Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
Sunday, November 3, 2024
Ville Platte Girl
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Monday, October 28, 2024
Maison Blanche
Moi je reste dans un mobile home
Mais tous les soirs je rêve de ma maison blanche
Moi j'ai une femme et un ti-garçon
Et j'aimerais les mettre dans ma maison blanche
Moi j'veux pas d'être president
Mais j'aimerais rester dans ma maison blanche.
Moi j'veux pas d'être le president
Mais j'aimerais rester dans ma maison blanche.
Ma Maison Blanche
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Il était une fois dans la Louisiane une place qui s’appelle la prairie des femmes
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Origin of Grand Coteau
Grand Coteau, La.
The origin of Grand Coteau dates back to 1821, when Sieur Charles Smith, a large land owner in this section, donated land to the church for a convent. The convent was founded by Mother Eugenie. Aude and called “Grand Coteau.” In 1837 St. Charles College was built. The settlement that grew up around the two schools was originally called “St. Charles Town,” but later became known | as Grand Coteau, the name it still holds today.
Opelousas Place Name
photo Pete Gregory |
Olivier Plantation
OLIVIER PLANTATION HOUSE on Bayou Bourbeaux in Prairie des Femmes, as viewed here, shows it to have been a typical river plantation house that was similar to those built by most of the early French settlers in Louisiana. The view is-from.the rear and shows the carriage entrance. A pigeoniere stands oneither side of the house. The present Olivier home, which is also a very old one, is said to have been moved out to its present location from the town of Grand Coteau. All of these old photographs loaned to us by the Oliviers are of especial interest in that they are arranged for viewing with a stereoscope, which makes the pictures thus seen three-dimensional -and very sharp and clear although they are yellowed with age.
KING COTTON Goes To J & W SIBILLE CO. In Sunset
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Prairie Des Femmes Water Corporation
Prairie Des Femmes Water Corporation constructs and operates a water distribution system within and for that part of the area within the confines of St. Martin Parish lying within the following area:
Beginning at a point which is the confluence of Bayou Carencro, Bayou Fuselier and the Vermilion River; said point also being the common boundary of St. Landry Parish, St. Martin Parish and Lafayette Parish; thence following the meanderings of Bayou Fuselier in a northerly direction to its intersection with Bayou Bourbeaux; thence following the meanderings of Bayou Bourbeaux in a northwesterly direction to its intersection with the centerline of Louisiana Highway 93; thence in a westerly direction along the centerline of Louisiana Highway 93, a distance of 5,400 feet; thence in a due north direction for a distance of 7,000 feet to Bayou Bourbeaux; thence following the meanderings of Bayou Bourbeaux in a northwesterly direction to its intersection with Coulee de Marks; thence following the meanderings of Coulee de Marks in an easterly than a south-easterly direction to its intersection with Bayou Fuselier; thence following the meanderings of Bayou Fuselier in a south-easterly direction to its intersection with the western corporate limits of the Town of Arnaudville; thence southerly along the western corporate limits line and a projection thereof to the intersection with the centerline of Bayou Pont Brule; thence following the meanderings of Bayou Pont Brule in a southwestern then southerly direction to its intersection with the Lafayette Parish-St. Martin Parish Line; thence westerly along said parish boundary line to its intersection with the centerline of the Vermilion River; thence following the meanderings of the Vermilion River in a north-westerly direction to its intersection with Bayou Carencro and Bayou Fuselier which is the point of beginning.
Write up from Botanica
Life Everlasting | Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium
Ashlee Wilson, 2024
Installation
In "Café des Exiles," George Washington Cable reports,
"An antiquated story-and-a-half Creole cottage sitting right down on the banquette, as do the Choctaw (women) who sell bay and sassafras and life-everlasting."
What was this old herb the Choctaw women sold while sitting on the banquette in New Orleans? Used by traiteurs in down the bayou communities for centuries, life everlasting known also as fragrant rabbit tobacco and vinéraire is revered for her healing properties, as well as a distinct syrup smell. Indigenous people of this land used her as a sweat lodge and funerary herb, smudge, lung and skin healer, as well as psychological aid. She is a spirit plant and integral part of smoking blends of the Americas. In Creole culture, she was used as a remedy for fever.
Living in southwest Louisiana, I was told that vinéraire was a "lost" plant, her absence a sign of the impact of saltwater intrusion and habitat destruction. But in 2011, a patch appeared at my home, Prairie des Femmes (Prairie of the Women), in St. Landry Parish. I first realized vinéraire was growing by smelling its fragrance. I often say she's smart like a chaoui (racoon). If you leave food out and make a habitat for it, she will follow you around. A mid-successional species, she can appear when a prairie begins to heal, coming back to its original vitality. The quest to identify and grow her has given me what feels like a secret wink from the universe.
From the first three volunteer plants, there are now over 200. I celebrated every new plant, complimented her, called her "darling," manicured the caterpillars, cleared the weeds and protected her from poison as well as from man's cruel blade. The plants multiplied and they got bigger. In addition to making medicines, I save the seeds and share them with native women, and all those who need it, in an effort to return this important healing herb to the land and people of south Louisiana.
edited by Rachel Breunlin
The Prairie Has a Memory Ashlee Wilson, 2024
Ashlee Wilson is a Ville Platte native and self-taught Louisiana French speaker. She is a teacher and artist known for her writing, photography and visual journals that document her acquisition of Louisiana French, as well as native plants and folk herbalism. She is the creator of the Prairie des Femmes blog (2012), an online space that documents this historical prairie's daily life, as well as The Plains of Mary (2014) and the Ô Malheureuse collection (2019 UL Press). She teaches French at the Academy of the Sacred Heart at Grand Coteau.
The Prairie Has a Memory is an homage to her home, La Prairie des Femmes (Prairie of the Women), in St. Landry Parish. Found in records since the mid to late eighteenth century, the land is located in an area of high native traffic near the boundaries of the Attakapas-Ishak and Opelousas territories, just east of the sacred hills of Grand Coteau. A former sweet potato farm, for more than twenty years, Ashlee has cultivated plants and knowledge of the prairie with her family as an act of restoration- planting native species, and implementing a plan to minimally mow, periodically burn, and forgo poison on the land.
La Pointe Claire
Prairie des Femmes generator box by Churchgoing Mule |
Sunday, September 8, 2024
The Protection of the Academy
Notes from Reverend Mother Jouve, July 1864
Thanks to the protection of the generals, or rather to the Heart of Jesus, our property has been respected, and guards have been sent by the officers to protect us from the marauders who infest the area. For more than two months, we heard the noise of the cannons; some of the skirmishes took place on the road which leads to the convent, and from our gallery we were able to follow the phases of a real battle between the Confederate guerillas and the Federal troops.
In these moments of crisis, prayer was constantly our recourse, the Way of the Cross, adoration all day and the Holy Hour at night, the most exact practice of the Rule. Finally, the certitude that our Mothers and Sisters were praying for us, all combined to sustain our courage, and to help us to live through this time of trial with calm and confidence."
20 April 1863
To the Superior of the Convent of the Sacred Heart-
If you desire to send letters to New York, you will please forward them to me by the bearer who is instructed to wait for them. I send a safeguard that will protect your school from the stragglers in the rear of my column and if you desire it will leave a guard. I regret that I cannot call to see you. My daughter is with Madame Hardey at New York.
Mrs. Banks who visited the school but a short time since writes that all are well there.
I am respectfully your obt servant,
N.P. Banks
*Mary Aloysia Hardy ppt compiled by Caroline Richard 2020
Saturday, September 7, 2024
Our Lady is not Bound by Means: The Borders of Prairie des Femmes
Prairie des Femmes is a small prairie found within the colonial Poste des Opelousas. Our Lady is not bound by means but if we must give boundaries she is found at the triangulation of the villages of Grand Coteau to the west, Arnaudville to the east, and Leonville to the north. The historic community of Frozard (the old Olivier Plantation) is found within the southern boundary of Prairie des Femmes, at an intersection of the old native path we now call Hwy. 93 and Meche-Frozard roads, and extends south to the junction of Bayous Fuselier and Bourbeux. She is water-bound by an oxbow swamp to the north, Bayou Fuselier to the southeast, Bayou Bourbeaux to the north and west. There are at least two bridges in the interior prairie, one over the Bourbeaux at Hickory and one over La Coulee des Marks known as Marks Bridge at Jules LaGrange.
She is a prairillon among other larger prairies of Louisiana. To the north, in the back, and across the oxbow swamp is the native-Creole enclave of Prairie Laurent, also known as la Côte/l'anse des Mulates. To the northwest, la Prairie des Coteaux where Cypress Valley can be seen east of I49 at Opelousas. To the west of Prairie des Femmes is la Prairie des Grands Coteaux, and to the east, la Pointe Claire and la Prairie des Gros Chevreuils which touches the western levees of the Atchafayala basin. To the south is la Prairie Basse, aka Prairie de Manne (colonially Prairie de la Grosse Patate), with the greater Prairie Carencro further south.
Prairie des Femmes exists in an area congruent with the boundaries of the Attakapas-Ishak tribal lands and the Opelousas tribal lands and there is much evidence of earthworks, pottery, grindstones and spear points found here. Despite years of modern agriculture on the prairie, these features, as well as land-memory, persist and continue to reveal themselves.
Thursday, September 5, 2024
Tuesday, September 3, 2024
Prairie des Femmes Origin Stories
Prairie des Femmes
Coming to the Prairie and Staying
Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Tuesday, August 6, 2024
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Saturday, July 13, 2024
Friday, July 12, 2024
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Prairie des Femmes at Botanica
Monday, June 24, 2024
Botanica at the Cabildo
Click here to visit the website.
This exhibition explores the cultural meaning of Louisiana medicinal plants and how historically based understandings of them are evolving under the threat of climate change and land loss. Guest curators Rachel Breunlin and Monique Verdin collaborate with herbalists, artists, gardeners, and scholars to place into context stories of historical and contemporary gardens and natural environments.
This exhibition will be open at the Cabildo until May 10, 2026.
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
Rabbit Chew
Tuesday, June 18, 2024
Bashuchak
I've been going down a few rabbit (tobacco) holes in search of more indigenous information about the vineraire. The first reports I received of it being nearly gone down the bayou came from native women who remembered their daddies bringing it in from the rabbit hunt. Folklore says that rabbits live in the briar patch. This rabbit tobacco is a natural healer for the thin skinned lapin if it is ever snagged.
The Native Ethnobotany Database has been helpful in listing the varied ways tribes across the continent used it. I was most interested in some of the ways of the Choctaw, since they were a major tribe in my area of Louisiana. In google searches using different common names for the plant, as well as searching for Choctaw sources with it, I found the book Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial life of the Choctaw Indians by John R. Swanson, that contained by first cite of the Choctaw name for life everlasting: bashuchak, or bvshuchak. I searched online Choctaw dictionaries and a glossary and noted that this word also looked like the word I knew for sumac, bachoucta. In an email with indigenous writer Jeffery Darrensbourg, he relayed to me information that confirmed that bachoucta was the same word as bashuchak (also bvshuchak) and could refer to four medicines: greenbriar (I know this as kantak), elderberry, purple sumac and rabbit tobacco. I can also say that all four of these plant friends grow around my home, and came into my life around the same time.
See my work featuring the above items at Botanica the Cabildo through 2026.
Thursday, May 30, 2024
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Part 9: The prairie has a memory.
Part 9:
Over the two years that I observed this plant I gained an ability to spot her and tell the difference between her and her cousin purple cudweed. In May of 2023 I had Amanda Lafleur, Bill Fontenot and Dr. Charles Ray Brassieur over for what we called a vineraire-coffee summit. I walked them out to the field to see one of the closest plants.
Since I had seen Dr. Allain last winter, every once in a while I would send him a new photograph of the plants. His photos on the USGS survey website were one of my main resources in identification, so we all knew his word was gospel. So finally on a particularly hot day in July I found 13 more plants in the overgrown coton jaune patch to the east side of the field. They were five times the size of the plants in the west yard. With that, I found the courage to call Dr. Allain, who lives 2 miles as the crow flies from me. I explained again what I had growing and encouraged him to come anytime to see the big plants. He was at my field within an hour.
As we walked around he told me that he was initially incredulous because he had never seen this plant just “growing in someone’s yard” like that. He said that it was a mid-successional species, and that they appear halfway to when the prairie habitat is “healed”, that is, back to its original vitality and biodiversity. I found some metaphor in this.
Although Prairie des Femmes is remote, she is hardly untouched. Dr. Allain said that this life everlasting can be found in some of the rehabilitated prairie habitats as well as prairie remnants, and as I understand, needs the biodiversity of the intact prairie soil and root system (never tilled for agriculture) to thrive. Although we are an old and somewhat insulated prairie close to the wild oxbow swamp to the north, our field was not a prairie remnant, but rather a fallow and overworked sweet potato field. In my opinion, this plant must have survived in our place not because it was pristine, but because of the way we managed the land, including planting native species, forgoing poison, minimal mowing and burning periodically.
So my field was not a prairie remnant but maybe the place where I found the first plant in 2011, in the far southwest corner of the yard, was rounded by the plow and retained some type of biodiversity needed for this plant to survive. Perhaps she came on the feet of some bird or deer, or in the fur of the coyotes who passed noisily in the field. Whatever it was, somehow this vineraire patch had survived here. The prairie has a memory.
When we went to the local neighborhood boucherie my neighbor Monique Verdin’s cousins from down the bayou were all there. I gave some of the rabbit tobacco to all the neighbors, Monique’s cousins, as well as her most matriarchal aunt who remembered it. That fall I was put in touch with Marlene Toups who called it the “lost herb” and said she had not seen it in 40 years down the bayou. When I hand delivered a bag to Mrs. Marlene at festivals Acadiens et Creoles, she smelled it and said, “you found it”. Mr. Clovis Billiot said that the salt water intrusion had “tout tue’ en bas”. Hurricane Hilda and Ida were the worst and the water stayed a long time inland, enough time to kill the tender medicinals. I gave the plant and beaucoup seed to Theresa Dardar as well as Janie Luster (or maybe I just called Ms. Janie and offered it).
I was also able to return a big bag to the Attakapas-Ishak tribe through their daughter Maaliyah Papillion, a Creole and Indigenous actress, singer, model, former Ms. Louisiana and third-generation healer. In return her father and uncle gave me information on the ceremonial blend rabbit tobacco was used in, as well as a spear point directly to my eldest son, who had escorted me there.
Vineraire Part 8: Life Everlasting
Life Everlasting
An antiquated story-and-a-half Creole cottage sitting right down on the banquette, as do the Choctaw squaws who sell bay and sassafras and life-everlasting. -George Washington Cable, Café des Exilés
As any good student of Louisiana literature I had read Toole, Grau, Gaines, Percy, Fontenot and Chopin at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. However, it was reading George Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days under the tutelage of the late Dr. Maurice Duquesnay, rumored muse for certain attributes of Ignatius J. Riley HIMSELF, that brought me the first mention of the elusive herb, life everlasting.
No mind, the herb was one of those details that, as a college student, I glossed over. Bay laurel and sassafras were common enough in our food. Bay leaves went in soups and gumbos. I foraged bay laurel at the top of a bluff on Santa Rosa Island, Florida. The sassafras root I was given to chew as a child. The leaf was known in my town as the ubiquitous tonic “tisane” and was, according to Mayor Vidrine, good for everything, including puberty. With harvested sassafras leaves (sometimes green, sometimes red) I would dry and grind filé to sprinkle in my gumbo bowl at the last minute. But life everlasting? What was this old herb the Choctaw women sold while sitting on the banquette in New Orleans?
It took twenty years for me to close my knowledge gap in the indigenous women’s herbal trifecta. As I was identifying the same mysterious herb in my own field, my husband at the time was creating a performance at the Music Box Village in New Orleans called "Café des Exilés" where our friend and poet Moose read so beautifully the very excerpt about the Choctaw women and their life everlasting.
Life everlasting. They say this herb will heal anything: skin, lungs and spirit, and make you live a long time. For me, there was a deeper meaning. Not only was my life feeling utterly over and un-lasting at that time because of my failed marriage, I had reason to attach the folklore about this plant as a respiratory and funerary herb, a protector and smudge, and connector to the afterlife to other experiences I had had. There was a spiritual lesson in this name life everlasting and vineraire, as well as in the properties of this plant. I often say it's smart like a chaoui (racoon). If you leave food out and make a habitat for it, it will follow you around. The everlasting came into my life at a time when we were both at risk of survival. The name life everlasting and the quest to identify and grow it out gave me what felt like a secret wink from the universe and indeed encouraged me to live a long time.