Avoyel

The Avoyel, also called the Flint People, were a small tribe of the lower Red River in Louisiana, with palisaded villages near Marksville, commanding the waterway to the Mississippi. Their Tunican name means Stone-Arrow-Point people, and they grew prominent as middlemen carrying flint from the Caddoan peoples to the stone-poor Atakapa and Chitimacha of the Gulf coast.

French records put their population at 280 in 1698, when Iberville met them and misleadingly dubbed them the little Taensas, though they were distinct from the Natchez-speaking Taensa further east; the Avoyel's lost language may have been related to Natchez.

Epidemic disease steadily reduced them, and when Tunica, Ofo and Biloxi groups settled nearby in the 1780s and 1790s the surviving Avoyel married into those villages. In 1805 an Indian agent reported only two or three Avoyel women remained, living along the Ouachita River.