Persistence on the Edge: The Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb

Abstract

Persistence on the EdgeThe Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb Robert B. Caldwell Like many other tribes in the US South, the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb, located in western Louisiana, began organizing for self-determination in the 1970s. Influenced by the American Indian Civil Rights and Red Power movements,1 the community made no land claims to the Indian Claims Commission but requested federal acknowledgment and was recognized by the State of Louisiana as a tribe in 1978.2 Efforts by the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb to secure federal recognition offer insight into the importance that place plays in a people's history. In an essay in volume 12 of the Handbook of American Indians, Hiram F. Gregory suggests that Louisiana tribal communities persisted throughout the difficult nineteenth century in "refugia and isolation," living in marginal landscapes outside the cotton plantation corridors.3 This generalization may hold true, but certainly the various tribal communities have different lived experiences. This article begins a close examination of the construction and persistence of one isolated American Indian refuge close to the edge of other peoples' worlds. This investigation required the author to cross many boundaries: of language, geography, time, and identities, as well as disciplinary boundaries. Seeking a legal basis for the tribe to collectively interact with local and state officials, and complying with self-government provisions in the Indian Reorganization Act, leaders exchanged traditional forms of family- and clan-level leadership for an elected body, incorporating the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb as a not-for-profit organization on August 18, 1977. Membership was limited to those having "1/16 degree or more of Indian blood" and "living within the territorial limits of Sabine Parish . . . more particularly those living in the unincorporated portion of Ward 5" or those who can "affirmatively establish their [End Page 190] family origin as belonging to the Ebarb area." Tribal citizenship was also extended to descendants of those persons duly enrolled.4 Today, as in 1977, tribal citizens continue to live in dispersed settlements throughout the western part of the parish. But nearly half of tribal members living in the parish live in, or within two miles of, the town of Zwolle (Ward 6). Outsiders invariably make reference to Zwolle (the nearest town) as the location of the tribe, but tribal members reject this town as the geographical or political center of the tribe. Why was the name "Ebarb" so important as to be included in the name of the tribe, and why did the articles of incorporation emphasize the unincorporated portions of Ward 5? Published regional histories do little to elucidate Choctaw-Apache territoriality. The first published histories of Sabine Parish claim that when Anglo-Americans arrived in the nineteenth century, they encountered nothing more than a "howling wilderness," a "no man's land."5 This twentieth-century whitewashing conveniently ignored not only the Spanish soldiers and French traders who had arrived one hundred years earlier but also the American Indians who had been in the region for thousands of years. The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana characterizes the Choctaw-Apache community as a synthesis of immigrant tribes.6 Ebarb elders understand that northwestern Louisiana is not the ancestral homeland for their Choctaw or Apache ancestors, yet their oral tradition stubbornly claims, "we have always been here." There is some truth to this widespread sentiment of primacy. Some of the tribe's ancestors were soldiers at the Spanish presidio at Los Adaes in the early nineteenth century and built strong fictive kinship relationships with local Caddoan tribes, especially the Hasinai confederation.7 More importantly, almost all Choctaw-Apache share a handful of common Adai ancestors, who historically inhabited lands between the Sabine and Red Rivers in northwest Louisiana. Prior to 1820, the community lived in dispersed extended-family settlements stretching one hundred miles between the Spanish and French frontier settlements of Nacogdoches, Texas, and Natchitoches, Louisiana, and sustained themselves through subsistence agriculture, hunting, and cattle raising.8 By 1795, Catholic missionaries had established a church at Las Cabezas de Vallecillo, near present-day Zwolle.9 Despite any Spanish administrative preference to keep Tejas and Luisiana separate, this population continued to live in the margins...