[Note from Christopher:  The following article ran in the June 2000 issue of Texas Co-op Power Magazine, whose editors have graciously permitted me to re-publish it here. My good friend Randy Mallory of Tyler, Texas, a superb photographer, took these striking photos for the piece. I first visited the Alabama-Coushatta reservation in East Texas as a young boy. My Grandfather Kirkland, who grew up not far away, enjoyed visiting the reservation and often took me along. The place has changed a lot since those days. The homes are more comfortable and the new tribal buildings much larger. But the forested landscape with creeks and a lake is much the same. It’s still a beautiful place.]

 

East of Livingston, along the flanks of U.S. 190 in Polk County, the land rolls gently away to either side in pine forest and grazing pasture. On a spring afternoon, the blacktop weaves through a lush landscape of bucolic greens bathed in sunlight.

We have entered East Texas, the nearer edge of the Great Southern Forest that once stretched to the continent’s Atlantic shore. Formerly wilderness, practically jungle, once home to panther and bear. Big Thicket country.

And still in some ways remote, mysterious. Roll down the car windows, hear crows calling in treetops. Stop along the road shoulder, listen to the wind rustling leaves, the rat-tat-tat of a red-cockaded woodpecker in a distant creekbottom. Otherwise, the low hum of insects, and silence.

Then regain the road, move on eastward again. Cross Big Sandy Creek and Bear Creek and Mill Creek, then turn right into a narrow paved lane marked by large wooden signs and a small state monument. A hundred yards in, near a collection of buildings, a village center, pull into the Conoco station and convenience store, go inside.

The market is like any other such store, with shelved merchandise and racks of items ready to roll. You might be in Lubbock or Waco or Corpus Christi.

Behind the counter, a tall young man wearing jeans and boots and long black hair flowing over his shoulders is adjusting the radio dial. He settles on a country station, George Strait singing about Texas. Then he turns and nods. His eyes are dark brown, almost black, like his hair, his smooth bronze face set with high cheekbones and an aquiline nose.

It stops you.

Then you notice the newspapers for sale on the counter: Indian Country Today, with a front page photo of a woman performing a hoop dance; The Nations Native Journal, main story on President Clinton proposing new funds for American Indian schools and health care.

Another pause. And you know then, for certain, that you’ve entered a different kind of place. Another culture, really, maybe another time.

You’re on the tribal lands of the Alabama-Coushattas—except for a couple of tiny postage stamp pieces of turf along the Rio Grande, the only territory in Texas that still belongs to indigenous native Americans.

There are several versions of how the Alabamas and Coushattas came to own these 4,600 rural acres of timbered land in Polk County, land the residents, in casual conversation, call “the rez.” The version I learned as a child, when my grandfather first began bringing me here, was simple: White American settlers attempting to bring civilization to dangerous new territories were forced to fight off savage Indians. The conflict was brutal, but in the end the settlers won and gave these Indians land to live on.

That version was derived from Hollywood westerns and TV and a public school education. The version offered by historians is quite different. And the version known by the American Indians themselves is more different yet. It is close up and personal. Listen to Mikko Choba Oscola, also known as Clayton Marion Sylestine, the present chief of the Alabama-Coushattas in Texas:

“We are a unique people. We have been here in Texas all this time, since 1700 or 1800. We originally came from Alabama. We were crowded out. We had cabins and gardens but they came and destroyed them. Instead of fighting them, we just kept moving west.”

The chief pauses. He is 68 years old with thoughtful brown eyes, and soft spoken. Years ago, while working in the woods for a timber company, he broke his hip. Now he walks with a cane. In his younger days, when he was an ace fast-pitch softball pitcher, he earned his nickname, Smiley.

After a moment, he says, “Finally, we found a place where the grass grows, and the water flows,” and his eyes dance a little, his craggy face breaks into a cheerful smile. “This place that was given to us was fit for nothing, they thought. They didn’t think it would grow anything, just a lot of woods.”

And he laughs.

His laughter causes me to recall something from childhood, from that time when my East Texas grandfather, entranced by these Native Americans who lived so nearby, brought me to meet them. In those days, the late 1950s, the reservation had only recently received electricity through the REA (now Sam Houston Electric Co-op) and water was still drawn by hand from communal wells. Yet even then, the people here seemed to laugh more often and more gently than those I lived among. They seemed to have what I later learned to call “the long view” of life. They noticed small oddities and ironies, and laughed about them. And in events where others might find only disappointment or self-pity, they also found humor, the mark of a mature person, or a mature culture.

The chief continues. “We have a history of being peaceful people. We have not been renegades. We are not savages. We have John Wayne movies where we live in teepees. We never lived in teepees. We lived in log cabins. Some of the children who live way over there,” and he waves one hand vaguely into the distance, beyond the treeline, “have come here and wanted to see teepees because they’ve seen television. And they wanted to see warpaint.”

He shrugs. “Sometimes they go back discouraged because they didn’t see it.” Again, he laughs.

The version of the story of the Alabamas and Coushattas as told by historians bear the chief out. Their history goes back to mythic times when Aba Mikko, the sky deity, ruled supreme. Much of that history, passed down orally through untold generations, accumulated over thousands of years, has been lost. More recent history, since Europeans arrived, is recorded in documents.

The two tribes, the Alabamas and Coushattas, were members of the Upper Creek Confederacy, members of the Muskogean Nation in the region that later became Alabama. They were, in fact, a civilized people, with complex laws and highly developed social norms. They were led by elected leaders. They lived in towns with a public square surrounded by rectangular log buildings, with a ball playing yard at one corner and a council house at another. They hunted and fished, pursued agriculture and engaged in trade. An evening meal might include venison, turkey, corn, squash and cornbread.

They did not, however, claim to rule the natural world, or to possess the earth, and were pushed westward by militant Anglo settlers who did, backed by government soldiers. They moved into Spanish (later French) Louisiana, where some remain even now near Kinder. Others moved on into East Texas and settled along the Angelina and Neches rivers. By 1809, peoples from the two tribes living near Nacogdoches numbered 1,650.

Over time, the Alabamas and Coushattas were given lands and had it taken away, a betrayal that would become an ongoing pattern. The history of how American Indians were treated by Anglos—the stories of genocide and racism and greed—are widely known now. In Texas, all the original native tribes were killed or driven out a hundred years ago.

Yet the Alabamas and Coushattas, through either genius or luck, managed to survive in East Texas. Except for one brief period, the state, not the federal government, claimed controlling authority over them, and the people were “managed” by the Board for Texas State Hospitals. The story is long and complex—with bureaucratic neglect, the tribal peoples surviving poverty—but in the end they gained these 4,600 acres of Polk County land. By then the two tribes had intermarried and merged, and now more than 500 tribal members live here.

In 1987, frustrated with the continuing neglect of state government, the Alabama-Coushattas applied for and received tribal status from the federal government. That qualified them for federal loans and funding to improve physical infrastructure. With those financial resources, along with some oil lease and production income, they now are putting in a sewer system and wastewater treatment plant. A fiber optics system will soon connect all the homes to state-of-the-art telecommunications.

Federal recognition also meant better educational opportunities for children. When he was a child, Chief Sylestine recalls, when many reservation children went year round without shoes, there was a small schoolhouse on the reservation. The State of Texas closed it in 1946, refusing to fund it any longer, and the students were transferred to off-reservation schools. Nowadays, students attend school in either Woodville or Big Sandy, though a few go to Livingston. Back then, the chief attended the nearby country school at Big Sandy.

For a while, so did Perry Williams, 55, a tribal council member and Vietnam veteran. (Alabama-Coushatta men served in the army in both World War II and Vietnam.) Williams, however, lived away from the reservation for many years. He attended high school at an Indian boarding school in Kansas, later lived in Phoenix and worked in Chicago, then returned to the reservation in 1971. Even then, like most tribal members, he worked a job off the reservation and commuted.

“I had applied for a scholarship but we did not have money for that under the state,” Williams says. Since federal recognition, he adds, the tribe participates in an educational program. “Kids now have a great opportunity to go to any college and the tribe will support them as long as they keep their grades up. When they graduate, hopefully we will have positions for them to come back to.”

For young people to remain living within the tribal community receives high value on the rez. Extended families are strong, and scheduled activities for young people are ongoing and numerous. Especially athletics. “Like tonight we have a volleyball tournament,” Williams observes. “Tomorrow, it will be softball. Last weekend, a lot of the tribal members, whole families, went to Louisiana for a basketball tournament.”

Williams, a heavyset man who appears younger than his years, glances away, thinking. “The one thing that we are looking at as a tribe is how to make some jobs available here on the reservation. Hopefully, we can support our young people.”

The task, he admits, is not always easy. The world has become smaller, more accessible and homogeneous. “With changes in communications and transportation, we are like anyone else. Somebody can just up and go to Houston and eat and take in a movie, then come back. That’s nothing to us anymore.”

Such changes gnaw away at tribal traditions. Though tribal council meetings are carried out in the Alabama language, much of the proceedings now are translated for those who don’t understand. Williams says his own children do not speak the native language. He rubs his jaw, a troubled look comes over his face. “They speak English.”

For most of us, perhaps, religion reflects our fundamental beliefs and values more than any other aspect of community and personal life. The religion of the Alabama-Coushattas in the pre-missionary era included belief in a supreme creator, in other supernatural beings (such as angels and demons), in the necessity of prayer and supplication, in forgiveness (purification), in divine intervention, in an afterlife, and in communal worship.

That changed, at least in formal expression. Chief Sylestine tells the story this way: “God traveled through here at one time. There was no Christianity yet, but the Indians had their own beliefs. Then there was a guy in Crockett who was going to Beaumont. He got sick and lost. Several of the men found him lying on a bank. We brought him to our houses and nursed him back to health.

“Before that, a little Indian girl had a relationship with a white man and a little boy was born. He lived with white folks and learned to talk English. Later on, he came back with the Indians. So he was prepared for that guy to get lost. The little boy was the interpreter.

“Later, when that guy got strong enough, some Indian people walked with him close to Beaumont. After that, he talked with those people at the Presbyterian church and told them there is a good Indian in the woods at Polk County. They sent a missionary, and that’s how Christianity got started.”

A Presbyterian church was established on the reservation in 1880, three years later a log cabin school. Some of the Anglo neighbors disapproved and burned the church-school down in 1886. The missionaries persevered. Nowadays, tribal members have three churches: the Presbyterian church in the village center, the nearby Indian Village Assembly of God, and First Texas Indian Baptist just up the road.

Chief Sylestine suggests that tolerance for denominational differences, as with most differences, is high in the tribal culture. “We’re worshiping the same God,” he says, “there’s one baptism.” He casually observes that some prefer full submersion while others sprinkle, then smiles mischievously. “And some like to get baptized both ways.”

Yet it’s the Presbyterian mother church, located as it is in the village center, that still serves as a gathering point on urgent occasions. The Alabama-Coushattas will tell you they are like any other people and any other community, and in most ways they are. But if there is a death in the tribe, the Presbyterian church bell is rung, and the peal of it travels through these East Texas woods like an audible beacon. Down paths and wooded roads come then the tribal members. They gather at the church to hear the news of the passing, and together prepare for this latest change.

There aren’t many people, or many places, who enjoy that sort of close-knit community anymore.

 

*****

[Note from Christopher: Almost everyone loves to eat shrimp. But somebody has to catch them first… and catching shrimp is hard work. I grew up watching shrimp boats work the bays and shallow offshore waters along the Upper Texas Gulf Coast. I always wanted to go out on one of those boats. Then I finally realized the easiest way to do that was to get a magazine to pay me for a story on shrimpers and shrimping. In 2003, Texas Co-op Power Magazine agreed to do just that. So I spent several days with shrimper Mark Gilbert on Galveston Bay. This is the article I wrote. My thanks to the magazine for letting me re-publish it here.]

 

 
An hour before dawn, the time of deepest silence, when all the world still seems to be dreaming, Mark Gilbert is down in his engine room among the grease with a wrench adjusting valves, checking gears, wiring, oil. The yellow glow of his work light creeps up the ladder, falls over the moist deck, casts the winch and ropes looped over pin rails in flickering shadow.

Overhead, beyond the upstretched outriggers, low coastal clouds chase a glossy half-moon past stars over the Bolivar Peninsula. A warm southeast breeze carries the salty tang of sea, of surrounding bay and fertile marsh, of rank organic decay procreating new life.

With a quick jab, Gilbert punches the starter button on the wall and the V-6 diesel growls, grumbles, awakens. The deck of the Stingaree 2 vibrates, the low rumble rolls over the dark water, and Gilbert comes up the ladder wiping his hands on a towel, an expression of satisfaction on his face. Time to undo the mooring lines. Time to hit the bay.

Time to chase those shrimp.

***

Gilbert has been pursuing mudbugs since he was a boy. His father was a shrimper, and so was his grandfather. In the pilot house, he lights a cigarette and sips black coffee, reflects for a moment on his own life at age 42. No benefits, no retirement, imports pushing down shrimp prices, fuel costs rising, eternal boat maintenance, state regs in chronic flux, hard labor, long hours, blazing summer heat, starving to death in wintertime. And unpredictable shrimp.

Otherwise, it’s a cushy occupation.

Gilbert laughs loudly, a machine gun discharge, a cheerful affirmation of life’s small ironies. Then, as if summing up, adds, “Only you don’t have to kiss nobody’s ass like on a 9-to-5 job.”

He hits the throttle, turns the wheel. The 40-foot trawler advances slowly along the narrow canal past darkened dockside homes on pilings and covered boat stalls, past the Stingaree Marina with its boat ramps and bait shed—all silent, not even the first gull’s cry of a new day yet—then crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, heading north through a slender cut past Goat Island into open water, the shallow East Bay.

The bay, with an average depth of only two to six feet, is part of greater Galveston Bay, the northernmost in a series of five major bay systems along the 400-mile arc of Texas Gulf coastline. The bays, along with their barrier islands and marshes and wetlands, form complex estuarine systems where fresh river water meets sea water. The commingling creates a salinity gradient influenced by upland droughts and floods, and by how much precious river water is removed upstream by people: city dwellers, farmers, industries. That, in turn, determines the quality and quantity of thousands of species of marine life that breed and grow in the fecund estuaries. Too little fresh water flowing in and the bay ecosystems will collapse. If that happens, then no more shrimp, no oysters, no crabs, no more… well, the intricate web of nature is woven tight, and the consequences much larger than just the bays.

Gilbert nudges the wheel, gazes eastward. The sky is breaking open with a rosy flush of dawn over the marsh. The first black-headed laughing gulls whip past, then several brown pelicans gliding in close formation over the surface, enormous bills thrust forward. Pesticides almost drove these regal birds to recent extinction. Now on the rebound, they are still listed as threatened.

The wind has shifted and picks up, the waves on the bay are becoming choppy, churning the water, a condition Gilbert prefers. “I like it rough and muddy,” he observes. “When the water’s clear, shrimp can see the net coming. They scoot away.”

He falls silent and slows the boat, one eye glued to the depthfinder perched on the dash next to his GPS. Moments later, he explains his worry. The bottom in here is especially shallow since last winter when a drilling company pushed two rigs several miles up East Bay to Frozen Point.

“They needed eight feet of draft but had three feet of water. They plowed up the bottom. Destroyed two acres of oyster beds, left a hill of mud down each side of a false channel. And never came back to clean it up. Seems like there’d be a law.”

Did they find oil?

“Naw, they didn’t.” He shrugs, in no mood now for laughter, and guns the throttle, rotating the wheel to bear west toward Hannas Reef and Port Bolivar, about six miles away, where East Bay opens into the main bay.

“Let’s go for deeper water.”

Gilbert is a short, sturdy man with a beard permanently trimmed in a three-day growth, his head hair cut to a gray burr. His skin is sun-burnished, wind-whipped, his keen eyes crinkled from the relentless bright light. His gimmee cap reads: Commercial Fisherman, Endangered Species. He does not think his own son, Patrick, will become a shrimper. Or his daughter, Claudia.

Nor does he want them to.

***

Half an hour later, Gilbert steps onto the back deck and lowers the portside outrigger. At its tip hangs the try net, a small net used for locating shrimp during 10-minute test drags (or “tries”). He puts out the try net, and when he hauls it back in shortly, out spill a dozen shrimp. They flip and vault over the deck, tiny legs treading air along the transparent shells. Several are sizable. Gilbert quickly winches out the main net (the otter trawl), moving from transom to cathead to pin rail, tying and untying ropes, lazy line and cables, stepping in a familiar dance with the gear.

Woven of green nylon cord with a 1 3/8 inch mesh, the otter trawl is 90 feet long and 38 feet wide at the bottom, 32 feet wide on top. The net precisely conforms to state regulations limiting mesh and net size for the bay for this time of year. In the byzantine universe of commercial fishing regulations, if this was September instead of June the net could be larger, but so must the mesh. That is, if he’s shrimping on his bay license instead of his bait license.

Gilbert watches the long net trail backward in the frothy wake, then finally drops the boards, two large slabs of steel shaped for their namesake. He shoves the throttle forward, the engine roars and vibrates, the prop boils up mud as the doors veer outward in the water like twin rudders spreading the mouth of the net. A long tickler chain connecting the boards bumps over the bottom mud where shrimp are burrowed down, causing them to leap upward for the net to scoop them inside.

The drag will last about 45 minutes, so Gilbert returns to the cabin and settles into the pilot’s chair for breakfast, a pint of chocolate milk and a packet of small sugar donuts. Not exactly health food, but easy to prepare. Meanwhile, he steers the boat along a serpentine route and listens to chatter on the marine band radio.

Working a boat alone, as Gilbert does, is unusual. It’s dangerous—fall overboard and it’s a long swim or a slow drowning—but deckhands are famously unreliable. They bum cigarettes and food, tend to drink and show up hung over, or simply don’t show.

“Plus I’m a cheap SOB,” he adds with a chortle. “I like to keep what I make.”

Even with a deckhand, the long hours on a boat on open water are isolating. The marine channel stays busy. If other shrimpers are coming up empty, they readily share the news; if they’re hitting shrimp heavy, they probably won’t mention it. Not even the most sociable want to share paydirt with a crowd.

After scarfing the final donut, Gilbert talks briefly on the radio, sympathizing with a fellow shrimper a mile away. He takes a call on his cell phone from his wife, Chris. The Gilberts recently leased the North End Bait Camp at Rollover Pass. Chris manages it and needs more live bait shrimp ASAP; he says he’s working on it. Hanging up, he describes the bait camp as an effort to diversify the family economy.

“I’m getting old, pardner. I can’t see working this boat when I’m sixty. I need to think ahead.”

The Gilberts also bought a home with an attached duplex apartment they rent short-term to sportsfishermen. A little here, a little there, he reasons, and it adds up. A shrimper covering his bills learns to scrabble.

He stubs out a cigarette, says, “Let’s haul in that net. I’d sure like to catch some and go in. Man, I’m still tired from yesterday.”

***

By noon, Gilbert is finishing his fifth drag and the trawler is broiling beneath a white-hot sun in a pale, blanched sky. The heat seems unyielding. The boat rocks, the engine drones, the pungent reek of fish and sour mud and diesel hangs over the slick deck. Even the shallow bay water registers 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

A sweating Gilbert winches in the trawl and raises the bag, loosens the bulging pocket over a tank. The catch falls with a whoosh and a splash. The pocket is retied, the net winched back out, the doors plunge beneath the surface for another drag.

Wiping his face with a forearm, Gilbert squints upward hoping for a cloud. Nada. He dips into the drop tank and lays part of the catch on the culling board: mullet, shad, silver ribbon fish with sharp teeth, small jellyfish (“sea wasps”), croaker, cigar minnows, crabs, robinfish, a mean-looking sting ray… and shrimp.

He slides the by-catch offboard into the bay, a thick flock of gulls screech and spar for anything dazed enough to float. Sleek black cormorants dive for what sinks, pelicans loaf for what’s overlooked, and magnificent pterodactyl-like frigatebirds circle high above, primed to dive-bomb unsuspecting gulls and pirate away a prize. For foraging birds, a shrimp trawler is a water-borne cafeteria.

The shrimp, unlike the by-catch, go into a second tank, then a third and a fourth, if necessary. Tank pumps circulate bay water in an effort to keep them alive. Live bait shrimp bring in twice the money of dead shrimp.

Gilbert keeps careful watch on his course while culling, steering the boat from a second wheel by the tanks, avoiding the crab traps marked with small white buoys dotting the bay. “A crab trap tearing up the net can sure ruin a day,” he allows.

He culls quickly, expertly, while commenting on the varieties of shrimp and their behavior, and the man-made laws governing shrimpers. None of it is simple.

Take the matter of spawning. Shrimp grow and thrive in the estuarine bays and marshes but they aren’t born there. Brown shrimp (Penaeus aztecus) spawn offshore in the Gulf in about 400 feet of water during winter months, while white shrimp (Penaeus setiferus) spawn in about 35 feet of Gulf water in the spring. (A third variety, the pink shrimp, isn’t found much this far north; it prefers the saltier water found in Texas bays further south.)

Once spawned, the larvae of all shrimp work their way back into the bays and marshes to grow. They are omnivores, feeding on smaller organisms living among the rich sediments and nutrients of the estuary. The brown shrimp then migrate en masse back into the Gulf during spring and summer, the whites wait until several months later. These differing spawning and migratory patterns result in complicated—and increasingly restrictive—regulations on when and how shrimpers work, aimed in part to ensure annual spawns aren’t disrupted.

Following the regulatory scheme, Texas bay shrimpers landed about 9.4 million pounds of shrimp in 2001. Almost half of that came from Galveston Bay, the most productive estuary in Texas and easily one of the most productive in the nation. Gilbert’s boat was one of 132 shrimp boats working Galveston Bay on May 15 this year, the opening day of spring bay season; a total of 182 boats were working other Texas bays.

On the other hand, Texas Parks and Wildlife figures show about 1,200 bay licenses currently in effect, and another 1,200 bait licenses. With a bait license there’s no closed season but the bag limits are much smaller and half the shrimp must be kept alive. Almost all bay shrimpers carry both licenses so they can work year round, though winter takes are small.

The numbers indicate most bay shrimpers, unlike Gilbert, are part-timers holding other full-time jobs. A license is tied to the boat, not the shrimper, and the state is issuing no new ones. In fact, the state is buying back bay licenses—25 percent of them have been “retired” since 1995—to increase each remaining shrimper’s slice of the total pie. At least theoretically.

Gilbert shrugs, grins, offers his machine gun laugh. In his view, there’s still too many bay boats. And the shrimp are being depleted. Though it isn’t the shrimpers’ fault, he says. Estuary degradation caused by loss of wetlands to developers—the Houston Metroplex now overruns the northern and western stretches of Galveston Bay—as well as urban runoff, industrial pollution, and agribusiness pesticides and herbicides all conspire to hurt the shrimp.

And what hurts the shrimp hurts the shrimpers.

Still, unregulated global trade is putting the biggest economic hurt on Texas shrimpers, including offshore Gulf shrimpers who annually land three times the catch of bay boats. Imported pond-raised shrimp from cheap labor markets in Asia and South America are, says one Parks and Wildlife official, “killing our shrimpers.” The imports don’t taste as good as wild shrimp, and some have been found laced with animal antibiotics detrimental to human consumption, but about 85 percent of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. is imported. Some argue it all should be imported. Texas shrimpers feel beleaguered from every side.

“Personally, I think they’ll close the bays to commercial shrimping within ten years,” Gilbert observes. “They’re already trying. They’ll make sportsfishermen go to artificial bait. Right now, if you aren’t selling live bait, you can’t make a living. Price on food shrimp barely covers your operating costs.”

***

By 2 p.m., the trawl net on the Stingaree 2 is out of the water, pursuant to state regulations for bay shrimpers from May 15 to July 15. Gilbert is beat. The wind has died, the sun is a searing torch, the pilot house has become a sauna. Gilbert is cruising homeward to off-load the day’s catch: six gallons of live shrimp, about 40 pounds of dead. It’s not even close to a limit.

“An average day,” he observes, “which ain’t good. Haven’t had a really good day in a while. We’ve had three, four bad years in a row.”

Once docked, he’ll do some maintenance, repair a clutch seal. He lights a cigarette, leans back in the pilot’s chair—the captain’s chair, really—and pops the tab on a cold soda. He closes one eye, calculating.

“Add and subtract it all,” he finally announces, “I’m making minimum wage.”

He wags his head and lets go. The laughter rockets through the small cabin: a working man’s commentary on the absurdity of it all—chasing those shrimp, trying to catch them, what happens when you do, or don’t, in a world mostly beyond your control.

 

*****