NEW ORLEANS – After 170 years fishing
and crabbing in southern Louisiana’s swamps and marshes, a group of
American Indians repeatedly flooded by hurricanes says it is intent
on moving from its ancestral island home.
The band’s chief said Sept. 22 that the group is seeking to start a
new life as a community behind levees on higher ground.
A migration inland would symbolize one of the most obvious defeats
in south Louisiana’s losing battle with land loss and hurricanes.
The
Mississippi River Delta, on which south Louisiana sits, has lost
about 2,000 square miles of marsh and swamp since the 1930s.
But relocation was inevitable, said Albert Naquin, the chief of the
Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. He said
the marsh community had been flooded five times in the past six
years. About 25 families still call it home.
Naquin said the tribe hoped to use about $12 million in federal aid
to build 60 homes on 50 acres in Bourg, which is about 10 miles
inland.
But many details had to be worked out and the plan was not a done
deal.
Naquin said Terrebonne Parish and state officials would have to sign
off on it.
State Sen. Butch Gautreaux, D-Morgan City, said he was working with
the tribe and Louisiana congressional members to get the relocation
plan executed.
Christina Stephens, a spokeswoman for the
Louisiana
Recovery Authority, said she was unfamiliar with the tribe’s
plans, but that funds for relocation could come from a variety of
federal sources. Michael Claudet, the Terrebonne Parish president,
said he was unfamiliar with the details.
Windell Curole, a coastal manager and hurricane expert, said Isle de
Jean Charles would be the latest town in a long list to retreat from
Louisiana’s sinking and hurricane-threatened coast.
“We’ve been retreating a lot in south Louisiana,” Curole said.
“People have moved to the high ground.”
Naquin said the road to the village has been battered and reduced to
one lane. Even in modest bad weather, the road can flood, he said.
The church was relocated after
Hurricane
Rita in 2005, and the fire station has been closed.
“I don’t think they want to spend any more money out there,” Naquin
said about federal officials.
He said the relocation plan calls for moving the band of American
Indians into prefabricated homes.
“These are real homes,” he said. “We won’t have to move for a couple
of hundred years, hopefully.”
Moving to Bourg, he said, might bring the community back together.
He said many residents had been displaced and were scattered.
Moving to the land in Bourg “would be a displacement, but it
wouldn’t be as much if we went way out into a subdivision,” he said.
C. Ray Brassieur, an anthropologist at the University of Louisiana
at Lafayette, said there was the danger that Louisiana’s traditional
folk were being displaced by land loss.
“We need to watch if the indigenous population will be replaced with
these weekend fun seekers,” he said. “If they are bumped out so we
can have some big fancy marinas placed there, that doesn’t seem
right to me.”
He said a plan to remain close to the marsh was a good one. “I’d
rather they do that than go into some mobile home park in a
metropolitan area,” Brassieur said.
The tribe’s first families, made up of French and American Indians,
moved to the island around 1840, Naquin said. The tribe remained
secluded for the next century when a road was built to it in the
1950s, Naquin said.
Naquin, 62, recalled how secluded the location was. “We didn’t get
electricity until I was 16 years old.”
The tribe, as with many other American Indians in south Louisiana,
is not recognized by the BIA.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved.