Climate change not a distant problem for Indigenous island
NEW ORLEANS— As the Earth warms and waters rise, Indigenous communities are on the front lines of climate change from the southern U.S. coast to James Bay to Nunavut.
Forced off land by exclusionary government policies to make way for arriving settlers, Indigenous people are still engaged in a centuries-old fight to safeguard what is left for the next generations.
Nowhere is that more evident than in southern Louisiana.
For the Indigenous people of Isle de Jean Charles, climate change is not some distant or abstract threat.
Their plight is also a reminder that years of inattention to Indigenous communities has meant they will often bear the consequences of climate change first and most painfully.
Isle de Jean Charles was once a refuge to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw people — a shelter from the extermination policies of Andrew Jackson, the violent Indian Removal Act imposed to make way for arriving colonials.
But the land they were forced onto is rapidly disappearing. In the last 50 years, the island’s land mass has shrunk by 98 per cent — due to rising sea levels, oil and gas exploration, levee development and soil erosion.
Two decades ago, the tribe realized they needed to flee to higher ground. They are now in the process of a near $48million relocation, funded by the U.S. government.
Those living and working on southern Louisiana tribal lands know well that the Earth is rapidly warming, the sea levels rising and that intervention must happen now before more land disappears into the water.
Just to the west of Isle de Jean Charles, Grand Caillou/ Dulac Chief Shirell ParfaitDardar’s community has watched the waters rise steadily in her southern Louisiana homeland as mismanagement, coastal erosion and a warming Earth have put the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw people directly in harm’s way.
“We are now also experiencing things like nuisance flooding during south-east winds, the water is polluted with all sorts of contaminants. It is the snowball effect of all things caused by climate change,” she said.
It is not an exaggeration to say southern Louisiana is sinking. Since the 1930s, the state has lost 1,883 square miles of land (nearly the size of Prince Edward Island), noted Alex Kolker, an associate professor at Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.
Blame for Louisiana’s climate woes can be traced back to the way the Mississippi River has been managed, to the canals built for oil and gas exploration, to climate change itself.
A further 1,750 square miles of additional land are at risk of being lost in the next 50 years if measures are not put in place now, according to Louisiana’s 2012 Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast.
“The catastrophe facing south Louisiana means that we must act quickly or we will lose everything,” the report said. (In June 2017, the state approved a $50-billion Coastal Master Plan.)
Yet while Indigenous communities in the area are most vulnerable to the geographic crisis underway, they are still excluded from making decisions about how their land is managed and protected.
The Grand Caillou/Dulac have fought for U.S. recognition, which would give them federal band status, for 25 years. The state of Louisiana recognizes them, but not the country that has tried to erase them for more than 200 years.
Recognition would give the Grand Caillou/Dulac a seat at the negotiation table. They often find themselves “consulted” on resource projects only when there is a public meeting. Parfait-Dardar said things are improving with scientists and environmentalists but there is a “long way to go” with everyone else.
In this way, she feels a kinship with the hereditary chiefs of Wet’suwet’en territory in northern British Columbia who are defending their land from a proposed gas pipeline. Through the power of social media she has watched their struggle. And she relates.
In both cases, she says, exclusion of Indigenous voices from the decision-making process is not only wrong. It’s perverse.
“We are also the keepers of traditional knowledge, going back thousands of years and that is why we are all still here,” she said.
What is most perverse about their exclusion is that First Nations peoples are fighting not just for themselves and their children, but for everyone’s children — Indigenous or not.
“We are trying to do this for the next several generations. For all of us. Our time here is limited. We should be doing what is best for the planet that sustains us.”