knew.
“It’s an amazing time to be part of that resurgence,” Hernandez-Fitch said.
