École Pointe au Chien

École Pointe au Chien

The country's first Indigenous French Immersion School represents a victory for Louisiana tribes after a long history of cultural erasure

By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

In April 2021, the children and parents of Pointe-au-Chien, Louisiana gathered before the chain link fences of their elementary school, holding handwritten signs entreating: “Sauve cette École.” Save our school. The bayou community’s battle against the Terrebonne Parish School Board’s efforts to close Pointeaux-Chênes Elementary School represents the latest chapter in Louisiana Indigenous tribes’ centuries-long struggle for cultural recognition and access to education.

But in this battle, finally, there was a victory. Due to the tribe’s relentless efforts and the swift mobilization of partner agencies, researchers and scholars, and state officials—next August, not only will there once again be an elementary school in Pointe-au-Chien, but the school will open as the country’s first-ever Indigenous French Immersion school.

According to Will McGrew, CEO and founder of the Louisiana Francophone media platform Télé-Louisiane, the establishment of the new school—which was signed into law by Governor John Bel Edwards on June 24, 2022—“represents the largest single investment by the State of Louisiana in its unique language and heritage since its admission to the Union.”

On June 24, 2022, Governor John Bel Edwards, pictured in the middle, signed into law the creation of the École Pointe-au-Chien, the state's first ever Indigenous French Immersion School. Pictured with him are future students, members of the Pointe au Chien Executive Council, and other stakeholders. Also pictured from left to right: Christine Verdin (PACIT Tribal Council), Will McGrew (CEO, Télé-Louisiane), Donald Dardar (Second Chairman, PACIT), Michelle Matherne (Secretary, PACIT), Chuckie Verdin (First Chairman, PACIT), State Senator “Big Mike” Fesi, Patty Ferguson-Bohnee (PACIT Lawyer), and State Represetnative and Speaker Pro Tempore Tanner Magee. The children are students of the future École Pointe-au-Chien.

Photo courtesy of Will McGrew.

One more generation

It’s been just under fifty years since Louisiana lawmakers removed the state’s constitutional ban of the French language within its public schools. The 1974 Constitution of Louisiana states: “The right of the people to preserve, foster, and promote their respective historic linguistic and cultural origins is recognized.”

Of course, by then, it was too late. Countless of the previous generation of Louisianans had been beaten in the schoolyards for speaking their parents’ and grandparents’ language, assigned to write hundreds of lines of “I will not speak French.” Their children, attending school in the ‘70s, spoke the “American” language. They spoke English.

But within the largely Indigenous population of the Pointe-au-Chien village—living on the precipice of the Gulf—the language has endured just a little longer than in its neighboring Cajun and Creole communities. It’s survived another generation inside of people’s homes. Many Pointe-au-Chien children of the twenty-first century still hear French spoken in their community.

This is largely because the Pointe-au-Chien Indians, along with the other native populations of Terrebonne Parish, were excluded from the public school system until the 1960s—when Louisiana finally started to enforce racial integration in its schools.

“The fact that they were excluded from the school system for longer actually preserved the French a little bit longer, like maybe a generation or so—like thirty years beyond the Cajuns and Creoles,” said McGrew. The reality that the tribe has been better able to protect its heritage as a result of being barred from public education—an act of discrimination that resulted in significant economic disadvantages and barriers to progress within the community—is of a victorious sort of irony. Their exclusion, after all, was justified by Terrebonne Parish leaders as an attempt to erase that very same cultural identity.

History of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe

Named for the fragile place it occupies along the Terrebonne Basin, the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe’s origins can be traced back to the mass displacement of Indigenous peoples caused by the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Biloxi, Acolapissa, and Attakapas Indians convalesced in this ancestral home of the Chitimacha where, within the fold of their shared native cultures, the Pointeau-Chien emerged as an identity all their own—preserving many of their ancestors’ traditions as they made a life on the edge of the world. French, the universal trade vernacular in the region at the time—co-opted from the French colonizers—gradually replaced their individual tribal languages.

The tribe’s centuries-long status as a union of diverse ancient tribes and its lack of “sufficient” primary information about its origins have posed barriers to its official acknowledgment as a Native American tribe by the federal government. The state of Louisiana only granted official acknowledgment to the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe as recently as 2004, in a state resolution that promised “to support their tribal aspirations, to preserve their cultural heritage and improve their economic condition, and to assist them in the achievement of their just rights.”

Among these rights, according to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed in 2007, is “access, when possible, to an education in their own culture and provided in their own language.”

In recent years, lack of federal acknowledgment has prevented the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe from receiving assistance from the U.S. Government in the wake of environmental threats like hurricanes, land loss, and crises like the 2010 BP Oil Spill. Most recently, this included the devastating impact of Hurricane Ida in 2021—from which the community is still recovering an entire year later.

But in the early days of public education in Louisiana, lack of acknowledgment on a local level set the stage for a century of racial discrimination and lack of educational opportunities.

Not officially considered “Indian” by the government or by the local community—who considered them simply “non-white”—the Indigenous communities of Terrebonne Parish were not designated their own schools within the public school system and were barred from attending the Pointe-aux-Chênes Elementary school in their own community. As a result, most Indigenous children went without an elementary or high school education until the 1960s, when Louisiana integration laws began to take effect.

“And then, when people started going to school, they prevented them from speaking French,” said Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, a member of the tribe and a law professor at Arizona State University (ASU), where she is the director of the ASU Indian Legal Clinic. Like the Cajuns and Creoles of the region, she said, “they were prohibited and punished from speaking French.”

Today, though members of the tribe speak French at a significantly higher rate than in other communities, Americanization still looms. The children of Pointe-au- Chien still have French- fluent grandparents. But, as is the nature of assimilation, the language diminishes with each generation. Christine Verdin—a member of the Pointe au Chien Tribal Council who served as a master teacher at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary and Montegut Elementary until her recent retirement—spoke French as her first language and continues to speak it exclusively among her siblings; but her children, who are in their twenties and thirties today, do not speak it fluently. “We have at least one generation ... like my kids, unfortunately, I did not teach them French, which I thoroughly regret.”

Like in most other Louisiana communities in the twenty-first century, the French language is definitely threatened, said Ferguson-Bohnee. “You do hear it in the home more often than most other [places] ... but there’s nothing to support maintaining that.”

Closing Pointe-aux-Chênes Elementary

In 2021, the Pointe-aux-Chênes Elementary School served about one hundred students, seventy percent of them being of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe or the nearby Isle de St. Jean tribe, and the other thirty percent being of Cajun heritage. “It was the highest percentage of Native Americans at any school in the state,” said Ferguson-Bohnee.

“I was always proud of that school,” said Louisiana State Representative and Speaker Pro Tempore Tanner Magee. “It was a National Blue Ribbon Award-winning school, B-rated. For such a small community, such an economically-disadvantaged community—predominately based off of shrimpers and commercial fishermen— to have such a good school was always really great.”

Through collaborations with school administration and tribal leaders, the school had developed curricula that incorporated the students’ Indigenous traditions and heritage. Within the educational setting, they were exposed to tribal gatherings, basket weaving and wood carving workshops, and presentations by tribal members.

“I think having this school within the community is helpful to these kids who are going through very unfortunate environmental changes, which impact their dayto-day lives,” said Ferguson-Bohnee. “Having the school there and having other people who are going through the same thing is helpful for the students for their support system, but also helps them to continue the important cultures and traditions of their families and the tribes that are in the area.”

In March 2021, when the school board announced the proposed closure of the school for the 2021-2022 school year without any prior notice to parents or teachers, the community wasted no time in mobilizing. By the time the official vote was to take place at a school board meeting on April 13, a protest had been organized, an op-ed was signed by thirty-two academics from around the nation, and the Louisiana House of Representatives passed a unanimous resolution urging the school board to vote against the closure, threatening to consider withholding COVID relief funds if they moved forward.

In the petition, published in The Daily Comet newspaper in Thibodeaux and read before the board at the April meeting, the writers urged the school board: “Do not repeat a notoriously unjust history.”

Despite such fearsome opposition, the board voted 6-3 to close the Pointe-aux-Chênes Elementary School, citing dwindling enrollment as the primary reason behind the closure. This claim was proven to be unfounded; Pointe-aux-Chênes Elementary enrolled forty-three fewer students than the neighboring majority-white Montegut Elementary, which had faced the same degree of enrollment drop following the region’s struggles after the COVID-19 pandemic and recent hurricanes.

“Closing a school is like a death spiral,” said Ferguson-Bohnee. “It impacts the stability of the community. Social institutions are important for civic participation and engagement, and that helps community cohesion. And if you remove that community cohesion, you destabilize a focal point in the community.”

Magee echoed Ferguson-Bohnee’s concerns, describing the loss of the elementary school as a death knell to a community already facing significant challenges. “To me, that was like the straw that was going to break this community’s back. Then, once it’s gone, it’s gone, forever. You can’t ever really replace it.”

Something New

After participating in initial advocacy efforts to save the Pointe-aux-Chênes Eelementary Sschool and using Télé-Louisiane’s platform to amplify the story, Mc- Grew—whose background is in economics and policy—assisted tribal members in challenging the school’s closure in the courts. In June 2021, twelve parents of Pointe-au-Chênes Elementary students, all members of the tribe, filed a federal lawsuit against the Terrebonne Parish School Board, its president Gregory Harding, and its superintendent Phillip Martin alleging discrimination on grounds of race, language, and national origin.

The lawsuit was strategic, explained McGrew. “It was the right thing to do, but also kind of created a lever to attract media attention to the story.” Currently, both parties are in the process of settling. The suit also accused the school board of failing to adhere to the requirements of Louisiana’s 2013 Immersion School Choice Act, which provides that “a local public school board, if requested in writing signed by the parent or legal guardian of at least twenty-five students enrolled in kindergarten who reside within the jurisdictional boundaries of the school district, shall establish a foreign language immersion program for such students.”

Prior to the school’s closure in 2021, Pointe-aux- Chênes parents petitioned twice, in 2018 and 2020, for an immersion program to be offered in Terrebonne Parish. “Not having a French immersion program in coastal Louisiana, coastal Acadiana, to me, was just completely hard to understand,” said Magee, reflecting on the area’s vibrant, living Francophone heritage, as well as the educational and economic benefits such a school would offer the parish.

Verdin has long been part of the effort to open an immersion program in Terrebonne, hoping to grant area children the advantages of being bilingual, as well as to reconnect the new generations to the old. “If we teach our kids French now, and their grandparents speak French, then that generation that missed it—they might be more prone to learn French, too, as their kids bring it home,” she said.

Both times organizers submitted petitions, though, they received no response from the parish school board. “We’d submit ... and the parish would not contact parents,” said Ferguson-Bohnee of petitioning for an immersion school. “There should be a trigger, where they’re contacting parents and moving forward, because then once you turn [the petition] in, the responsibility is on the parish. They did not do that.”

“So we knew then,” said Verdin. “That made a statement that [the Terrebonne School Board Superintendent Phillip Martin] was not interested in us having a French Immersion school in his district.”

Following the official decision to close Pointe-aux- Chênes Elementary in 2021, community members and regional partners started to consider new solutions. “We started thinking about, ‘How do we bring a school back to our area?’” With the support of the state legislature— which allocated $1 million of state funding towards their efforts—they started working on a charter school application, with the intention of it being the parish’s first French immersion school.

“And throughout this process, we’re meeting with many stakeholders, especially stakeholders in the French-speaking community, the Francophone community—because we want to create a culturally reflective school of the people from that area, to instill pride the young people, but also to maintain this for future generations,” said Ferguson-Bohnee. “So, we’ve met with many people, even Indigenous Francophone Canadians, CODOFIL, people from the Louisiana Department of Education, our partners at TéléLouisiane, and the French Consul General. We’ve been having weekly meetings ... just strategy and things like that.”

In April 2022, the Terrebonne Parish School board denied the community’s charter school application, but another avenue of action was already underway. At the start of the 2022 regular legislative session, Magee introduced House Bill 261, which would establish the pre-K–4th French immersion school as a special public school that would operate under its own independent governing board, operating similarly to other Louisiana special schools such as the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) and the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. Per the bill, the board would include three members of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe, one member of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians of Louisiana, one member appointed by the governor, one member appointed by CODOFIL, one member appointed by the French Consul General in Louisiana, one member appointed by the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, one member appointed by the Bayou Lafourche Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogees, one member appointed by the United Houma Nation, the state superintendent of education (or a designee), a member of the Louisiana Senate, and a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives. The bill, which also allocated $3 million for the school through the state budget, was unanimously approved by the Louisiana House of Representatives, then also by the State Senate on May 31.

On June 24, Governor John Bel Edwards traveled to the village of Pointe-au-Chien to sign the bill into law onsite. According to Verdin, he is the first Louisiana governor to ever visit the village. The occasion was held in the tribal building and marked by the sounds of traditional drumming performed by tribal members. “I’m most excited because it does help preserve the language, the culture, the heritage, the traditions, and it is about resiliency,” he said at the ceremony. “This is about surviving and holding on to what’s most important to you all.”

There is still work to be done; as the settlement from the tribe’s lawsuit with the school board come to a close, an agreement is being reached that will allow the new school to occupy the old Pointe-aux-Chênes campus, which has been unoccupied since its closure in June 2021 and faced significant damage during Hurricane Ida. As of press time, McGrew said that the settlement "has been agreed to in principle to allow the new school to use the property. The remaining steps are simply procedural."

The school will open in Pointe-au-Chien in August 2023—offering full French immersion to pre-kindergarteners, kindergarteners, and first graders and hybrid immersion for the school’s first classes of second through fourth graders, shifting to complete immersion in all grades as students advance. The school will also prioritize curating an educational experience reflective of its students’ heritage, integrating the history and traditions of the local Indigenous and Cajun communities into its curriculum.

“It’s really exciting,” said Ferguson-Bohnee. “It shows that this culture and lifeways are valued, especially because of this long history of discrimination, especially for the native children, which was designed to suppress the speaking of the language and the actual tribal identity. So now we can have something that’s more culturally responsive, that’s affirming the backgrounds of the students, considering their cultures, and being reflective of the community.”

McGrew, who will serve as the vice president of the non-profit organization established to support the school, described the opening of the school as a “historic moment and a historic opportunity”—an example of a truly resilient community refusing to be silenced in the battle to protect their distinct and important heritage. He said that the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe’s success can also serve as a model for other communities in Louisiana as the door continues to close on opportunities to bring the Francophone culture of Louisiana into the next generation. “I think there’s no reason why this shouldn’t exist in at least every parish, but also at least every community where there are people who want it, [and] especially those who still speak French in a very real way...we’re going to reap the benefits multifold because not only do we keep our small communities alive, we keep our language alive, and we give people reasons to stay, and to invest in, our small towns and Louisiana in general.”

What's In a Name : Pointe-au-Chien vs. Pointe-aux-Chênes

For the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe, the way cultural identity is entangled in language is particularly fraught, and the French dialect they speak carries with it a history of colonialist erasure of its own. But today, particularly in the context of the cultural victory that is this new school, the tribe has wholly reclaimed the language as their own—their ancient words and traditions wrapped tightly within their unique place in the Francophone world

Though the tribe and their village on the Terrebonne Basin have been known by the name Pointe-au-Chien for at least a century—an ongoing linguistic debate between the natives and white settlers of the area is centered around whether the bayou for which they are named was originally called “chien,” which translates to dog, or “chênes,” which translates to oaks—and which is a mispronunciation of the other. But the tribe retains firmly that the name of their ancestral home, and of their tribe, is Pointe-au-Chien. “Every document we’ve found on our ancestors, it is ‘chien’,” said Verdin.

In December 1986, an AP report sent out to Louisiana newspapers documents the height of the debate with the headline “This Town No Longer ‘Going to the Dogs,’” announcing that, following the approval of a 1978 resolution requesting the town’s name officially be changed from “Pointe-au-Chien” to “Pointe-aux-Chênes,” the road signs were finally changed by the Department of Highways. The name of the community’s elementary school followed suit.

So, when tribal leaders went to name the new school, the first Indigenous French Immersion school in the country, they added the “i,” removed the extra “e”. The name of this school, they said, would be École Pointe-au- Chien.

Learn more about the Pointe-au-Chien tribe at pactribe.com, and keep up with Télé-louisiane's coverage of the state's linguistic and cultural landscape at telelouisiane.com.