Above the Rising Tide: Tribes in Coastal Louisiana’s Apply Local Strategies and Knowledge to Adapt to Rapid Environmental Change

Companion, Michele

doi:10.1201/b18233-22

Cited by 5 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…According to Tribal leaders, the Island flooded from six major storms and multiple less severe storms since 2005. Maldonado et al (2015) and other critics have referred to the region as a "sacrificial zone of resource extraction" due to the exploitation and subsequent disaster produced by industrial development.…”

Section: Extraction Exclusion and Injusticementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Restoring capacity for seasonal habitation, communal gathering, subsistence, and the reinvigoration of traditions are thus potentially essential resettlement planning activities. Such considerations and the retaining of Island land have long been prioritized in the discussions among the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders and their partners (Maldonado et al 2015;Peterson and Maldonado 2016). Retaining previously held territory is seen as critical for the cultural survival of many indigenous communities and nations like the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe (Burkett et al 2017;Marino 2015).…”

Section: Reshaping Louisiana's Coastal Frontier: From Doctrine Of Dismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders had been actively working on resettling inland and reuniting their displaced Tribe for over a decade prior to the National Disaster Resilience Competition. The Tribe's pre-NDRC resettlement efforts are documented extensively by journalists, academics, and filmmakers (Jessee 2015;Maldonado et al 2015;Simon 2008). Despite multiple setbacks in the previous efforts the US Army Corps and Terrebonne Parish described in a previous section of this chapter, the Tribal Council has continued to search for resources and pathways to reunite their people and ensure their future inland-an effort described by Tribal Executive Secretary, Chantel Comardelle, during an interview as "creating a living and active bridge from our ancestral land to the new Isle de Jean Charles Tribal community.…”

Section: Reframing Resettlementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…State or federal agencies could also provide financial compensation for time spent on resettlement activities, office space for community or tribal use, and guidance for people to gather additional resources themselves. Providing material support to existing community-to-community and tribe-to-tribe knowledge exchanges and to existing relationships of solidarity among community-based organizations would enhance resilience and might also supplement governmental deficiencies (Lazrus et al 2016;Maldonado et al 2015). Access to professional networks, like the American Planning Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, Rising Voices, and the Rural Sociological Society, are also potentially valuable.…”

Section: Beyond Beneficiaries: Resourcing Community and Tribal-drivenmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope

Jessee

2019

Extreme Weather and Society

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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

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Section: Extraction Exclusion and Injusticementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Reshaping Louisiana's Coastal Frontier: From Doctrine Of Dismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Reframing Resettlementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Beyond Beneficiaries: Resourcing Community and Tribal-drivenmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope

Jessee

2019

Extreme Weather and Society

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“…The Isle de Jean Charles Tribe and surrounding communities have suffered impacts from eight major storms just since 2002, and most recently experienced flooding from Hurricane Patricia (2015), on top of the impacts from the 2010 British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster, and other oil spills and contamination (Maldonado et al. ).…”

Section: Framing: Culture Of Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Considering culture in disaster practice

Maldonado¹

2016

Annals of Anthropol Pract

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In disaster‐related policies and practices, culture is often treated as tangible, homogenous, static. The diversity of communities and places, on‐the‐ground actions and networks for how things are actually accomplished, intricacies of local politics and maneuvering and layers of socio‐historical inequalities, are often missing from expert calculations and official frameworks for action. The basic but most important first question goes unasked: “What would you do and how?” Disaster anthropology relentlessly arrives at the all‐too‐common problem of “policies and practices need to consider local culture.” Here too culture is framed as static, passive, homogenous. Understanding the complexity and dynamics by which we experience and understand the world is much more challenging than at first glance. Culture is fluid, evolving, and intertwined with a host of economic, political, and social relations and tensions that are constantly altering seemingly stable processes. This leads to at least two related questions. First, how do we theorize beyond this point to better interpret and explain the persistent issue of cultural insensitivity in disaster‐related policy and practice? And second, how can we develop more useful and successful prescriptions for incorporating cultural sensitivity into policy and practice? Overall, this article puts forward the argument that disaster reconstruction is a complex, culturally sensitive dynamic, within which decisions are embedded in tensions of social, political, and economic priorities. While disasters can function as a mechanism to sustain and perpetuate power relations, disaster survivors have distinct agency through the disaster recovery process and are empowered citizens that should be treated as equal partners to guide the process in a way that makes sense on‐the‐ground in the given local contexts. In the unfolding plays of disaster, the interpretive, behavioral, and material repertoires we refer to as culture exhibit some of the characteristics of emergence, insomuch as they are not fully determined by arrangements that precede them; yet, neither are they without antecedents, relationships with the past and other ongoing processes.

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Incorporating Indigenous voices in regional climate change adaptation: opportunities and challenges in the U.S. Pacific Northwest

Dent

Donatuto²,

Campbell³

et al. 2023

Climatic Change

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As the impacts of climate change increasingly and disproportionately affect indigenous peoples, equitable approaches to regional climate change adaptation must center the voices, needs, and priorities of Indigenous communities. Although the tribal climate change principles identify actionable recommendations to address the unique needs of Indigenous peoples in the contexts of climate change adaptation efforts undertaken at the Federal level in the United States (U.S.), there has yet to be exploration of how such principles might be applied at the regional level. Through semi-structured qualitative interviews with 18 representatives from inter-Tribal organizations and non-Tribal organizations engaged in regional climate adaptation in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, this research sought to describe challenges faced by, and opportunities available to, non-Tribal entities when engaging with Tribes on regional climate adaptation initiatives. All respondents reported high levels of motivation to work with Tribes on climate adaptation and identified several perceived benefits of integrating Tribal partnerships and indigenous ways of knowing into regional climate adaptation initiatives. Respondents underscored the need for strong, trusted relationships that respect the sovereignty and priorities of Tribal nations to guide engagement. However, non-Tribal organizations’ own capacity constraints, perceived Tribal capacity constraints, and institutional cultures rooted in colonialism and structural racism were discussed as obstacles to meaningful engagement. As such, we identify an urgent need to prioritize sustained investments in both Tribal and non-Tribal actors’ partnership capacities and climate change adaptation capabilities to place Indigenous voices and needs at the forefront of regional climate change adaptation planning and implementation.

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Above the Rising Tide: Tribes in Coastal Louisiana’s Apply Local Strategies and Knowledge to Adapt to Rapid Environmental Change

Cited by 5 publications

References 9 publications

Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope

Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope

Considering culture in disaster practice

Incorporating Indigenous voices in regional climate change adaptation: opportunities and challenges in the U.S. Pacific Northwest

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