#lesserknowntribes

Chief Stickwan's two daughters holding buckets and carrying burdens on backs with trumplines, Klutina-Copper Center band of Lower Ahtna, 1903

The Apalachee are a Native American people who historically lived in the Florida Panhandle. They lived between the Aucilla River and Ochlockonee River, at the head of Apalachee Bay, an area known to Europeans as the Apalachee Province. They spoke a Muskogean language called Apalachee, which is now extinct.

The Apalachee occupied the site of Velda Mound starting about 1450 CE, but had mostly abandoned it when Spanish started settlements in the 17th century. They first encountered Spanish explorers in the 16th century, when the Hernando de Soto expedition arrived. Traditional tribal enemies, European diseases, and European encroachment severely reduced their population. The survivors dispersed, and over time many Apalachee integrated with other groups, particularly the Creek Confederacy, while others relocated to other Spanish territories, and some remained in what is now Louisiana. About 300 descendants in Rapides and Natchitoches parishes assert an Apalachee identity today.

Villages and towns were often situated by lakes, as the natives hunted fish and used the water for domestic needs and transport. The largest Apalachee community was at Lake Jackson, just north of present-day Tallahassee. This regional center had several mounds and 200 or more houses. Some of the surviving mounds are protected in Lake Jackson Mounds Archaeological State Park,

The Apalachee grew numerous varieties of corn, pumpkins and sunflowers. They gathered wild strawberries, the roots and shoots of the greenbrier vine, greens such as lambsquarters, the roots of one or more unidentified aquatic plants used to make flour, hickory nuts, acorns, saw palmetto berries and persimmons. They caught fish and turtles in the lakes and rivers, and oysters and fish on the Gulf Coast. They hunted deer, black bears, rabbits, and ducks.

About the year 1,000 B.C., a tribe of Indians settled in the general Brevard area of Florida. These early inhabitants were named Ais or Ays (Ah-es) by the first Spanish explorers. The Ais Indians were aboriginal and should not be confused with the Seminole Indians. The Ais lived in small nomadic bands and chose various prime locations along the Indian River to make camp. The beach area was the normal winter habitat but with the coming of summer and the ever present mosquito, the Indians would migrate to the higher mainland ridges.

The tribe consisted of a series of small villages each commanded by its own village chief. They lived in wooden frame structures that were completely covered with palmetto leaves. The largest house in each village belonged to the chief and it was usually located in the center of the village. In his house was a seat of honor and other places where his second in command and advisers were stationed. It was here that the village chief enacted village laws and ruled and judged his tribe.

The Atakapa-Ishak (uh-TAK-uh-paw – ee-SHAK), are a Southwest Louisiana/Southeast Texas tribe of ancient Indians who lived in the Gulf of Mexico’s northwestern crescent and called themselves Ishak. The name means The People.

In prehistoric times the Ishak divided into two populations known to this day as, “The Sunrise People” and “The Sunset People”.   Some Ishak lived on the south coast of what is now Texas, down to Matagorda Bay. Other Ishak lived on the upper coast of the Gulf’s northwestern crescent at what is now Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana.  In Louisiana, on the coast, we spread all the way to what is now Vermilion Bay.  The former Ishak, those on the lower coast, inhabited the land to perhaps a distance of a week’s walk.  Those on the upper coast inhabited the land to perhaps a distance of several weeks’ walk.

They were called Atakapa by the Choctaw.  The name was used by the Spaniards and French colonizers in Louisiana,  as a slur word to refer to the Ishak people. This gave them a reputation and rumor of being “man eaters”, which continues through today.

In 1641, the Accomac Indians, an Algonquin-speaking tribe located on the Eastern shore and part of the group collectively referred to as Powhatan Indians, became known as the Gingaskins when they accepted a patent from the English government for the remaining 1,500 acres of their ancestral lands on the ocean side of Northampton County. Various legal and boundary struggles with their English neighbors over the years reduced the lands reserved for the Gingaskins to 650 acres, which was patented again in 1680.

Over the years, Indian lands were often leased to outsiders by the state and county governments in order to “help support” Gingaskin members, most of whom chose to maintain a traditional lifestyle and not farm the lands. Great concern was exhibited by white neighbors about the Gingaskins intermarrying with free negroes and charges were made in petitions to the General Assembly in 1784 and 1787 that there were no more “real” Indians left on the reservation and therefore the land should be given to whites who could “better protect it”, by which they meant farm it in the traditional English way.