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Abstract
Some scholars still view American Indian history as part of the study of the American West, and most work in the field examines the nineteenth century. Research must better represent the diversity in Native America and acknowledge the continuing existence of Indigenous communities. This work offers analysis of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, a small community in the South, extending into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In the eighteenth century, Coushattas constituted part of the powerful Creek Confederacy in what is today Alabama. This confederacy included a culturally and linguistically diverse group of towns that began cooperating as an adaptation to European contact. The Creek Confederacy included seventy-three towns and 15,000 people at the height of its power. Coushatta people moved west away from American encroachment beginning in the late eighteenth century. One group of approximately three hundred Coushattas ultimately settled near Bayou Blue in Southwest Louisiana in the late nineteenth century. The federal government placed a small parcel of land in trust for the Coushattas in 1898, but most members of the community either purchased or homesteaded their land.
The community functioned with no real support from the federal government until the 1930s when the Bureau of Indian Affairs took financial responsibility for Coushatta education. The BIA further extended services to include a school directly operated by the bureau and contract medical services in the 1940s but discontinued these services and removed the small parcel from trust status in 1953 when the government unilaterally terminated the Coushattas. The community began efforts to regain federal recognition in 1965 by forming Coushatta Indians of Allen Parish, Inc. and achieved state and federal recognition by 1973.
From the beginning, the Coushattas have used a number of strategies to keep their community economically viable, and their leaders have fought to gain not only federal services but also economic opportunities. Following the example of the Seminoles of Florida, the Coushattas experimented with high-stakes bingo in 1985 with poor results. However, after passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana established one of the most successful Indian casinos in the country. The Coushatta community has transformed itself from an economically marginal community into the third biggest private employer in Louisiana and a powerful political force on the local, state, and national level.
