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| Subject: Biloxi-Chitimacha Tribe, LA - A sinking island. . . | |
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Author: Mark Tirpak |
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Date Posted: 13:33:14 09/28/06 Thu In reply to: Mark Tirpak 's message, "New Orleans / Katrina Resources" on 12:57:35 09/28/06 Thu Just FYI. Would love to see a UTSOA project emerge to work with this community. For more about this tribe, please visit http://www.biloxi-chitimacha.com/isle_de_jean_charles.htm In Louisiana, a Sinking Island Wars With Water and the Government By Dan Barry The New York Times Monday 19 June 2006 Isle De Jean Charles, La.- All trees and farmland, the tribal chief said. With hard acres of green where cattle grazed, adults trapped game, and boys and girls of the Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe ran without even dampening their feet. You should have seen it. But you can hardly imagine it, much less see it, because where gardens sprouted and children sprinted just 30 years ago, there is now a grass skirt of mushy marshland, and beyond, the rippling open waters that lead to the Gulf of Mexico. "Water," the tribe's conflicted chief, Albert Naquin, said. "All water." Think of a ship with expansive decks and a close-knit crew. Now think of that ship surrendering slowly to the ocean, leaving its crew clinging to an ever-sinking bow. The ship is this island, here at the bayou bottom of Louisiana, about 30 miles south of U.S. Highway 90. And its crew members are the island's inhabitants, the small band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha, related to the Choctaws and part of a larger confederation of Muskogees. For natural and manufactured reasons, 30 square miles of South Louisiana wetlands vanish every year into the Gulf. People here say they lose a football field every 20 minutes, every half-hour, every hour - the estimates vary, but the panic is constant, partly because wetlands and barrier islands act as hurricane buffers for the vulnerable mainland. The unnerving sense of "look away, lose an inch" is especially keen here on the very poor, very mucky and thoroughly exposed Isle de Jean Charles, which almost dutifully received six feet of water during Hurricane Rita last September. But the advancing waters rubbing away a culture have a partner, tribal members say: the government. To reach the island, you take a narrow road that was raised several years ago but which has sunk so much since that cars seem to skim the lapping waters. As you drive, you leave behind the initial stage of a 72-mile levee system called the Morganza to the Gulf of Mexico Hurricane Protection Project. The operative word here: behind. This $887 million project of the Army Corps of Engineers, long-planned and still awaiting full Congressional authorization, is designed to stem the wetlands' erosion in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes caused by natural subsidence, the rerouting of the Mississippi River and, some say, global warming. "The system will provide hurricane protection to over 90 percent of the residents," said Jerome Zeringue, the director of the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District. "There are a few people left out, unfortunately." Most of those few left out are the Biloxi-Chitimacha on Isle de Jean Charles. "We did originally try to put them in there," Mr. Zeringue said. "The problem is, based on the cost-benefit ratio, it would cost too much to include that sliver of land. For the cost, you could buy the island and all the residents tenfold." In effect, the government had to ask itself: is it worth $100 million or more to protect a shrinking spit of an island, its only road, its modest homes, some of them little more than shacks, and its 250 residents, whose families have lived here for generations? Its conclusion: no. "Even in a high tide, with strong southeast winds, these people have water in their yards," Mr. Zeringue said. He emphasized that the decision was not made lightly. A few years ago, the island's residents rejected a proposal to be relocated somewhere within the Morganza skirt. Since then, water and mortality have continued to creep, leaving some of the younger members to question the point of it all. Not that many of them trust the government. Residents float conspiracies about greedy land speculators and oil interests craving the liquid gold that may lie beneath. Their distrust runs deep in the softening soil; they don't have to think too far back to remember a time when they could neither pray nor learn beside white people. Mr. Naquin, the tribal chief, solid as a piling, rode down that only island road, where the local surnames of Naquin, Billiot and Dardar date to the mid-1800's; where patchwork wooden walkways twist over an ever-widening bayou; and where some abandoned houses look as if they had exploded. Do not immediately blame last year's Hurricane Rita for the damage; it might have been Hurricane Lili, in 2002, or Tropical Storm Bill, in 2003. But each storm accelerates the inevitable fate. Several children frolicked in the bayou muck outside a small house, while their grandfather, Philip Brunet, watched in the melting heat. At 61, he has "caught" two heart attacks, as he put it, ending his career as a welder and signaling that the time had come to leave where he has lived all his life. "We're moving, me and my wife," Mr. Brunet told his old friend, the chief. "We're going to take off when the hurricanes come and go someplace high. No more mud to clean." The chief said goodbye - "I love y'all," Mr. Brunet called after him, in affecting Cajun English - and moved down the road. He passed the old cemetery, spongy and unused since the 1940's; the mounds of empty Milwaukee's Best beer cans that glitter outside a tilting shack; and the sinking property of his older sister, Denecia Billiot, and her husband, Wenceslaus. The Billiots raised seven children, all of whom have moved off the island. Now they live alone in a house placed on stilts after Lili. When they look out their back window, they see deep blue water where corn grew and their children played. They sit on the porch, Mr. Billiot wearing a red Army cap that hints of his South Pacific tour during World War II, Mrs. Billiot killing sand flies with a pink swatter. "I'm not going nowhere," she said. "I was born here. I got 81 already." Years on the island, that is. The chief passed other houses, naming residents both here and gone: shrimpers and welders and riggers and loafers. He pointed out where Lover's Lane used to be, where a dance hall used to beckon, where groves of trees used to flourish before the salt water withered them dry. Even the chief doesn't live on Isle de Jean Charles anymore. The only road leading to the island kept flooding, he said, and he could not afford to lose his off-island job in the petroleum industry. He moved 30 years ago from an island house that still stands, an empty hull, vacant since Hurricane Lili. He came to the end of the island road, to the spot where he and his many siblings grew up, including Gustave, who died in a tugboat accident; Simon, who died in the Vietnam War; and Deme, the tribal chief before him, and now an elder. Mr. Naquin is nearly 60, and his tribal burdens line his face. He fears that if he sues the federal government for leaving the island outside the levees, he will jeopardize his tribe's application for federal recognition. He fears that if he does nothing, his tribe may not survive the next colossal hurricane. Even his preferred option - the government builds homes on the mainland for tribal members, but allows members to move off the island when they feel ready - could mean the loss of connection to the land, the loss of cultural ways, the loss of continuity. "It is terrible for me," the chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha said, as another sun set on the encroaching waters. "I thought I could change the world, but the world is changing me." [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
| Subject | Author | Date |
| Juvenile Justice & New Orleans - Katrina Evacuation | Mark Tirpak | 13:35:12 09/28/06 Thu |