The Traiteurs Down the Bayou

Indigenous healers in coastal Louisiana, called traiteurs, face not just the physical erosion of their homeland but also the loss of their culture. As medicinal plants fade with climate change, so too do remedies and rituals. Meet the indigenous residents working to save their traditions from washing away.

Story by Jonathan Olivier | Photos by Rory Doyle

Theresa Dardar with harvested elderberry outside the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe Community Center in Pointe-aux-Chênes, Louisiana.

Dardar’s life has always revolved around water — her father worked on oyster boats while her husband, Donald, shrimps, crabs, and harvests oysters for a living. The catch was always good, enough to put food on the table and enable a comfortable life in a community they loved. Water, too, has driven them from their home. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Gustav in 2008. When Ida struck last year, they fled north once again and returned to find their house intact. They were lucky — 68 out of the 80 homes in Pointe-aux-Chênes were destroyed. 

“Hurricanes and the [Deepwater Horizon] oil spill, climate change, sea level rise — all that is all playing hand in hand in eating up the community,” Dardar says. These have irreversibly altered the ancestral lands of Dardar and her people. Other indigenous groups also live nearby, like those from the United Houma Nation, the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, and the Bayou Lafourche Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha. 

Only a few decades ago, these groups were able to graze cattle or grow crops on rich land near their homes; today it’s open water. Dead live oak trees sit like gray skeletons in lakes,  a reminder of a bygone era. Plants and shrubs that thrived here have vanished as saltwater invades. Dardar observes that, similarly, her “culture has been eroding for a while now.”

Indigenous people relied on the coastal ecosystem for shelter, dyes, tools, and — of vital importance — medicine. Back in those days, Dardar says, natural medicine was all around them: new oak tree leaves were boiled for coughs, and the bark was used to soothe wounds; horsetail helped bladder and kidney issues; a hackberry tree was sought for relieving sore throats; sassafras leaves and roots eased inflammation. Dardar says that today most of these plants have disappeared from her community entirely and are only available farther north, away from the rising sea. 

Even if the plants could survive here, Dardar says there aren’t elders left who can identify them all. At one time, healers, called traiteurs in French, were the gatekeepers to this plant medicine knowledge. With a combination of remedies and prayers, they healed community members before modern medicine could. The last traiteur in Dardar’s community passed away many years ago, and those with their residual insights have passed on, too. 

“Every time we lose an elderly person, we lose a lot,” Dardar says. “You don’t have that person to go to. We didn’t record what they were telling us at the time. And I don’t remember everything.”

After Hurricane Ida, the focus became rebuilding. Now that life has returned to a semblance of normal, Dardar is compiling every available clue about medicinal plants to retain what is left. Other indigenous people, too, are collecting what they can in a new movement that promises a return to reliance on nature for medicine — much like the traiteurs of years gone by.

Much of what we know today about traiteur traditions was collected by academics who spent time with healers, or was passed down by word of mouth, as it always had been. Ethnographer Frank G. Speck noted, in his 1941 study on medicinal plants used by the Houma people in coastal Louisiana, that they “seem to possess a blending of beliefs and practices acquired from the varied sources of Old and New World cultures.” Throughout the colonial period, healing traditions were swapped between Native American groups and Europeans and enslaved Africans who had settled in Louisiana and became known as Creoles. Remedies and treatments often varied across the state — indigenous traiteurs near the coast had access to different plants than a Creole traiteur a few hours north. Prayers likely differed, too. Still, much, if not all, of the local plant knowledge among traiteurs originated with indigenous people. 

Generally, Louisiana traiteurs engaged in vernacular, or folk, medicine, historically applied through three forms: remedies, magic, and faith healing. Remedies include using plants or household items to treat an illness; magic includes their supernatural abilities handed down from a god steeped in Roman Catholicism; and faith healing is treatment by prayer and the divine. Due to colonial missionaries and contact with the French, many Native Americans in south Louisiana are French-speaking Catholics, too. 

Traiteurs could approach a patient’s illness in a variety of ways — laying hands on someone, a series of prayers, a medicinal plant recommendation, or a remedy involving anything from potatoes to barnyard chickens to kerosene. “For a toothache, the traiteur will make you bite on a nail while he prays,” wrote John Adrian Lançon in his 1986 thesis about traiteur remedies. “Then you must rinse your mouth out with whiskey.”

While Lançon observed that knowledge passes from person to person, he also noted that traiteurs could be born with their abilities. For example, a baby born with a veil — delivered partially wrapped in the amniotic sac — can be a traiteur. So can the seventh son of a seventh son, or a baby born after the death of his father. Orphans are said to heal le mal blanc, or thrush, by blowing in an infant's mouth. Typically, traiteurs did not advertise their healing abilities but relied on word of mouth to treat people, without ever asking for payment.

At one time, most people had at least some idea of medicinal plants to treat themselves. But the traiteurs provided more than just plants — they were the cultural glue that bonded communities. People weren’t considered ill due to pain alone but because their illness prevented them from functioning within the social framework, according to Julia Swett in an essay on traiteurs. Thus, treating and communal prayers reintegrated patients into the community. 

The Pointe-au-Chien tribe relied on traiteurs until, in the 20th century, the problems wrought by colonization were aggravated by rapid Americanization and capitalism. Traiteurs faded as jobs in the oil field took people away from small isolated villages and folks began seeing doctors and taking modern medicine instead.

“It’s low to the ground and looks like a mule’s hoof,” Dardar says, scouring nearby vegetation. She moves behind the Pointe-au-Chien tribal complex, raised off the ground and dome-shaped to resist punishing hurricane winds. There’s just a patch of solid earth here to explore before land gives way to a levee and, on the other side, the encroaching sea. She promises we’re bound to stumble across Carolina ponysfoot, but she only knows its name in her native French, sabot de mulet. 

She eventually finds a patch. “That’s good for lowering blood pressure,” she says, plucking a few out of the soil. Next, she locates some plantain, good for stings and insect bites. Then, an elderberry tree sporting white flowers, which she’ll dry and use for colds, fevers, and the flu. 

Dardar credits plants like these with bolstering her health, even curing her of illness. When she was in her early 20s, she suffered from liver issues, with pain that wouldn’t abate. So she did what everyone in her community did in those days — she sought consultation from a traiteur. Louis Naquin, her husband’s great-uncle, listened to her symptoms closely and doled out his recommendation of several days of brewing tea with plantain and little bluestem. 

“I had to wash the roots of that, make a tea, and drink that for so many days,” she says. Naquin said a series of prayers for Dardar throughout an entire week. Her symptoms cleared up not long after the visit. 

Later, as Dardar experienced uterine complications, she repeated the process: see a traiteur, accept prayers, find some plants, brew some tea. More than 40 years later, she hasn’t had an issue since.

A medicinal plant grows outside the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe Community Center in Pointe-aux-Chênes, Louisiana.

Dardar wants the next generation to have access to the same plant medicine that healed her. Instead of relying on prescription drugs, which often come with unwanted side effects, she feels that herbal remedies can once again bond her community and her culture at a time when it’s all at risk of eroding even further.

But in order to do that, she says her people must do all they can to save plants, collect information, and pass it on. A few years ago Dardar took the first step and received approval for a greenhouse that would function as a classroom to teach herbal remedies and to house hard-to-find plants so that locals can harvest their own, and then plant and use them. 

“I gather plants from all over,” Dardar says, which includes a mix of contributions from local indigenous people, wetlands farther north, or nurseries in New Orleans. Since 2013, she has been working with California ethnobotanist Liza Kachko to pair traditional knowledge with the various plants she collects. Together, they identify local plants and their traditional remedies from archives and previous ethnobotanical inquiries of coastal Louisiana Native Americans. 

Construction finished last year on the raised greenhouse, positioned next to the tribal center in Pointe-aux-Chênes. At 16 by 23 feet, it’s big enough to house a substantial collection of shrubs, plants, and flowers. Barring any other storms, she hopes to open at full capacity later this year. 

These plants being cultivated aren’t in danger of extinction in Louisiana — the issue is regionality and local access. “We used to be able to pick in the backyard, and now we can’t,” says Donny Verdin, a member of the United Houma Nation who lives in Galliano, just east of Pointe-aux-Chênes. 

Verdin has collected plants from nurseries, friends, and people who live farther north. He’s received many from the former principal chief of the United Houma Nation, Brenda Dardar Robichaux, whose grandfather was a traiteur. Robichaux provided him with a few plants that she knew were important but were becoming increasingly hard to find, and Verdin kept cultivating them to perpetuate the tradition. 

One is vinéraire, or pearly everlasting. Although it isn’t native to the Southeast, oral histories show it has been commonly used in tea in Louisiana and was cultivated by indigenous people. Verdin has been told that it was used for sinus ailments and headaches but only knows of a few people still growing the plant in the region. Another is Louisiana sage, which is a native plant that alleviates stomach issues. Others include sassafras, redbay, and black cherry trees — all once ubiquitous but now difficult to find due to saltwater intrusion and land loss. Verdin hopes that by growing this network of cultivated plants, even if his community can’t halt the coast’s retreat, they can at least stop the erosion of traditional plant knowledge. 

“The solution is greenhouses and cultivating the plants ourselves, getting as many [as we can] growing in our area,” he says. “Instead of having them in the wild, we’ll have a trade network. We can trade off, and this diversifies the amount of sources we have for these plants.”

Crops and gardens strike a culturally hopeful note in Pointe-aux-Chênes.

While these repositories will reconnect a fragmented indigenous cultural memory, what’s still missing and harder to uncover are the prayers and rituals associated with treating. If a traiteur didn’t transmit their prayers to anyone else, they died with them. “It’s basically only people like me who are using more plant-based medicine than actually the cultural practice with prayer,” Verdin says. 

Although indigenous traiteurs are gone from Verdin’s and Dardar’s communities, Creole or Cajun traiteurs can still be found in small towns throughout south Louisiana that share similar healing traditions. Becca Begnaud is a traiteur who lives near Lafayette who’s seen an uptick in interest in the craft in recent years, crediting a younger generation interested in meditation, health, mindfulness, and spirituality. 

Begnaud, who’s been practicing for 30 years after learning from an elderly traiteur, doesn’t treat with plants, only prayers and by laying her hands on patients. She doesn’t consider herself a traditional traiteur due to her background in other forms of healing, like Reiki. “Sometimes I do guided meditation,” she says. “Sometimes I just do a prayer, and that’s it.” 

Begnaud thinks there are more traiteurs left than we know — they just aren’t advertising their practice and don’t adhere to more traditional notions of what a traiteur should be. If someone was born with the gift of healing and is using that gift in some way, Begnaud asserts they’re genuine traiteurs doing the work healers have always done.

“Treating is different now, just like our lifestyles — we just don’t live the way we used to,” she says. “But it’s still alive. The spirit of who we are, it’s still alive. Things have to change in order for them to remain.”

Isle de Jean Charles, an island in Terrebonne Parish, once spanned more than 22,000 acres, surrounded by forests and marsh and winding bayous. Several groups of Native Americans have inhabited it for generations and now call themselves the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe. Today the island has shrunk to only 320 acres. Levees surround it to prevent flooding, but the island’s only road to the mainland is easily and often swamped by high tides or swift wind. During the active 2020 hurricane season, most island residents evacuated seven times to escape danger. A year earlier, Hurricane Barry’s storm surge flooded the island with as much as 15 feet of water, forcing several evacuations by the U.S. Coast Guard. 

In the midst of so much environmental uncertainty, almost everyone abandoned the island over the years. The 42 families that remain have faced the tough prospect of relocating because soon the island will no longer be a viable place to live. These people are often billed as the nation’s first climate refugees, being forced to initiate a “managed retreat” due to rising seas. But their flight is also evidence of the horrors of industry and its shortsightedness. According to Jessica Simms in Solastalgic Landscapes: Prospects of Relocation in Louisiana, colonization and the continued marginalization of indigenous people have created such vulnerabilities for the island residents.

When the collective memory tied to ancestral spaces remains while rapid environmental changes render the landscape unfamiliar, Simms wrote, people can experience “solastalgia.” This refers to the distress brought on by drastic environmental shifts — put another way, homesickness without ever leaving home. So many disasters in such a short span of time can induce “chronic disaster syndrome,” present in those who are forced to live with the long-term stress of the continued loss of family and community

Residents of Pointe-aux-Chênes, Louisiana, live in between the water’s give and take.

On Isle de Jean Charles, the pressure began to mount in the last decade, both for residents and Louisiana officials. In 2016, the state was awarded $48.3 million in federal Community Development Block Grant funds to resettle current island residents as well as those who once lived there but were displaced after Hurricane Isaac in 2012. After many conversations with residents, a land trust on behalf of the Louisiana Office of Community Development purchased property 40 miles north near Schriever to create The New Isle under the Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement program.

This community sits on the site of an old sugar cane field, and will eventually have more than 500 homes complete with retail spaces, walking trails, and even a bayou and wetlands to mimic the marshy landscape residents left behind. Of the 42 families, 38 on the island have decided to relocate. People should begin moving into their homes this year with a new hope that they’ll be able to settle in relative security while their ancestral lands to the south continue to erode into the sea.

Some of Monique Verdin’s Houma ancestors lived near Isle de Jean Charles before they fled to higher ground a few generations ago. She worries that with so much uncertainty caused by environmental disasters, relocations will continue, which will hasten cultural degradation. Movement — of people and their material culture — is an approaching reality for much of Louisiana’s coastal communities, but there are few solutions being floated. Government moves slow, and the land is going fast. 

Taking the matter into her own hands, Verdin purchased 12 acres of land an hour north of the coast, near Arnaudville, to provide a refuge for coastal indigenous people when hurricanes strike. The space will also serve as a refuge for those medicinal plants that can no longer survive in coastal regions — and those that have faded from indigenous cultural memory. “I’ve been trying to work to identify plants and to have relationships with them again,” she says. “But also, I’ve been thinking about getting these plant medicines to higher ground, and how we can then create decentralized networks of gardens that can help propagate them.”

Verdin started the Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange, a seed-saving and oral-histories preservation initiative. More recently, she’s been working as a part of the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo (People of the Sacred Medicine Trail) Network, which is made up of women and nonbinary indigenous gardeners who are activists, artists, and academics but also herbalists who can work to fill in any gaps. 

Verdin has amassed a small nursery full of trees, shrubs, and flowers at her coastal home in St. Bernard that she’s been slowly transporting to her new property, where she’s creating a forest full of valuable flora. Seeds and plants are also sourced from the 1,000-foot medicine wheel garden at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) founded by Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Network member Tammy Greer, who is also a USM associate professor of psychology. Greer and the network have established three greenhouses across the Southeast — one at Greer’s home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, one on Verdin’s property near Arnaudville, and another near the Alabama-Florida line. 

“Native Americans have been strategically disconnected from the land and waters in so many ways,” Verdin says. “When you’re disconnected from sacred places and water, that disrupts lifeways and understandings of the seasons.”

The people from the network, Verdin says, come from indigenous tribes or bands that have, at one point, been in hiding and who are now hoping to “reactivate by trying to remember.” Remembering involves piecing back together certain elements of indigenous cultural tradition, and Verdin knows this will look different than it once did. Culture evolves over the years, anyway, she concedes. Some of the remedies of today will vary from their traditional uses. Plants might fall out of favor, while others will gain newfound attention. Maybe even a few people will step forward with a gift for healing — a resurgence of traiteurs.

What those traiteurs and their rituals and remedies might look like, Verdin isn’t so sure. She says that being one is about more than just cultivating and using medicinal plants. Ultimately, it’s about the spirit within. 

“I hope people pick it back up,” she says. “I think they’re here — they must be. I’m always looking for them.”

Ode to Blackwater Rivers

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