The children, their little brown bodies and silky-black sun-streaked hair shining, are bathed in the shallows after running unconstrained all day. A woman with a stick, bent doubled over, digs tiny protein-rich clams out of the sand to feed her infant. The strong young men, with their small, weathered, fishing boat, are sliding into the turquoise lagoon, spreading their hand-made nets to collect the hefty fish from the slow, outgoing tide. […]
In the early 1700s, Jean Baptist Le Moyne de Bienville planted the French flag on a bank near the mouth of the Mississippi River. On a berm above the water line, outside an acute curve, he laid out the crescent-shaped city of La Nouvelle-Orleans, or New Orleans. About a year later the little city flooded […]
On Isle de Jean Charles, a barrier island of coastal Louisiana, there lives a tribe of Native American Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. The island settlement was established when Jean Marie, the son of Frenchman Jean Charles Naquin, married Pauline, a Native American woman, and was promptly disowned by his high-brow family. The couple settled on a lush island […]