American Indian Culture and Research Journal

August 29, 2005 marked the worst natural disaster in US history. While millions across the world watched their televisions in horror and disbelief, a greater tragedy began to unfold. Centuries of neglect and disinvestment in the indigenous and tribal communities of Louisiana would reach an all-time high in the aftermath of the storm forever known as Katrina. This collection of essays draws on the work of scholars and Native community members from the state of Louisiana and beyond. Although Hurricane Katrina has had an enormous impact on Native American communities in the Gulf Coast area, it also highlights a reality that existed long before the storm struck the region. For mixed-blood communities like the Atakapa/Creole people from Grand Bayou, the storm was a reminder of the social, economic, and political under-pinnings that have erased the voices of Native American peoples in the state. According to Atakapa/Creole tribal member Paul Sylvie: There is a discrepancy. Some people say that we should know better than to live in a flood-prone, hurricane-prone area. They want to say that we “choose” to live on Grand Bayou. It’s not necessarily a way of choice. This is where we have been since before there even was a state of Louisiana or a Plaquemines Parish. Now they want to tell us we can’t apply for aid because of where we live. But as a group, this is our home. If they drive us out, what’s going to stop them from coming for you and your community? Sylvie’s comments speak to the heart of the issue that Katrina has taught us. Issues of poverty, ongoing colonialism, and racism have dramatic impact on the ability of Native peoples to continue to live on their traditional lands and maintain important cultural practices. The community is well aware of the challenges that confront it and refuse to be rendered invisible as so many indigenous people of Louisiana have been since European contact first began.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita affected hundreds of thousands in southern Louisiana. To say that they touched people of every stripe and color dramatically is a gross understatement. Aside from the horrendous loss of life and property damage, families were uprooted, traditions disrupted, and one of the largest migrations in American history forced on a state with traditionally the lowest outmigration rate. Still, as hurricane survivors know, a large difference separates standing battered versus lying destroyed. What Katrina and, more significantly, Rita dealt the United Houma Nation and other tribes of southeastern Louisiana was a harsh strike but not a death blow. On the contrary, Katrina and Rita were only the last in a series of hurricanes that have shaped Indian settlement and culture. Through all those storms the Houmas have persevered, helped each other, and used tempests to reaffirm who they are. This article will examine several hurricanes and how they affected Houma history and culture. Though the Houma lived among highland bluffs when they first met the French in 1699, within seven years they had relocated down the Mississippi and to the Bayou St. John area just outside New Orleans. A few years later they moved back upstream to the area known in colonial times as Upper Lafourche, near modern Donaldsonville, Louisiana. There the Houma provided foodstuffs to La Nouvelle-Orléans and also buffered the settlement against hostile tribes and the English. Houma political power waned dramatically during the Spanish colonial era as increasing numbers of Germans, Acadians, and Canary Islanders (Isleños) settled along the river. Not only did these groups supplant the Houma as food producers and soldiers, but also increasing conflict with settlers convinced elders that the best route to survival was to relocate down bayous into Lafourche Interior and into modern Lafourche, Terrebonne, and St. Mary parishes.

The majority of the Houma people live in the southern portions of Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes in south Louisiana. Today more than 50 percent of the Houma still live within a twenty-five-mile radius of the town of Montegut. In the adjacent parishes of Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Mary, and St. Bernard are smaller Houma settlements that trace back to the early twentieth century. Before the 1960s Houma Indian children could not attend public school in Lafourche and Terrebonne. After years of fighting this type of discrimination several family groups migrated to the adjacent parishes. There they found new trapping and fishing grounds, and some found the chance to “pass” their children into school systems more tolerant of or less knowledgeable about Indians. I grew up in the Houma community that had formed in lower Plaquemines Parish, about thirty miles north of the mouth of the Mississippi River. We were originally from one of the larger Houma settlements on Bayou Lafourche just below the town of Golden Meadow. Sometime in 1964 we relocated to Plaquemines to live near my Uncle Hannah, my dad’s brother. The Houma community there was centered near the town of Venice with extended family groups clustered along the local waterways. The Half-Way House, Tiger Pass, Spanish Pass, Stryker’s Woods, and the Village were the major Houma settlements with a population that would fluctuate over the years but would never grow to more than a few hundred individuals. In those years it was to us a paradise; the waters were filled with shrimp, crabs, and fish, and the marshes teemed with muskrat, nutria, coons, otters, and minks. My dad, Raymond Mayheart Dardar (or simply “Mayheart” to the Indian community), was as good a trawler and trapper as any in the tribe. Fishing, hunting, and trapping were the traditional occupations of my people. Like the generations before him, my dad was a child of the bayous, marshes, and swamps of Louisiana, and his knowledge of Houma lifeways provided for all our needs. We lived in a little wood-framed house on Spanish Pass that my mom, Elsie, affectionately liked to call her “little green acres.”

Shortly after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina became clear, NBC televised A Concert for Hurricane Relief, a star-studded event watched by more than fourteen million Americans. Perhaps the most memorable moment of the evening had little to do with charity. Hip-hop artist Kanye West went “offscript” during a live segment of the telethon, voicing an opinion shared by many in the African American community: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” In his brief interruption of the choreographed program, West captured the uneasiness and shame many Americans felt regarding not only the federal government’s response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina but also the stark racial inequalities and class disparities hidden in plain sight in the contemporary United States. Whatever the veracity of his specific charge, West’s comments left an indelible mark on public discourse: race mattered in the social context that made the disaster and its tragic aftermath possible. Importantly, to the producers and viewers of the telethon, as much as to West, in the wake of the hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005 race mattered in a rather singular fashion, one that cast it in black-and-white terms and located it within impoverished areas of New Orleans. Consequently, the presence and experience of other racially marginalized groups received far less attention in the media. Native Americans, in particular, suffered beyond the glare of the media spotlight, rendered invisible by journalistic biases and public preoccupations. Ironically, although the mainstream media and its audiences all but erased American Indians from the unfolding story of the social crises wrought by Katrina and Rita, during the past two years Indianness has played an important role in the framing of New Orleans, the staging of America, and popular perceptions of the crisis.

INTRODUCTION In 2005, estimates from state officials and tribal leaders suggested that 4,500 Native Americans lost everything in southeastern Louisiana during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Was there mass media coverage of the effect of these hurricanes on Native Americans in Louisiana? If so, then where was it? If not, then why wasn’t there any? What can be learned from a post-Katrina and -Rita examination of the media coverage about the inabilities of mass media to illuminate the impact the hurricanes had on Native Americans in Louisiana? Although it seems to have been a common journalistic belief that because the majority populations in many Louisiana cities covered by the media reports were either predominantly African American or Caucasian—therefore, small Native American populations will have their concerns addressed in the coverage of these groups—the problem with this formulation is that it may lend the illusion to the American public that African Americans and Caucasians were the only populations affected. The significance of this issue becomes clearer when one tries to understand why the Houma and Pointe-au-Chien nations—like many others—raised serious questions about the limited media coverage they received shortly after the hurricanes struck and about the coverage they still do not receive as they continue to struggle to return their lives to normal. The standard discourse in the social scientific literature surrounding this problem suggests that few people were aware that Native Americans still lived in Louisiana; many are not federally recognized nations but are state-recognized nations and therefore not “real” Indians, or their appearances make it hard to distinguish them from the larger African American and Caucasian populations. This lack of attention on the Native Americans is consistent with the waning of nationwide media attention on Katrina and Rita victims.

Tears come before words as Tunica-Biloxi tribal member Elisabeth Pierite struggles to express her experiences with Hurricane Katrina. She sits in the living room of her family’s new home in Marksville, Louisiana, two years after Katrina forced them to abandon their home in New Orleans East. It is fitting to start with tears. Really, it is the only proper way to begin the story, to convey what Hurricane Katrina and its human-made aftermath meant for her, for so many of us. Hurricane Katrina traumatized the city of New Orleans and the Gulf South. It filled most Americans and global citizens with grief and rage in the late summer of 2005. As the world watched, feeling powerless to help the many thousands of suffering people, at first stunned and then furious over the ineptitude of government response to this long-predicted disaster, the Tunica-Biloxi Tribal Nation tended to the needs of thousands of evacuees on its small reservation three hours northwest of New Orleans directly along a designated hurricane evacuation route.

In June 2004, the American national media spent a considerable amount of airtime revisiting the events of June 1964 when three civil rights workers were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi on what was the fortieth anniversary of the murders. National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) All Things Considered devoted airtime to a story, “Truth and Reconciliation in Neshoba County,” in which reporter Debbie Elliot went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, the seat of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, to examine how “people in Neshoba, both black and white, are grappling with their community’s legacy.” The story goes on to look at the activities of the thirty-member Philadelphia Task Force and dissects the activities of this group as racial networking under the black-white binary that has become synonymous with the civil rights movements in the United States. The story overlooked the several members of the Philadelphia Task Force of Mississippi Band of Choctaw tribal members whose roots in Neshoba Country predate that of whites and blacks by thousands of years; thus framing the discussion of this particular issue in “black and white” and excluding any evidence of Indian in that mix. That date stands clearly in my mind, as it was my older daughter’s birthday. My daughter is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and her middle name is Nashoba, named after not the county of her father’s birth but after the clan from which that county takes its Choctaw name: wolf. It was a stark reminder to me of how Native peoples are completely taken out of a situation that is contextualized as a black or white issue, or when blacks and whites work together for the common good. There is no room for Indians in that scenario, according to the American media, because for so long the media has believed its own creation: that of the vanishing Indian whose voice no longer matters in times of national crisis or mourning. The only relevant news on American Indians the media sees as fit to broadcast follows a narrow definition of what is newsworthy: anything that has to do with casinos or tribal corruption warrants an “in-depth view” on the tracking of Indian country.

At the height of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Choctaw writer Cedric Sunray wrote in his Native American Times essay, “Similarities between Tribes and the Ninth Ward”: The word tragedy can hardly signify the extent of the pain being suffered by many in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. While America comes to grips with the enormity of the despair, people, many of them Black, in the previously unheard of Ninth Ward of New Orleans (one of the country’s most impoverished ghettos) already understand the touch, taste, and sound of generations of poverty. A poverty created by a very real caste system, which exists here in the United States of America. And Indians are no exception. Indian country has its own Ninth Ward of . . . individuals and families who have been some of the hardest hit over the course of the past week. . . . As communities of primarily impoverished and identifiable Indian people, we have never had the best of what America has to offer. The prosperity parade doesn’t march down the roads of our communities. And neither will assistance. Our lack of federal recognition has placed us at the mercy of federal bureaucrats and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We are the neglected of the neglected. You see, it is easy to forget about people, when you marginalize them and pretend they no longer exist. Just ask the people in New Orleans Ninth Ward.

We weave baskets of pine straw. We weave baskets of cane. Grandfather moves in pattern, flowing ever outward, claws offering earthen memory. And we dive and rise continuously from waters pushed from the Gulf of Mexico into the interior deltas. Our inherited blood brackish as these bayous . . . neither fresh nor sea-salt; yet natural in its inherent Louisiana topography. —L. Rain Cranford-Gomez, “Old Crawdad the Fisherman” As a child on the Gulf of Mexico, evacuation to higher ground for floods, hurricanes, and tornado warnings were common. It was a part of life, as much as getting up before school with my mother and father to fish for mullet and sheepshead for our evening dinner. The water was our sustenance, but we respected it and knew as quickly as it gave it could take. At the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the homelands of my father and grandfather in Louisiana. Hundreds of miles of wetlands, already threatened, were turned to open water; vital brackish waters were flooded with seawater, thus damaging the delicate balance between fresh and salt that many plants and animals need for their habitats. Vital records and historic documents were flooded, damaged, besieged with mold, and lost to the ravages of wind and water. However, these records do not tell the only stories in Louisiana. In the wake of the devastation that has impacted Louisiana communities, in particular Creole and Indian communities, it makes other forms of record keeping, such as historic oral narratives and material culture, vitally important as we seek to preserve our histories as Indians, Louisiana Creoles, and uniquely mixed-blood people in Louisiana.