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 on Louisiana’s coast, where Jean Charles had traveled many times to assist the pirate, Jean Lafitte. Together with their six children, who also married Native Americans, they spawned a tribe exclusive unto itself. In 1876, Louisiana began selling the “uninhabitable swamp land” to private landowners, and four of Naquin’s early descendants purchased the island. For eight generations, the Indian family has farmed the rich dirt and made their meager livings as fishermen, oystermen, farmers, and trappers.
In 1900, the beautiful sub-tropical island, 15 miles north of The Gulf of Mexico, was 5 miles wide, flourishing with willows and live oaks, mangroves, grasses and goldenrod, and teeming with rabbits, nutria, and heron. But in the last 60 years, ninety-eight percent of this island has been lost. “Land sink” has been caused by the lack of replenished sediment as levees divert river water to control flooding. Loss of marsh caused by the state’s poor infrastructure planning, and repeated inundation of salt water from hurricanes and oil and gas company canals, leaves the island no protection from storm surge and erosion. The lone access road is often submerged during storms and high tides. The island is now a mere one-quarter mile wide. Experts estimate the island could be completely underwater in as little as five years.
To protect communities along the Louisiana coast, a 98-mile long levee has been in planning stages since 2000, but without funding from the U.S. Congress, the $10.3 billion-dollar project seems dead in the water. This is of no consequence to Isle de Jean Charles. The Army Corps of Engineers does not deem it cost-effective to include the island behind its protective walls. If it is ever built, this flood/surge protection will pass north of the Isle de Jean Charles, leaving the land to be devoured by the hungry ocean waves.
Causing a physical rift in the culture over the last few years, many of the island’s tribe have moved to higher ground. Without a dependable road, they could not travel to their jobs and schools. Now, the two dozen remaining families can no longer continue rebuilding. For 15 years, the tribe’s Chief, Albert Naquin, has been working tirelessly to raise support to move his people to a safer place. He wants them relocated in a way that maintains their cohesive culture, traditions, and way of life. “For our island people, it is more than simply a place to live. It is the epicenter of our Tribe and traditions. It is where we cultivated what has become a unique part of Louisiana culture.”
The Department of Housing and Urban development has awarded $48.3 million to The Louisiana Office of Community Development- Disaster Recovery Unit to help resettle the residents of Isle de Jean Charles as an entire community, making them the first beneficiaries of the kind, and the first U.S. Climate Migrants. Near Thibodaux, a 515-acre site has been purchased for the pilot program. Construction of the new community is set to begin in fall 2019. One of the goals of the design is to reunite the families still living on the island with the nearly 100 who have already fled. Naquin’s goals are to maintain and strengthen the tribe’s safety, collective identity, social stability, and their contribution to the region. The new site will be a self-sustaining, practical, affordable, living demonstration of a community-led resettlement with shops, schools, residential, agricultural, agroforestry, and aquaculture uses. It is committed to protecting Isle de Jean Charles’ American Indian culture and supporting their future generations. In 2017, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Gulf of Mexico Program – Gulf Guardian Award in Environmental Justice / Cultural Diversity Category was bestowed on The Isle of Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw for its efforts in resettling of a coastal community due to land loss. With this resettlement project a model has been put in place which can be scaled and replicated over time, not only for the entire nation, but the entire world.
Many of the families south of Interstate-10 have lived on the bayous and marshes for generations. They wake when the sun rises. The day’s schedule is set by the seasons and the most urgent need: tend the crab pots, the crawfish nets, and the vegetables growing in the rich soil, mend the nets, mend the house. When you need a little money sell your catch, and when you need a little more hire on with a commercial fishing company or the oil companies. The children run and play barefoot and graduate from high school with friends they’ve known since pre-school.
Not far from Isle de Jean Charles, two miles south of the New Orleans’ levee system, is the town of Jean Lafitte. It sits barely two feet above sea level, but the 2,000 residents say they don’t want to relocate. Long-time resident Kindra Arnesson knows, “It’s a whole culture that’s connected to the earth and water. You can’t duplicate it. When you’ve lived on the water all your life, you develop a kinship that’s inexplainable. I’d rather be on the water than anywhere else in the world.”
Just as desperate as Chief Naquin, the mayor of Jean Lafitte has been fighting tooth and nail with the state to build a levee around his town. He hopes to keep the residents in their homes, protected from the ever-encroaching ocean, but the state has thwarted him at every turn. In desperation he has buffed up the commercial area and infrastructure so they will be considered “of value.” He has conducted fund-raising events to help pay for the levee.
After the devastation that occurred with Hurricane Katrina, the State of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority was created, and a master plan was devised for her coast. Science, not politics, controls its deliberations about the most cost-effective ways to protect people and property. The 2012 update presented an ambitious strategy for improving flood protection for every community in coastal Louisiana. Marsh creation, barrier island restoration, oyster shell reefs, and river sediment diversions were charted to neutralize land loss over the next 23 years and outpace the loss by year 30. They planned house elevations, and flood walls, and finally, $870 million was allotted to build a levee around Jean Lafitte.
Some exciting inroads were made. More than 1,000 acres of marsh and walkable land were created by pumping sand from the Mississippi River. But before Jean Lafitte’s levee could be built, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate change forecasts became dire, doubling the losses of the previous 50-year projections for southern Louisiana. The Gulf Coast can expect more sea level rise than anywhere else in the country. It became clear that no matter how much or how fast the state creates new land, they will not get ahead of the extreme losses to come.
Deliberations over the master plan changed direction. Gut-wrenching decisions were made about which communities could realistically be saved, and which should be relocated. As reported by The New York Times, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Gulf Restoration Program believes, “Once you accept the diagnosis that much of south Louisiana is going to disappear, you still have to have a strategic retreat. How do you plan this shrinking of the footprint, which is complicated by socioeconomics and by real questions about how fast sea level will rise and how fast you can build wetlands?” According to Tulane geologist, Torbjorn E. Tornqvist, decisions about places like Lafitte will be “a piece of cake compared to what’s coming – because a little down the line we’re going to be talking about communities not of 2,000 people, but of much bigger things.” They’re not talking just about the coast of Louisiana, but all over the U.S.
In Jean Lafitte, enrollment is down in the schools, a sign that younger residents are leaving. Some of the old timers, weary of fighting to rebuild after hurricanes and floods, put their homes up for sale. Unfortunately, no one is buying property on sinking land. Now the citizens of Jean Lafitte are beginning to say they are ready to take a government buyout.
Southern Louisiana is the fastest disappearing land mass on earth. Of the state’s 250 square miles, 189 square miles, over half, is water. With current predictions of six to nine feet of sea level rise, everything south of Interstate-10 will be under water within this century. The entire city of New Orleans will sink, and Baton Rouge will be on the coast. One quarter of the state’s wetlands are already gone. In 2011 the federal government retired 35 place names for islands, bays, passes, ponds and barrier islands that have ceased to exist. Caused by everything from oil rigs, to hurricanes, to levees, to coral reef die off, salt water is overwhelming and killing the marsh, swamps, and bayous. Land cannot be rebuilt faster than it is being lost. The barrier islands – the first line of defense against storm surge from hurricanes – are eroding at a rate of a football field worth of land every hour, and the people, with some of the world’s most unique and diverse cultures, who have lived there for hundreds of years, are being forced from their homes. If these people can be viewed as disposable with their lands left to perish and their way of life with them, who is next?
For a simple, beautifully written, real life account of forging life from the swamp, I highly recommend, “Atchafalaya Houseboat My Years in the Louisiana Swamp,” by Gwen Roland. This is the story of how, in 1970, an idealistic young couple quite successfully recreated the lifestyle of their grandparents in the Atchafalaya River Basin Swamp.