Adrien Rouquette

Adrien Rouquette (February 26, 1813–July 15, 1887) was a Louisiana Creole writer, poet, and Catholic missionary to the Choctaw Native Americans, among whom he was also known as Chahta-Ima.

[1] His father, Dominique, had emigrated to New Orleans from Fleurance, France, in 1800, where he soon married a Creole woman named Louise Cousin.

[2] Dominique fought under the command of General Andrew Jackson during the Battle of New Orleans and, four years later, committed suicide by drowning in the Mississippi River.

[4] He and his siblings would play games together and, as Rouquette's older brother later recalled, it was a "golden age of life", and referred fondly to the "free and happy years of my half savage childhood".

Assigned to duty at the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, he served for fourteen years as a priest in the city, then suddenly, in 1859, he severed all connection to it.

He anticipated that other enlightened Christians would join him to escape modern commercialism but, failing that, he established a mission community among the several thousand Choctaws then living in the forests beside Lake Pontchartrain.