The Choctaw-Apache Tribe of Ebarb is Louisiana’s second-largest tribe, with more than seven thousand enrolled citizens. Half of the tribe’s members live in Sabine Parish, which is a tribal-designated statistical area for the US Census. Ebarb and Zwolle schools have a combined tribal student population of more than seven hundred, and the public schools receive funding under the Department of Education’s Office of Indian Education Programs.

Like many other tribes in the South, the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb began organizing for self-determination in the 1970s, influenced by the American Indian Civil Rights and Red Power movements. Seeking a legal basis for the tribe to collectively interact with local and state officials and complying with self-government provisions in the Indian Reorganization Act, leaders exchanged traditional forms of family- and clan-level leadership for an elected body, incorporating the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb on August 18, 1977. Membership was initially limited to those having “1/16 degree or more of Indian blood” and “living within the territorial limits of Sabine Parish” or those able to “affirmatively establish their family origin as belonging to the Ebarb area.” However, membership criteria have changed over time, and the tribe’s enrollment department has practiced extending membership to descendants of enrolled citizens. Recognized by Louisiana in 1978, the Choctaw-Apache Tribe continues to seek federal acknowledgment.

The tribe has been strongly Catholic since the time of the first Spanish missions. Many tribal citizens attend St. Ann’s in Ebarb, St. Joseph in Zwolle, or St. John the Baptist in Many. The tribe holds biannual powwows in April and in November.

Roots in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Louisiana

The tribe traces its roots to Indigenous peoples living in proximity to eighteenth-century Spanish and French colonial forts and missions, most notably the capital of Spanish Tejas at the presidio Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza de Los Adaes and the mission San Miguel de Cuellar de Los Adaes. The tribe also traces roots to emancipated Lipan Apache captives and Choctaw bands that initially ventured west for hunting and settled in the area before 1800.

Adaeseños—or the people from this area, known as Los Adaes—were often mixed-race soldier-settlers with Indigenous roots who formed strong trade networks and ritual kinship with Caddos and related tribes. By the 1790s they intermarried with the local Indigenous population, including the Adai in modern Louisiana and the Lipan Apache in what is now Texas.

Indigenous captivity was common in the borderlands. By the mid-eighteenth century, Apache enslaved people outnumbered all other Indigenous enslaved people in Louisiana. These Apaches, known locally as Connechi or Canchy, were freed during the Spanish rule of Louisiana. In 1787 Gov. Esteban Miró reissued a previous ban against Indigenous slavery, allowing enslaved people to petition courts for their freedom. Many manumitted Apaches intermarried with other Choctaw-Apache ancestors. John Sibley, a US Indian agent sent to the region after the Louisiana Purchase, noted that despite intermarrying, Apaches continued to speak their language and dress distinctively.

Choctaws first came to what is now Louisiana after 1763, many searching for better hunting grounds. In the early nineteenth century, Sibley settled these small bands of Choctaws west of Natchitoches in the Valley of the Adaes, where they intermarried with the existing community. Many Louisiana Choctaws—including those in Sabine Parish—avoided forced resettlement to reservations in Oklahoma.

By the mid-1770s the tribal community began to cohere. Prior to the 1820s it lived in dispersed, extended-family settlements, stretching one hundred miles between the Spanish and French frontier settlements of Nacogdoches, Texas, and Natchitoches, Louisiana, and sustained itself primarily through subsistence agriculture, hunting, and cattle- and stock-raising. In 1795 Catholic missionaries established a church at Las Cabezas de Vallecillo, near Bayou Scie in present-day Zwolle.

The dissolution of territorial claims by old Empires (Britain, France, and Spain) and the creation of new nation-states (the United States and Mexico) curtailed the tribe’s collective power. It was thrust into turmoil by large-scale arrival of Anglo-Americans into Louisiana and Texas and the disruptive events of the nineteenth century. Such events included the War for Mexican Independence from Spain (1810–1821), the signing of the Adams-Onís Treaty (1821), the establishment of Fort Jesup (1822–1846), the War for Texas Independence (1836), Cordova’s Rebellion (1838), the creation of Sabine Parish and the concurrent creation of Many in 1843, the US-Mexican War (1846–1848), and the American Civil War (1861–1865). The introduction of the Kansas City Southern Railroad in 1898 resulted in the new majority Anglo-American town of Zwolle, which brought many new people to the area.

By the early twentieth century Choctaw-Apache people started doing more wage work, especially in service to railroaders and the timber industry. The rerouting of US Highway 171 in 1937 meant that keeping small herds of free-ranging livestock was no longer practical. Many young men who went off to war in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam were baffled at the changes they saw when they returned. Speaking about the creation of Toledo Bend Lake, Former Tribal Chairman John W. Procell remarked that upon his return from duty in Vietnam, “everything I knew as a kid was gone.”

Contemporary Life

Many facets of Choctaw-Apache culture continue to distinguish the tribe from those around them. Their foodways traditions include a plethora of corn-based foods, including the famous “Zwolle Tamales,” “pepper” (a condiment or side dish of cowhorn pepper, garlic, and sometimes onion and tomatoes), frybread, wild berry dumplings, various types of wild game, and homemade sausage.

In 2011 the tribe constructed a permanent powwow ground on a tract of thirty acres near the Ebarb School, with a long-term plan to build an adjoining tribal complex. Public powwows are held each April and November. The tribal government office is located near the convergence of Louisiana Highways 482 and 3229.

Logging continues to be a major industry in the parish, and there is a centuries-long legacy of men in the community working in the woods. Hunting and fishing continue to be popular activities for supplementing store-bought groceries. In addition to hunting deer and small game, some in the tribe trap feral hogs and loggerhead snapping turtles.

Notable tribal arts and crafts include pine-needle basketry, quilting, hide tanning, knife making, turkey-feather dance fans and bustles, sewn dance regalia, decorative gourds, painted alligator-snapping-turtle shells, and jewelry, including alligator-snapping-turtle necklaces.

Examples of recent cultural resurgence include interest in, and individual study of, ancestral languages, more interest in basket-making (pine needle, white oak, and palmetto/rivercane), and an interest in drumming and traditional social dancing. After a century of sleeping, stickball (toli) is also making a comeback.