The next day I drive back out to the island for my midday meeting with Chris. Here on the far reaches of the bayou, my visit is an event. Another one of Chris’s nephews, Dalton, comes over to watch Mission: Impossible and when the movie ends he joins our conversation. The afternoon is hot and still. The three of us sit together and eat slices of store-bought cake from the market in Pointe-aux-Chenes. The talk moves easily through a range of subjects: the kids’ schooling, the bus schedule, the weather. It is a great comfort to be engulfed in the workings of a family not my own.
I felt immediately at home despite the fact that Chris’s house is physically falling apart. The plaster and particleboard have been stripped from all the walls, and the bones of the structure shine through. In order to save it from mold after Hurricane Lili, in 2002, Chris gutted the entire thing.
“That Lili, she got all the way into the house here,” he says with a sweep of his arm. “I had to take out all the walls. I’ve been repairing them little by little, but the going’s slow.” He rolls from the living room to the kitchen and offers me a soda. “When more people lived on the island I would have been able to call on some of them and get help with this here,” he continues. The bedsheet tacked between his bedroom and the kitchen flaps in the wind. “Now I get help occasionally but mostly do the work myself, one board at a time.” His living room, which is separated from the children’s bedroom by a faded piece of red fabric, has been under construction for more than a decade.
“Do you remember,” Dalton says, “I forgot what hurricane it was, when they were dropping all them sandbags from the helicopters? You know that levee busted for the fourth time during the storm and they still haven’t finished fixing it.”
“It wasn’t Rita, and it wasn’t Gustav or Katrina or Ike,” Chris says, rattling off names with an ease that borders on the familial. He looks out the window to where the nameless bay laps at the disappearing land and laughs. “If they really wanted to save the island they would have included it in the Morganza to the Gulf protection plan.” Chris is speaking of a $13 billion infrastructure project to construct ninety-eight miles of levees that would wrap most of the Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes in ten-foot-high earthen berms. The project, which is part of an even larger so-called Master Plan designed to “rescue” part of the state’s crumbling coast, will require $50 billion to complete. That’s more than the costs of the Manhattan Project, the recovery from Sandy, and the Hoover Dam combined.
“No one is surprised that we weren’t among those who were saved,” Dalton says firmly. “We are Indians, after all.”
On the last morning of my trip I speak with Albert Naquin, the reigning chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe to which Dalton and Chris belong. Albert, like so many others, doesn’t live on the island anymore. He moved to Pointe-aux-Chenes—a stone’s throw from the grocery—after he had to mop an inch of mud off brand-new appliances and dining room furniture in his first year of marriage. “I was fresh out of the army with a baby on the way. The first time I flooded, it was the end for me,” Albert tells me, tugging at a black baseball cap with the word NATIVE embroidered on it in big block letters.
Albert, who is in his sixties and built like an old Buick, has spent the last twenty years trying to organize the remaining islanders to relocate as a group and to get the Army Corps of Engineers to pay for it. While Chris says he isn’t against the idea, he has yet to wholeheartedly embrace it. And others are completely opposed. Back in 2002, when the initial Morganza to the Gulf feasibility report was submitted and Jean Charles left out, that was as close as Albert ever came to uniting the islanders.
“I think the Army Corps was feeling guilty about not including us in their big plan, so they offered to help us relocate,” Albert tells me. “But we needed to show that nearly everyone living on the island would be interested in leaving. On the day we met with the government folks there were a bunch of people who don’t even live on Jean Charles asking all of these questions that derailed the conversation. After that the interest in relocation dropped, and without consensus no one was going to give us money to move.”
Before coming to Jean Charles I researched the history of Louisiana’s wetlands. Not surprisingly, our knowledge of early residents is somewhat limited; most artifacts have been found in less ecologically volatile areas upstream, such as the Cahokia Mounds of Illinois. The Chitimacha are said to have lived in what is present-day central Louisiana for over six thousand years. In the face of the violence that accompanied the arrival of Europeans, they migrated south along the lower Mississippi in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arriving at the far reaches of the delta at roughly the same time as the Biloxi and the Choctaw, who were retreating from their ancestral homes in the wake of Florida’s bloody Seminole Wars.
The convergence of so many disparate Native groups—along with the Acadians, who were expelled from Nova Scotia and other soon-to-be-Canadian provinces by the British in 1755—on the boggy fringes of the continent was no coincidence. Living in this marshland—considered uninhabitable by most mainland Europeans—was a kind of shared survival tactic, and Acadians and Native Americans thrived together here. But today the high rate of intermarriage between these groups means that the federal government does not recognize the residents as Natives. And since the island was never formally a reservation, there is no federal mandate to relocate the islanders now that their home is disappearing.
“At first we were losing one or two families with every storm,” Albert says. “But now, with the wetlands opening up, the storms are getting worse, and over the years the flow of people off the island has increased. If it continues like this, eventually there won’t be anyone left out there. And who we are, our unique Native community, will become fractured, will disappear along with the land.”
A light wind moves through Chris’s house, making the exposed beams whistle. This place was built by Chris’s grandfather, who insisted on using Douglas fir trees for their strength and resistance to rot. It has been standing in exactly this spot for the better part of the last century, though Chris has lifted it twice: first after Hurricane Lili, and then even higher after Katrina.
“For a while my parents were completely self-sufficient,” he says, “but by the time we were adults they went to the grocery store.” Chris grew up eating blackberries, oranges, pears, and cantaloupes all grown in the garden alongside his home. Back then gardening was easy, because there wasn’t any salt in the groundwater.
He rolls over to a big wooden chest and lifts out a warped photo album. I watch as he flips past pictures of his house, water lapping at the window frames, back when the structure rested on the ground. Past black-and-white photos of his father playing guitar. Past the image of himself, much younger, and the brother who died a few years back, orphaning Howard and Juliette. Past the image of his sister Teresa, in a pair of John Lennon sunglasses and a striped jumper, smiling in front of a live oak tree with a double trunk and Spanish moss cascading down. The same one still stands behind the house, but is a husk of its former self today, a rampike with all its branches removed. Past the photo of Father Roch’s place next door and the forest of cypresses that once separated here from there.
Eventually Chris arrives at the photo he wants to show me. In it his father is tilling the ground in a dirty white button-up shirt, flanked by okra plants. “That was all the way back in 1959,” Chris says, “the year he married my mother.” His father is working the land his parents had given him as a wedding gift. Chris runs his finger over the image and hands it to me. “It looked so different back then.”
I have been in the Terrebonne Parish for over a week, and everywhere I go people keep telling me how it used to be. They
