360 BUKEAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull. 43 



at noon. Then the dance continued around it until the pile was 

 consumed, which lasted about 30 minutes." If we could reconstruct 

 these ancient ceremonials in their entirety we should probably find 

 that other deities besides Ku'tnahin were honored in them. 



Although the Chitimacha no doubt had a very well-defined set of 

 ideas regarding a man's fate after death, the only record of their views 

 is contained in a rather unsatisfactory paragraph in Duralde's letter. 



"At death," he writes, "the body only perishes; the principle of 

 life never dies, but when separated from the body in death it visits 

 unknown lands, until returning into the bosom of a woman whilst 

 the man is employed in the act of procreation, when it assumes a 

 new course of life in this world." " This is interesting, nevertheless, 

 as showing the existence of a belief in rebirth. 



THE ATAKAPA GROUP 



The Atakapa 



The name of this tribe is Choctaw, signifying " man-eater," and 

 indicates the unsavory reputation which the tribe had acquired 

 among Mississippi river people. Many of the early maps designate 

 southwestern Louisiana and the entire Texas coast as a country occu- 

 pied by " wandering cannibal tribes," and Atakapa itself is often 

 thought to have been employed in a general, indefinite sense. As a 

 matter of fact, however, it is never known to have been applied to 

 any Indians except those between Vermilion and Oalveston bays, 

 i. e., to those constituting what is now" called the Atakapan linguistic 

 stock. In a political sense it came to designate a district embracing 

 the i^resent parishes of St. Mary, Iberia, St. Martin, Lafayette, and 

 Vermilion. From this it might seem as if the Atakapa had once 

 occupied the entire region, but according to the best evidence St. 

 Mary and the eastern parts of Iberia and St. Martin were in Chiti- 

 macha territory. On the other hand, the Atakapa extended very 

 much beyond these limits to the westward over what are now the 

 parishes of Calcasieu, Cameron, Acadia, and parts of St. Landry, 

 then included in the district of Opelousas. 



As the Atakapa country lay at some distance from the first centers 

 of colonization, it was not encroached upon to any great extent until 

 late in the eighteenth century. At that time there appear to have 

 been three main bands of Atakapa in Louisiana occupying the same 

 number of principal river valleys. The easternmost were on Ver- 

 milion river and bay. Their chief village seems to have been above 

 Abbeville, but there is said to have been a smaller one lower down. 

 The head chief of this division in the latter part of the eighteenth 

 century is called Kinemo, Kanimo, Skunnemoke, or Escanimon. 



" Ms., a copy of which is in the Bureau of American Ethnology. 



