It was a warm evening in early May of 2016. I made my way up two flights of stairs to Victor's wooden wraparound porch. His family's house is a comfortable prefab that looms 12 feet above the banks of Bayou Pointe-au-Chien on the border of Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes in Southeast Louisiana. It was built in 2008 after Hurricane Gustav blew the roof off their previous one-which itself had sustained extensive flood damage and needed to be raised after Hurricane Lili in 2002. I met Victor a little over a year earlier when he participated in a series of film screenings and panel discussions I co-organized in the Northeast United States. The events were coordinated to raise awareness about the recurrent disasters affecting his tribe, the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians of Louisiana (IDJC), and their plans for the future. Victor and the rest of the IDJC Tribe trace their heritage to Choctaw, Biloxi, and Chitimacha ancestors who, by the early 1840s, had escaped Indian Removal-era violence and resettled on a ridge of land 90 miles southwest of New Orleans called the Isle de Jean Charles, referred to locally as "the Island." "This is not the first time we have had to resettle. Our ancestors were displaced by treaties and Indian Removal. My papa's generation was displaced from the Island. We're already a displaced Tribe. That's why we've got to get it right." Tribal member, Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe "The question of migration and climate change is not a contingent problem to be solved (or that can be solved) by some technocratic protocol-but rather a metaphor carving out space to pose, contest and struggle for the highly political questions about the climate, mobility, economy, and the society we want." Giovanni Bettini (2017, p. 90
This article describes social encounters produced through climate adaptation policy experimentation focused on managed retreat—a framework increasingly used by academics and planning professionals to describe various kinds of planned relocations from areas exposed to environmental hazards. Building on scholarship that examines the political ecology of resettlement and adaptation (Shearer, 2012; Maldonado, 2014; Marino 2015; Whyte et al. 2019), I draw on five years of ethnographic work conducted alongside Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders as their longstanding Tribal resettlement planning was transformed by government investment. I found that Louisiana’s Office of Community Development relied on Tribal-led planning to garner federal funds, used those funds to transform the resettlement, and used planning process and documentation to erase the rationales behind and aims of Indigenous-led planning—a process I liken to Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019)’s notion of decontextualization as a colonial strategy of erasure. I contend that state decontextualization of the resettlement from a struggle for cultural survival to managed retreat policy experimentation reproduced a frontier dynamic whereby colonial and capitalist coastal futures are rested upon the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their lifeways, institutions, and self-determination. Constructions of risk and community and timelines published in planning documentation were particularly important state tools used for decontextualization. Ethnographic accounts of such processes can inform future resistance to eco-colonial schemes within climate adaptation.
Despite a rich history of collaborative and engaged scholarship and the recent “participatory turn” in anthropology few anthropology departments train students in the philosophy or methods of collaboration. Graduate training is typically characterized by conventional classroom-based lectures and individualized projects, while participatory research is thought of as something scholars can do later in their careers. The 2013 Health Equity Alliance of Tallahassee (HEAT) Ethnographic Field School disrupted this paradigm. The Field School used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework to train graduate students and community stakeholders in applied research methods through participation in an established community/university research partnership, examining race, racism, and health outcomes. The Field School was comprised of a racially, economically, and educationally diverse, intergenerational, multicultural, and multiethnic group of participants. Reflecting on this experience, we challenge the myth of the “lone ethnographer” and argue for a reorientation in anthropological methods training towards transdisciplinary, participatory, and collaborative ethnographic methods.
This article investigates whether it is possible to bring the longue durée, or the re-contextualization of risk distribution and accumulation, into litigation about climate outcomes. We do this by analyzing the structure of disaster litigation to identify if and whether historical harm is included in argumentation and by applying the concept of takings to a hypothetical legal argument of repetitive flooding in Alaska. We conclude that invisibility of historical harm in climate and disaster litigation gives insight into the preference and structure of the law.
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