“We are displaced. Our once large oak trees are now ghosts. The
island that provided refuge and prosper- ity is now just a frail skeleton,” says Chantel Comardelle,
tribal secretary of the Biloxi-
Chitimacha-Choctaw. We are sitting in one of the few houses left on the Louisiana Gulf Coast island of Isle de Jean Charles, which has shrunk from 34.5 square miles to half a square mile. Out front a stagnant canal festers, obstructed by a recent levee built by the Army Corps of Engineers to protect the remainder of the island. The community of Isle de Jean Charles
understands that climate change is affecting them. “The weather patterns are changing; storms are much more frequent” Comardelle says. “People really started leaving in the 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s, following storms like Juan and Hurricane Andrew, a lot of people left. Their houses got blown away – torn up, or flooded – completely gone, some of them.” Her father, deputy chief Wenceslaus Bil-
liot Jr. adds: “Every hurricane, someone leaves because their house gets blown away.” Right now, 95 percent of the tribal community no longer lives on the Isle. The residents and tribal members are now
the first federally funded community to be moved because of environmental degradation and displacement. In 2016, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded a $48.3 million grant through Loui- siana’s Office of Community Development- Disaster Recovery Unit (OCD-DRU) to fund the relocation of the Isle de Jean Charles band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe. Fol- lowing a two-year search and negotiation, some 500 acres of former sugar-cane land was purchased for nearly $12 million near Schrie- ver in southern Louisiana. Development is slated for 2019. In anticipation of the move and amidst
plans for relocation late last year, a tribal del- egation arrived at the Smithsonian Institution to view the cultural heritage collections relat- ed to their tribe and to their history and that have been held for decades at the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian. As part of the Recovering Voices initiative to preserve cultural knowledge, the delegation examined museum artifacts and was asked to contribute memories and recollections. “We had four generations there,” Co-
A large white cross marks the location where residents of the Isle de Jean Charles believe their cemetery is located, following the damages of multiple hurricanes over the past few decades.
mardelle says, “my kids traveled up with us, seeing this dugout canoe from our ancestors. With all the storms and such, we’ve lost a lot
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 23
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