Tales of Wind and Water

The majority of the Houma people live in the southern portions of Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes in south Louisiana. Today more than 50 percent of the Houma still live within a twenty-five-mile radius of the town of Montegut. In the adjacent parishes of Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Mary, and St. Bernard are smaller Houma settlements that trace back to the early twentieth century. Before the 1960s Houma Indian children could not attend public school in Lafourche and Terrebonne. After years of fighting this type of discrimination several family groups migrated to the adjacent parishes. There they found new trapping and fishing grounds, and some found the chance to “pass” their children into school systems more tolerant of or less knowledgeable about Indians.\nI grew up in the Houma community that had formed in lower Plaquemines Parish, about thirty miles north of the mouth of the Mississippi River. We were originally from one of the larger Houma settlements on Bayou Lafourche just below the town of Golden Meadow. Sometime in 1964 we relocated to Plaquemines to live near my Uncle Hannah, my dad’s brother. The Houma community there was centered near the town of Venice with extended family groups clustered along the local waterways. The Half-Way House, Tiger Pass, Spanish Pass, Stryker’s Woods, and the Village were the major Houma settlements with a population that would fluctuate over the years but would never grow to more than a few hundred individuals.\nIn those years it was to us a paradise; the waters were filled with shrimp, crabs, and fish, and the marshes teemed with muskrat, nutria, coons, otters, and minks. My dad, Raymond Mayheart Dardar (or simply “Mayheart” to the Indian community), was as good a trawler and trapper as any in the tribe. Fishing, hunting, and trapping were the traditional occupations of my people. Like the generations before him, my dad was a child of the bayous, marshes, and swamps of Louisiana, and his knowledge of Houma lifeways provided for all our needs. We lived in a little wood-framed house on Spanish Pass that my mom, Elsie, affectionately liked to call her “little green acres.”

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