Of the Atakapa Language Accompanied by Text Material

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY BULLETIN 108 A DICTIONARY OF THE ATAKAPA LANGUAGE ACCOMPANIED BY TEXT MATERIAL BY ALBERT S. GATSCHET AND JOHN R. SWANTON SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY BULLETIN 108 A DICTIONARY OF THE ATAKAPA LANGUAGE ACCOMPANIED BY TEXT MATERIAL BY ALBERT S. GATSCHET AND JOHN R. SWANTON UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE WASHINGTON : 1932 For sale by the Superinteudent of Documents, Washington, D. C. I LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL Smithsonian Institution, ' Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, D. C, May 16, 1931. Sir: I have the honor to submit the accompanying manuscript, entitled "A Dictionary of the Atakapa Language," by Albert S. Gatschet and John R. Swanton, and to recommend that it^^be^'published as a bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Very respectfully j^ours, M. W. Stirling, Chief. Dr. C. G. Abbot, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. in . CONTENTS Page Introduction 1 Atakapa texts: 1 The western Atakapa 9 2. Cakta'lko 11 3. Children's ears and faces 12 4. Yu'lc Caki'n O'k 12 5. Biographic notice of Ponponne 14 6. Chief Cukuhu'-i and Cyprien 16 7. Treatment of the sick 17 8. Himo'c (burial) 18 9. A fight among negroes at Lake Charles 20 Atakapa-English dictionary 21 Index to the Atakapa dictionary 161 ILLUSTRATION Plate 1. Albert Samuel Gatschet- BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY BULLETIN 108 PLATE 1 ALBERT Samuel Gatschet A DICTIONARY OF THE ATAKAPA LANGUAGE (ACCOMPANIED BY TEXT MATERIAL) By Albert S. Gatschet and John R. Swanton INTRODUCTION By John R. Swanton Atakapa dialects were spoken from Vermilion Bay and the lower course of Bayou Teche, La., to Galveston Bay and Trinity River, Tex., and extended westward from the Trinity an uncertain distance between the territories of the Tonkawan and Karankawan tribes. All of the Indians between Vermilion and Galveston Bays were called Atakapa by the French, but those on Trinity River and Bay were known to the Spaniards as Horcoquisa, Orcoquisac, or some similar designation, which we may simplify to Akokisa. The termination isa orisac stands for the native word "ishak" (icak) meaning "people," but the significance of the first two syllables is uncertain. They may contain the word for "river," or the word meaning "west." Hildke ishak would be "western people" and might have been employed in contradistinction to the name given some of the Louisi- ana bands, i. e., Hiyekiti ishak, "eastern people," or "sunrise people." The name "Atakapa " was an opprobrious epithet bestowed by the Choctaw. It signifies "man-eater" (hatak-apa) and probably was not confined in application to the people under consideration but extended to the Gulf coast tribes in this region generally, who did, it is true, have the gruesome custom of eating portions of dead, enemies, though cannibalism was by no means extensively resorted to. Most that is known regarding the history and ethnology of the Atakapa I have already given in Bulletin 43 of this series. Further interesting notes have been collected by Dr. J. O. Dyer in two small pamphlets entitled "The Early History of Galveston" (Pt. I, Galveston, 1916), and "The Lake Charles Atakapas (Cannibals) period of 1817-1820" (Galveston, 1917). In Bulletin 68 I instituted a linguistic comparison between the Atakapa, Chitimacha, and Tunica languages, which had been placed by Powell in three distinct linguistic families, and from this concluded that they were genetically related. I suggested the name Tunican for the new stock, since Tunica was the oldest of the three to appear in the narratives of European explorers, and, signifying simply "people," — 2 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull, lo is more appropriate than either of the others. In the International Journal of American Linguistics (vol. 5, Nos. 2-4, pp. 121-149) will be found a grammatical sketch of the language prepared by the present writer. The Atakapa and Akokisa embraced four or five principal bands on Vermilion Bayou, Mermentau, Calcasieu, the Sabine and Neches, and Trinity Rivers. The two first mentioned were those known especially as Hiyekiti or Easterners, and spoke a dialect differing in some measure from the language of the remainder. Judging by the only vocabulary of Akokisa which has been preserved to us, the speech of the Trinity River Atakapa differed little from that of the Calcasieu and Sabine Indians. It is probable, though not as yet demonstrated, that the tribe which gave Opelousas its name spoke the Eastern Atakapa tongue. Plainly its affinities were either with Atakapa or Chitimacha and not with the Muskhogean family. Westward, the researches of Prof. Herbert E. Bolton have shown quite conclusivel}'- that the Atakapan group included the Bidai, after whom Bedias Creek has received its name, and at least two tribes still farther west, the Deadoses and Patiri. The Han, found by Cabeza de Vaca in occu- pancy of the eastern end of Galveston Island in 1528, were probably Atakapan. Han may have been derived from an or a°, the Atakapa word for "house." The first vocabulary known to have been taken do^vn from any tribe of this group was also the last to be brought to the attention of students. It was collected by Jean B^renger, captain of the vessel Subtile, in which an expedition under Bernard de la Harpe set out for the Bay of Saint Bernard in 1721. Falling short of their objective, the explorers visited Galveston Bay and returned to Louisiana in less than a month, carrying off with them nine of the Indians of that region, who escaped not long afterwards and undertook to return to their native country. There is reason to suppose that part of them succeeded, since, in 1722, some Indians from the westward visited New Orleans and stated that eight of this band had passed through their country and had been supplied by them with bows and arrows in order that they might obtain subsistence for themselves during the rest of their journey. On the passage to Louisiana with these un- fortunates B^renger, by taking down a vocabulary of 45 words, was able to compensate to the learning of the future, and in some measure to the Indians themselves, for the cruel act of his superior. This invaluable record of Akokisa speech lay hidden among the colonial documents in the national archives of France until 1919 when, along with an equally valuable Karankawa vocabulary, it was published by MM. de Villiers du Terrage and Paul Rivet in the Journal de la Societe des Americanistes de Paris. ^ A copy of Beranger's memoir > Les Indiens du Texas et les Expeditions fran^aises de 1720 et 1721, in vol. xi (n. s.), 1914-19, pp. 403-442. GATSCHET 8WANT0N J DICTIONARY OF THE ATAKAPA LANGUAGE had meanwhile found its way into a collection of manuscripts in the possession of a Swiss gentleman and these were purchased by Edward E. Ayer to add to his Americana in the Newberry Library, Chicago. I came upon this in the course of investigations in the Ayer collection and obtained a photostat copy. The two vocabularies, along with explanatory material and facsimile reproductions of the copies, I prepared for publication in the International Journal of American Linguistics, but before they could be put in type the one by Du Terrage and Rivet made its appearance and I withdrew my own. This would not now require mention except that on one or two points the copy, or my interpretation of the copy, is nearer the Atakapa original as checked by Gatschet's material than the rendering given in the French publication. Perhaps, when the copy was made, the original writing was clearer than at present, or possibly my greater familiarity with Atakapa through the Gatschet vocabularies may have given me an advantage in transUterating some of the words. For our knowledge of the eastern Atakapa dialect we are almost entirely dependent on a vocabulary containing 287 entries taken down at the Attackapas Post (modern FrankUn) April 23, 1802, by Martin Duralde, along with a Chitimacha vocabulary and some scanty ethnological information. Pilling attributes the original collection of the words to a man named Murray from whom Duralde copied them, and indeed the common use of sh with its English value instead of the ch which a Frenchman would have used, or x or some other circumlocution a Spaniard would probably have employed, lends color to the idea that it came through someone familiar with Enghsh. One copy of this vocabulary reached the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia through Dr. John Sibley. It was published in part by Albert Gallatin, along with his comparative vocabularies, in the Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, Volume II (Cambridge, 1836), pages 307-367, and in John Severin Vater's Analekten der Sprachenkunde, Leipzig, 1821, pages 63-84. A copy of the Atakapa words in the latter was made by Oscar Loew in May, 1877, and revised by Doctor Gatschet in January, 1879. Gatschet's copy is preserved among the manuscripts in the Bureau of American Ethnology and has been one main reliance of the writer for the eastern Atakapa forms. Another copy of this manuscript, apparently that retained by its author, was later dis- covered among some old papers in the loft of a house at or near Opelousas, La., where they had lain for some 40 years, and where unfortunately the mice had destroyed considerable portions of them. Its title, translated from the original French, was, "Two vocabularies of the Indian nations, the Chetimaches and Attacapas, being a letter written to Sir William Dunbar, respecting some of the curi- 4 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull, los osities of the country, to be communicated to the Society of the North." This translation and a translation of the rest of the original material, except of course the Indian terms, was made by a Dr.

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