‘We’ve always been neglected’: Louisiana’s Indigenous communities recovering from Hurricane Ida are watching the coast disappear

Fighting for their sovereignty, Tribes seek relief in the face of sea-level rise and a growing climate crisis, Alex Woodward reports

Chris Brunet posted a sign in Isle de Jean Charles, an eroding island on the Louisiana coast, in Hurricane Ida’s aftermath. (AP)

Theresa Dardar started shrimping along Louisiana’s lakes and bayous with her husband Donald Dardar in 1974. Now, the once-recognisable waterways of south Louisiana – formerly surrounded by marsh grass and fragile land that provided a protective barrier for the Indigenous communities living among them – look more like open waters, she says.

“The lakes weren’t identified. My markings were all gone,” she says from the porch of the Pointe-Au-Chien Indian Tribe Community Center, a raised steel cabin on the edge of the bayou in Pointe-Aux-Chenes. “I wouldn’t be able to drive without him telling me where to go. It’s so open.”

More-severe storms fuelled by the climate crisis have accelerated coastal land loss in Louisiana, along with increased salinity of the waterways, erosion of barrier islands and the lack of freshwater to replenish soil on land that protects the remote Indigenous communities along Louisiana’s disappearing coast and interior. Oil and gas infrastructure, including shipping lanes carved into wetlands, cut into what’s left.

Hurricane Ida struck the coast on 29 August with wind gusts above 200 mph, devastating many of those tribal communities, including the Point-Au-Chien in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes.

“If the storms keep getting stronger than Ida was – she almost wiped us out this time – but another storm like her, unless our members can build really strong, we’re going to come back to nothing,” Ms Dardar says. “Our house probably won’t be strong enough for anything stronger than that.”

Along one stretch of road near the community centre, only 12 homes are liveable, Ms Dardar says.

United Houma Nation, the largest state-recognised tribe, with 19,000 tribal citizens, estimates as much as three-quarters of its members’ homes suffered damage.

Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe says none of the homes among the more than 1,000-member Tribe were untouched by Ida.

Theresa Dardar, a member of the Pointe-Au-Chien Indian Tribe, stands outside the tribal community center in Hurricane Ida’s aftermath. (Alex Woodward)

Ida’s destruction follows decades of institutional neglect and a series of interlocking crises facing Louisiana’s Tribal members – the colonisation of Indigenous land, a growing climate emergency, and a lack of federal recognition of several Tribes that they say have denied them access to critical resources for their survival.

There are 11 state-recognised Tribes in Louisiana. Four Tribes – Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, Jena Band of Choctaw, and Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana – have received recognition from the federal government.

Tribal members say that a lack of federal recognition has cut them off from a wide range of assistance and funding. It has also made it more difficult to get immediate relief, now more than a month after Ida’s landfall and devastation that Tribal elders say is the worst they have seen in their lifetimes.

A home in Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana is among dozens destroyed by Hurricane Ida. (Alex Woodward)

The French-speaking Pointe-Au-Chien Tribe, which has roughly 800 members, claims ancestry from the Chitimacha and other Tribes along the Mississippi River Valley. Tribal histories across south Louisiana are marked by French and American colonisation, modernisation, segregated education, and an ongoing fight for their sovereignty. Sea-level rise and the impacts of the climate crisis have also dramatically altered the tribes’ traditional ways of living.

Many Pointe-Au-Chien members were still recovering from Hurricane Zeta, which peeled roofs off several homes in October 2020, when Ida hit.

Ms Dardar returned to Pointe-Aux-Chenes three days after the storm. Since then, she has anchored the community centre, which received only minor damage, every day, sorting through supplies that come by the truckload and spread out on tables inside.

The centre and other homes in the area were without running water and power for several weeks. Electricity has slowly returned to the region, but thousands of homes are uninhabitable – winds ripped off walls and roofs, collapsed ceilings, or split buildings in two, or into piles of rubble.

Residents and officials in bayou communities across the state have grown frustrated with the pace of federal aid, as state lawmakers warn Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and President Joe Biden’s administration that a lack of safe, stable and immediate housing for thousands of people living in Ida’s aftermath has reached a humanitarian crisis.

“Our people – they’re hurting, too, because they’re homeless, they’re scattered,” Ms Dardar says. “It’s hard on everybody. It has hurt the whole community.”

Hundreds of residents are still living in tents, trailers and campers, or in their cars or storm-damaged homes, and many homes that survived are housing several households.

Officials in Terrebonne Parish have requested 10,000 trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for residents whose homes are unliveable. None have been delivered, according to state Representative Tanner Magee.

FEMA has paid for hotel rooms for roughly 3,200 households in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, according to the agency, but residents are pleading for housing that is closer to their homes as they begin the laborious process of gutting and repairing them. Many area hotels are unavailable, and officials don’t anticipate dispatching FEMA trailers or mobile homes soon.

A vast network of mutual aid groups and volunteers has supported hard-hit areas and Indigenous communities in the storm’s wake. Tribal leaders have created GoFundMe campaigns and put out urgent requests on social media for building supplies and volunteers to help rebuild, as well as cleaning products, laundry detergent, and large plastic tubs to hold salvageable items, and storage pods to hold the tubs.

“I always did say bayou people are resilient. We usually always bounce back,” Ms Dardar says. “But I am so worried, because most people here don’t have the funds to rebuild. If FEMA can’t help, I really don’t know what they’re going to do … We’ve been neglected. We’ve always been neglected.”

The community of Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana, as seen from above on 31 August, two days after Hurricane Ida made landfall. (Getty Images)

The disappearing Isle de Jean Charles – among the southernmost communities in Louisiana on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico – has lost 98 per cent of its land over the last several decades, following levee construction and flood diversion projects, sea-level rise and a constant battering from climate-crisis-fuelled storms.

In 2020, the state endured five major storms – the most in a single year. The island now is roughly the size of three football fields. Residents are connected to the island by a single road that frequently disappears under surrounding waters and during floods.

The Isle de Jean Charles band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe has organised around its resettlement plan for nearly two decades.

The tribe determined that resettlement “is the best way to reunite our displaced tribal members and rekindle our traditional life-ways” as the island erodes, according to the Tribe, which envisions space for sustainable housing, a community centre, gathering areas, seed-saving programmes and a museum, among other resources.

In 2016, Isle de Jean Charles was the first community in the nation to receive federal funding to retreat inland from the impacts of the climate crisis, what The New York Times called America’s first “climate refugees.”

After the state received a $98m grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, including $48m to resettle the Tribe, a Tribe-led resettlement plan was “hijacked” by the state, reneging on the conditions laid out by the Tribe, members have argued.

The grant supported construction of 150 homes on a 515-acre plot in Schriever, roughly 40 miles inland from the island.

In Ida’s aftermath, Tribal councilman Chris Brunet returned to Isle de Jean Charles and placed a yellow sign at the foot of his home: “ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES IS NOT DEAD. CLIMATE CHANGE SUCKS.”

If rates of sea level rise exceed 6 to 9 millimeters per year, Louisiana’s remaining wetlands are likely to be overwhelmed by ocean water within 50 years, according to Tulane University’s Torbjörn Törnqvist, who authored a 2020 study finding that the submersion of the state’s coastline is “probably inevitable”.

The alarming report follows decades of warnings from communities living on the so-called “frontline” of the climate emergency.

Tribal members now are closely watching how a new administration responds to those warnings, and whether it will be enough.

“It should have happened years ago,” Ms Dardar says. “The coast is always the last thing on their minds. They have to take care of the coast if they want to save anything. They have to protect the coast. You have to try to do something, and nothing’s being done.”