of things, including pictures. So, to see some- thing of that magnitude that was preserved there, that was just amazing.” “I would never have imagined they had
so much stuff,” Billiot says. “They had some artifacts that they didn’t know what they were. We showed them what they were and how they worked. They had a little device for hooking up the Spanish moss and spinning it into rope, and they didn’t know what that was for. There was a pirogue from the early 1800 – dugout – that was from here.” “We often talk about displacement of
According to elderly residents on the island, Isle de Jean Charles was once home to as many as 750 people, occupying 70 homes arranged on both sides of the bayou in a line village pattern. Now only 20 or so families remain. Above, Deputy Chief Wenceslaus Billiot Jr. and his mother at their home on the island, shown at top.
FACING PAGE: The island’s only access road, littered with storm debris in April 2018.
our tribe here, but as a whole tribe, we are displaced from our parent tribes,” says Co- mardelle. “And that was evident seeing the artifacts. They had baskets like ones from the Choctaw tribe of Alabama. Same weave pat- tern. And the games, we had similar games, we just didn’t have the same materials. For a tribe like us having to go back and find things and put pieces together, being able to sit in the collections and see baskets from the Choctaws that you know the pattern and know how they’re made; and clothing of the Biloxis that are similar to ours; it proves that we do have this history, and it helps to put those pieces back together and confirm that history.”
24 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2018
PICKING UP THE PIECES Putting the pieces back together again was important to state officials, too. According to Jessica Simms of the OCD-DRU, the state of Louisiana wanted to make sure that all Isle residents would be settled in a location that was suitable to their socioeconomic and cultural values and that former Island resi- dents could rejoin the community in its new location. “Many of whom,” she says, “were displaced over time following repetitive di- saster events.” According to elderly residents on the island, Isle de Jean Charles was once home to as many as 750 people, occupying 70 homes arranged on both sides of the bayou in a line village pattern. Now only 20 or so families remain. Louisiana is said to be home to more
American Indian tribes than any other south- ern state. There are four federally recognized tribes, 10 tribes recognized by the state of Louisiana and four tribes without official sta- tus. Located in Terrebonne Parish, the Isle de Jean Charles tribe is one of three ancestrally related but independent tribes of what was, until recently, the Biloxi-Chitimacha Con- federation of Muskogees. This is traditionally Chitimacha country. Scholars estimate that in
PHOTOS BY DOUG HERMAN
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