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Kenya LaMeroux wanders along
Island Road, as a storm approaches.
grant will help save the tribe from the eroding landscape, but
addressing the effects of cultural erosion is far more difficult.
“Once our island goes, the core of our tribe is lost,” said
Chantel Comardelle, the deputy tribal chief ’s daughter.
“We’ve lost our whole culture — that is what is on the line.”
According to JR Naquin, a member of the tribe, the
island once housed about 300 people, but only about 60 remain
today. Much of the tribe’s heritage and traditions have
faded away because the people have been scattered by land
loss and rising waters. The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaws
haven’t been able to hold a powwow since before Hurricane
Katrina hit over 10 years ago. For generations, the Biloxi-
Chitimacha-Choctaws have sustained themselves off of the
island’s natural resources.
But today, residents say the land loss has made that untenable.
“When the Great Depression hit, we didn’t know because
we would just trade with each other,” says Wenceslaus
Billiot, Sr., who was born, raised, and married on the island.
He and his wife of 69 years, Denecia Billiot, raised their children
there, but their grandchildren and great-grandchildren
no longer consider it a viable place to live.
Chris Brunet is the eighth generation in his family to live on
the island as a member of the tribe. In one generation, “this
island has gone from being self-sufficient and fertile to relying
on grocery stores,” he says. “What you see now is a skeleton
of the island it once was.”
The land is disappearing into the Gulf because of a combination
of coastal erosion, rising sea levels, lack of soil renewal,
and shifting soil due to dredging for oil and gas pipeline
placement. The soil that remains is nutrient-depleted because
the protective marshlands that once served as the first line of
defense against saltwater intrusion for the Louisiana coastline
are disappearing at a rate of the area of an entire football
field every hour.
As the effects of climate change transform coastal communities
around the world, the people of Isle de Jean Charles
will be only 60 of the estimated 200 million people in coastal
communities globally who could be displaced by 2050 because
of climate change.
Theresa Billiot, living on the island with her parents,
Wenceslaus and Denecia, in order to help take care of them,
commutes nearly an hour each way to her job at a grocery
store in Houma, Louisiana. Her small garden between their
house and the levee is one of the only remnants of the days
when the tribe could live off of the land.
In the distance, three oil storage tanks are visible reminders
of how nearby underground pipelines have
contributed to the shifting and sinking land.“It is hard for
30 CURRENT FALL 2017