The Atakapa-Ishak, whose own name means "The People," inhabited southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas for centuries before European settlement, living across a large homeland occupied by six bands and later becoming widely known by the Choctaw slur "Atakapa," meaning man-eater. According to the account, descendants of the Atakapa-Ishak survive unrecognized and misnamed under identities such as Creoles, Creole Indians, and Creoles of Color. To take advantage of seasonal food and game, they migrated widely through their homeland, hunting and fishing by season, gathering roots, berries, nuts, wild grapes, wild honey, persimmons, and other fruits, packing pecans for barter, collecting medicinal plants, and using houses that could be dismantled and moved. They carried no weapons of war but were highly skilled hunters with bow and arrow, and before the introduction of European cloth they tanned hides for clothing, wearing capes in winter. They traded with tribes to the west for flint, to the north for copperware, and to the near northeast for pottery, but because their occupation was dispersed and often left no recorded villages, early Europeans largely bypassed their lands. Their legacy remains in place names such as Anacoco, Mamou, Opelousas, Mermentau, and Calcasieu, in food customs such as the use of sassafras leaves for filé in gumbo, and in the foot trails that connected their six bands across southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas and later served as precursor routes for early roads. More broadly, Louisiana Indians thrived on the region's abundant game, fish, shellfish, turtles, turkeys, deer, rabbits, fowl, alligators, and frogs; alligators in particular supplied meat, hides, and oil used as insect repellent. The longer history of the region includes Paleo-Indian hunters in about 10,000 B.C. pursuing large mammals, Archaic Indians by 8,000 B.C. using fishhooks, traps, nets, and the atlatl and building the first earthen mounds, and later Woodland and Mississippi Indians making pottery, using bows and arrows, creating ceremonial objects, and building shell and earthen mounds from 800 B.C. to A.D. 1600. Louisiana Indians also developed extensive trade routes known as traces, bringing goods from as far as the Great Lakes, the Rocky Mountains, and Florida, and they shaped the landscape through controlled burning used for hunting, reducing underbrush, improving soil fertility, encouraging berry growth, and improving grazing land. Fire also held sacred meaning in traditional stories, including an Atakapa-Ishak origin story in which an angry man set the grass ablaze, a mocking bird was struck and gained the red mark of the red-winged blackbird, a giant raised his sister in an oyster shell, and the fleeing game provided food for the people.