On a recent morning in the southern Louisiana town of Bourg, Cynthia Owens reviewed flashcards with her kindergarten class.
She held up an image of a crocodile. “Caïman”, she said, using the word for crocodile spoken by Indigenous tribes in the region. Caïman, her nine students repeated. Then: “Crocodile”, she said, using the French term. Crocodile, responded the chorus of fidgety five- and six-year-olds.
“Now, who likes apple pie?” she asked. Hands shot up: “J’aime la tarte aux pommes!”
Owens is an instructor at École Pointe-au-Chien, a French-immersion elementary school that opened last fall. Though dual-language programs have been steadily rising across the country in recent years, this is the first one in Louisiana to teach Metropolitan French alongside local French dialects spoken by the Indigenous and Cajun communities it serves. Most of the school’s nine students belong to the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe, which for centuries has integrated Indigenous words for the plants and animals, native to the bayous, with French.
Preserving Indian French, as community members call it, has taken on new urgency in recent years as climate-related hurricanes and coastal erosion threaten to displace the tribe from the land it has called home for centuries.
“A lot of our words are attached to this place,” said Patty Ferguson-Bonhee, a Pointe-au-Chien tribe member, the community’s legal counsel and director of the Indian legal clinic at Arizona State University. “It’s a form of unity and understanding.”
In 2021, Hurricane Ida struck the tribe’s ancestral village of Pointe-aux-Chenes, destroying 68 homes and damaged the town’s then shuttered elementary school, which tribe members described as a linchpin of the community. Home insurance rates have skyrocketed and locals say many of their neighbors have left.
Yet those who remain say the new school is a beacon of hope.
“With this school reopening, a lot of people feel like we’re back up, like you can’t keep us down,” said tribe member Dominique Naquin, 29, who enrolled her two sons at École Pointe-au-Chien. “Everybody you talk to is excited about this.”
There are about 850 members of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe, and elders estimate that about half of that population speaks Indian French. But most of those speakers are over the age of 60.
“All the elders that speak it, a lot of them are old, they’re passing away, and they’re taking that language with them,” said Kahlie Naquin, the nurse at École. Naquin grew up hearing her grandparents speak Indian French and studied modern French in high school. (Naquin is a common name in the community, and Dominique and Kahlie are not related.) “When I brought what I was learning home, my grandpa said: ‘Well, that’s not right,’ – it’s not the same,” she said. “But it’s different here because these kids get both [dialects].”
The Pointe-au-Chien descend from the Native Chitimacha tribe, who settled in what is now Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes and intermarried with French-speaking settlers.
For decades, French was banned from Louisiana public schools – even though local papers report that as many as 1 million people spoke the language at home, according to 1968 census records.
“If you spoke in French, they would hit you with sticks on your fingers,” said tribal elder and fisher Earl Billiot. Billiot, who still feels more comfortable speaking French than speaking English, attended an Indigenous-only school run by missionaries before desegregation. “It didn’t take long to learn to speak English.”
Louisiana didn’t lift its ban on French in schools until 1974, and the number of French speakers in the state has declined to around 120,000, according to local press. after newsletter promotion
“It’s this irony where public support for French in Louisiana is at its height when the number of French speakers in Louisiana is at its lowest,” said Will McGrew, the school’s board president and CEO of Télé-Louisiane, a multilingual media company. “When we had the highest number of French speakers, we had the strongest discrimination.”
Tribe members and parents started petitioning for a French-immersion school in 2018. The effort picked up steam after the state closed Pointe-au-Chien’s elementary school in the spring of 2021 due to low enrollment over the protests of parents and community members. In 2022 then governor John Bel Edwards signed a law allocating $3m to establish the school.
“Not only were we able to get the school reopened, we were able to make it a French-immersion school,” said McGrew. “They’ve been trying to do that for decades, not just in Pointe-aux-Chenes, but in all the surrounding communities. It’s a huge victory.”
This year classes are being held in the town of Bourg, five miles down the road from Pointe-aux-Chenes, while construction crews work to stormproof Pointe-aux-Chenes’ elementary school. The school currently serves nine kindergarten and first-grade students, taught by three French speakers, but school officials say it will expand, adding a new grade each year.
Dominique Naquin said her sons are embracing the language they are learning at school. “You can see the kids at functions, grouping up and speaking French with each other. You’ll see them going up to their great aunts and uncles and talking with them in French,” she said. “I think it’s amazing.”
Communities like Point-au-Chien face an uphill battle in their quest to preserve their language. About 40% of all languages worldwide are endangered, according to the Language Conservancy advocacy group. Indigenous coastal communities such as Point-au-Chien are especially vulnerable because they face the combined pressures of rising seas, intense storms and temperature increases that threaten traditional ways of life. Point-au-Chien’s neighbors, the Isle de Jean Charles band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, have already begun to resettle further inland.
McGrew said he sees the school as one tool of many to strengthen the tribe’s climate resiliency.
“We need to build floodwalls. But it’s pointless if there are no community institutions behind these floodwalls,” he said. “By preserving the language, you reinforce communities. That’s why the school is so revolutionary.”