Chitimacha lost its last fluent speaker in 1940. That year might have marked the end of the language had it not been for a group of government ethnographers who recorded and studied Chitimacha speakers in the early 20th century – and a small group now determined to revive the language.

“There was a movement to document endangered languages, and we just got lucky,” said Chitimacha Tribe Cultural Director Kim Walden.

The Chitimacha language, believed to have been spoken for 7,000 years, was the victim of the countless indignities suffered by Native Americans across the country during forced assimilation.

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