Journal of Southern History

The Coushatta people settled Bayou Blue in southwest Louisiana in 1884. Since then, they have maintained their community and identity, established their self-determination, and become an important economic and political presence in the region. Despite the community’s significance and unique history, with Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884–1984, historian Denise E. Bates offers the first book-length study of the tribe since 1973. She tracks the development of the Coushatta community in southwest Louisiana from initial settlement to the tribe’s authorization of a tribal bingo operation in 1984, with a primary focus on the activism of Coushatta leaders. This activism and Coushatta self-determination provide the central themes for Basket Diplomacy.

The story culminates with the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana gaining federal recognition, establishing a reservation, and building government infrastructure led by Ernest Sickey, the community’s first tribal chairman. The second half of the book combines Sickey’s firsthand knowledge gleaned from multiple interviews, other interviews with tribal members, interviews with local non-Coushattas, and previously unused newspaper articles and archival sources to provide the most complete history of the community for the period from the 1950s to the mid-1980s. The first three chapters of the book tie Sickey’s efforts to those of earlier Coushatta leaders, explain how the Coushattas established a new home in southwest Louisiana, and outline their early efforts to create alliances and establish a relationship with the federal government.

David Sickey, Ernest Sickey’s son and the current tribal chairman, provides an epilogue focused on the significance of Bates’s work. He highlights its value for the tribe but also puts it forward as “a model for mutually beneficial and successful collaboration between an academically based scholar and an Indian tribe” (p. 210). Bates’s earlier publications featured Ernest Sickey prominently, and she built relationships with the former tribal chairman and the Coushatta people over an eight-year period. Extensive interviews with Ernest Sickey form the core of Basket Diplomacy, and David Sickey maintains that Bates “was, and still is, the only person whom my father ever allowed to hear, and record, this history” (p. 208).

In the introduction, Bates reveals that she initially planned to focus on Coushatta efforts for self-determination during the 1970s but expanded her scope. Examining Coushatta history from 1884 through the 1960s enables her to place Sickey’s leadership in context and to highlight the various institutions from which Coushatta leaders emerged, and extending the narrative to 1984 allows her to show that nation-building is a process that continued after federal recognition. David Sickey mentions the growth of the tribe since 1984 including the economic success of the Coushatta Casino Resort in the epilogue, but Bates does not grapple with the issues related to gaming or the debates it created in the Coushatta community from 1985 through 2006. By ending her narrative in 1984, Bates leaves the door open for further research on the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana and its efforts to maintain self-determination. [End Page 150]

Overall, Basket Diplomacy contributes significantly to our understanding of Indigenous peoples in the South, Indigenous leadership, and tribal relationships with local, state, and federal institutions. It reminds us that the experiences of Native peoples in the South are not monolithic and that community histories remain essential to understanding the diversity of Native experiences.