Chitimacha

The Chitimacha, whose name means people of the Grand River, are Indigenous people of Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin and Mississippi Delta, where their ancestors lived for thousands of years. Their Sitimaxa language is an isolate.

In swamps and bayous they built unfortified pole-and-mud villages, grew corn, beans and squash, hunted deer and alligator, and carved cypress dugouts holding fifty people; society was matrilineal. They may have numbered twenty thousand before contact, but epidemics cut them to about four thousand by 1650.

A long war with the French drove them from Bayou Lafourche, and many survivors were sold into slavery; in 1730 the French destroyed the Chawasha, whose remnants joined them. Later in the eighteenth century Acadian settlers occupied much of their land, leading to intermarriage and conversion to Catholicism; unlike most southeastern peoples, they were not removed in the 1830s and remained on their bayous.