TEACHING THE BABIES. Carolyn Burgess Savage returned to her reservation to help save the Chitimacha language and culture. Part of her work is teaching at Yaamahana (House of the Child) Day Care Center. Photo by Miguez Studio

I grew up in a shack in Louisiana’s sugar cane fields. Our family never ate with a knife—maybe a fork, mostly spoons. The house was one room, about 10 by 30 feet, divided by curtains. Eight of us lived under that roof, including my physically handicapped sister. During hurricanes Mama always took us outside and placed us in a ditch to protect us, but that shack never blew down. The first time I had a shower was as a college student.

As Chitimacha Indians, we were more accepted by the black people in our town than by whites. Most of our Chitimacha people were fair; those who had long straight black hair and/or were darker had a rougher time and generally could not pass as white and get into white schools.

I began eighth grade in the recently desegregated (for Indians) white public school. Before that, Chitimacha youngsters were sent to high school preparatory schools in Oklahoma or North Carolina or Haskell Institute in Kansas. Most parents did not want to send their young children that far for that long, and mine didn’t either. Until integration Indian education effectively ended at ages 13 or 14 at the seventh grade.

My mother and others fought for Indian children’s right to attend the local high school; subsequently the Chitimacha had to fight so they could ride the school bus. The first integrated class graduated in 1962; blacks were not allowed in those schools until 1968.

When I entered the public school, they could have put me in China, and the change could not have been more dramatic. I went from a one-room school with 37 children and one teacher to a school with hundreds of students and teachers I didn’t know. And we Chitimacha children were behind academically as well.

Growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, reservation Chitimacha did not go to stores, go shopping, or do most of the things that the white children did in town. Once Indian students went to public school, they interacted with the white community in and out of school, and the white community was more accepting of Indians.

I graduated from high school in 1964. For two semesters I attended Louisiana College in Pineville, LA, working three jobs and holding on to two scholarships. An older cousin who had learned the baking trade at Haskell Institute suggested I transfer there, and I did.

I began a post-secondary program in Lawrence, KS, at Haskell Institute where it did not cost a dime for tuition or board, but all students had jobs to keep the campus up. (Haskell Institute became Haskell Indian Nations University in 1993.) I graduated from the post-secondary business program in 1968.

Haskell changed my life forever. Part of our training was to reside for a month in a campus apartment to learn how to live a self-supporting life. Before graduation, we planned and executed a formal sit-down dinner. This “Rose Room” experience prepared us to meet kings and queens and U.S. presidents, and I did! I met President Johnson, Golda Meir, and the shah of Iran. I attended the funeral for President Eisenhower. Without the Rose Room training, I would have been lost and embarrassed.

Haskell’s reputation for producing outstanding graduates was well known. Government and private employers from all over the country recruited our graduates. The year I graduated, representatives of the State Department talked to us. Two of my classmates accepted jobs in Washington so I moved there too, becoming one of seven secretaries for the directors of the India, Nepal, and Ceylon desk. One day I answered the phone and heard Robert Kennedy on the line!

The biggest thing that really hit me at Haskell, though, was that I, a Chitimacha, had no Chitimacha culture or language. It had not been spoken since the early 1900s. The first time I ever heard my language was when I was 12. The word I heard was kica, which means maiden or girl. When I heard it, I said, “That will be my first daughter’s name,” and it is. I named all my children from the Chitimacha language.

All the other students at Haskell could talk about their tribal language, customs, laws, dress, foods, dance, folklore, and history. I wondered why my Chitimacha world had been kept from me. I felt horrible.

The Chitimacha you meet today, like me, are descendants of 50 who hid in Louisiana’s swamps between 1812 and 1824. The rest were killed or enslaved during that 12-year war. As this group of 50 grew, they intermarried with the outlying French families. Only five households today have both Chitimacha parents.

In 1991, I returned home to Charenton, LA, to the reservation, 30 some years after I had graduated from Haskell. I started my new career at the age of 45. I began talking with old people who knew some history and some of the language and working with the children. But we had no fluent Chitimacha speakers; the one lady remembered words from 40 years before.

We discovered that various museums in this country have indigenous language recordings, including the Smithsonian and the University of Indiana. We requested copies of our written or recorded language from any place we could. We contacted Julian Granberry, a linguist who knows our language and has put everything into book form. He thought we were extinct. Now he’s 76, but he meets with us each year to help us.

Today, with the additional money coming from our casino, the tribe can pay 100% tuition and board for each enrolled child accepted at any college anywhere. Every semester we have someone graduating somewhere in the country. Even the daycare preschoolers talk about going to college because they have older siblings who go.

In return for the tribe’s scholarship, each student must give 10 hours of community service on the reservation for each $1,000. They stay with relatives — very distant relatives usually since many of them have never lived on the reservation. They leave here with some of the language and more of the culture of their tribe.

I would love to go back and get my college degree — at Haskell. My oldest daughter, Kica, attended Haskell and is a licensed practical nurse. But my priority now is to get the Chitimacha language back out there. My life is learning the language, seeing the babies speak it, and even having the elders learn what they should have been allowed to speak from birth.

Barbara Johnson Williams is a retired special education secondary teacher living outside of Memphis, TN. She met Carolyn Burgess Savage when she visited the Chitimacha Tribal Cultural Center in search of a double-sided basket. A longtime contributor to the American Indian College Fund, Williams has visited several tribal colleges on the College Fund tours.