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Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community
Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity.
With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination.
With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published March 22, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 14, 2024
I’ve been reading this book for 2 years and is the longest amount of time that I have continuously read one text. It has been around the world with me and across the US with me as every time I traveled I’d be sure to grab it and throw it in my carry on. It took me so long to read this book because it required lots of space to digest it.
Kelly Clayton, my Louisiana sister who I met years ago at a writing workshop out in Cali, posted about having a poem featured in this book. I saw the title and purchased right away.
This is a necessary book. I am so grateful that it exists. I learned so much about myself, and saw so much of myself and my heritage in this writing… For this to exist, such a powerful piece of contemporary Creole discourse, one of this depth and intention, is a blessing to the entire Creole community and indigenous community in Louisiana and the Creole indigenous diaspora…
This anthology describes and names and gives language to so much of what I had experienced and picked up through osmosis in childhood and growing up —what I thought to be intuition and not deserving of close examination or study.
Unfortunately, the devaluing or failure to place value in your everyday culture and ways of being is far too common among people of color. This failure to recognize your brilliance or the excellence of your cultural specificities and nuances …
Oftentimes, “we” don’t believe or don’t see the value of what we know to be true or our way of being—now popularly referred to as centering “lived experience.” Then, it takes for an “outsider” to Christopher Columbus it. Name it. Call it special for us to see it as special. I appreciate that the editors of this anthology are all of the culture and community.
After reading this book, I am reminded and inspired to get to work. I recently completed two branches of my family tree and documented 172 members on just one branch— the Bertha (Romar) Bush and James Ovide Bush Sr.
I have so much writing to do, so much documenting to do, so much archiving to do, so much research to do…
Kelly Clayton, my Louisiana sister who I met years ago at a writing workshop out in Cali, posted about having a poem featured in this book. I saw the title and purchased right away.
This is a necessary book. I am so grateful that it exists. I learned so much about myself, and saw so much of myself and my heritage in this writing… For this to exist, such a powerful piece of contemporary Creole discourse, one of this depth and intention, is a blessing to the entire Creole community and indigenous community in Louisiana and the Creole indigenous diaspora…
This anthology describes and names and gives language to so much of what I had experienced and picked up through osmosis in childhood and growing up —what I thought to be intuition and not deserving of close examination or study.
Unfortunately, the devaluing or failure to place value in your everyday culture and ways of being is far too common among people of color. This failure to recognize your brilliance or the excellence of your cultural specificities and nuances …
Oftentimes, “we” don’t believe or don’t see the value of what we know to be true or our way of being—now popularly referred to as centering “lived experience.” Then, it takes for an “outsider” to Christopher Columbus it. Name it. Call it special for us to see it as special. I appreciate that the editors of this anthology are all of the culture and community.
After reading this book, I am reminded and inspired to get to work. I recently completed two branches of my family tree and documented 172 members on just one branch— the Bertha (Romar) Bush and James Ovide Bush Sr.
I have so much writing to do, so much documenting to do, so much archiving to do, so much research to do…
September 1, 2023
A must read for those interested in Louisiana Creole identity!
Too often Indigenous Americans are a footnote in the retelling of Louisiana’s food and cultural history. However, this collection of essays and community responses disrupts the study of Creole identity in Louisiana by showcasing Louisiana Creole voices and stories in the unique cultivation of what it means to be “Creole” in Louisiana. By recentering the definition of Louisiana Creoles “as a post-contact Indigenous group connected to specific Louisiana Creole communities with historic ties to specific tribal communities/histories, narratives, landbases, and practices within Louisiana terrains,” the contributors of this book progress the notion of creoleness within a Personhood matrix of landbase, language, religion, and sacred history. Within this matrix, Creole identity is better recognized as an Afro-Indigenous cultural identity cultivated through mestizaje. Thus, Louisiana Creole culture can be situated within the study of Caribbean Latinidad and Latinx people.
Too often Indigenous Americans are a footnote in the retelling of Louisiana’s food and cultural history. However, this collection of essays and community responses disrupts the study of Creole identity in Louisiana by showcasing Louisiana Creole voices and stories in the unique cultivation of what it means to be “Creole” in Louisiana. By recentering the definition of Louisiana Creoles “as a post-contact Indigenous group connected to specific Louisiana Creole communities with historic ties to specific tribal communities/histories, narratives, landbases, and practices within Louisiana terrains,” the contributors of this book progress the notion of creoleness within a Personhood matrix of landbase, language, religion, and sacred history. Within this matrix, Creole identity is better recognized as an Afro-Indigenous cultural identity cultivated through mestizaje. Thus, Louisiana Creole culture can be situated within the study of Caribbean Latinidad and Latinx people.
April 16, 2024
Enlightening in helping me learn about and interrogate my own cultural history. Poetic and academic, incorporating scholarly and community voices. A plea against Louisiana Creole erasure. At parts I wished it was broken down further with more in-text definitions, though the essays were well-researched and cited.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews