How big oil and big construction helped create America’s first climate-change refugees

By Meagan Day

The story of Isle de Jean Charles is a sad one. Its inhabitants arrived as refugees, and they’ll depart as refugees too.

The island, off Louisiana’s coast, has lost 98% of its land since 1955. What little is left — a quarter-mile strip on either side of a narrow road — is saturated with saltwater. The pecan and banana trees are dead. The island will be gone within fifty years.

And now, the federal government has announced that it will spend $48 million dollars to relocate the island’s eighty-five residents, all of whom are members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indian Tribe. With this allocation, the French-speaking Native Americans of Isle de Jean Charles have officially become America’s first climate change refugees.

A sad development for a population that arrived as refugees almost 200 years ago. The first settlers were a Native American woman and a Frenchman who was disowned by his family for marrying her. After they established a home on the island, it became a haven for members of the Choctaw, Biloxi, and Chitmacha tribes, who had been expelled from their land by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Most members of these tribes were forced to march the Trail of Tears to reservations in Oklahoma. But some of them “took a turn,” explained Bob Gough, secretary of the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy. They “found themselves on an island right after Lewis and Clark had come through with the Louisiana Purchase, and have been there for the last 200 years.”

Throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries, Isle de Jean Charles was one of a few scattered enclaves in the American South where Native ways of life persisted, largely ignored. The island’s residents survived by fishing, trapping and hunting. Until the early 1900s, they lived in houses with dirt floors, mud walls and roofs thatched with palmetto leaves. The community posted signs around the island that said “Indian Land Keep Out” and community decisions were left up to the tribal chief. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the island’s children traveled by small boats known as pirogues, using a paddle or push-pole, to a religious school for Native Americans on the mainland (public schools weren’t racially integrated in Terrebonne Parish until 1967).

But while life on Isle de Jean Charles continued isolated and unchanged, industry had already begun to intervene in the Louisiana coastal wetlands. First, the Great Flood of 1927 devastated mainland Louisiana. Determined to prevent another flood, the state built a series of levees at the mouth of the river, which blocked the river sediment from flowing into the wetlands and began to slowly disrupt the ecosystem.

Shortly thereafter, oil and gas companies discovered a motherlode of fossil fuels in the Gulf of Mexico. They began digging canals to transport machinery and oil to and from wells. The canals crisscrossed the wetlands, resulting in unnatural saltwater pools and flows, destroying marshes and cypress groves, and flooding once-dry land. Corporate canal construction was more or less unregulated until the Clean Water Act of 1972, so for forty years the wetlands were sliced up without any oversight. It’s estimated that some 10,000 miles of canals were dug during this period.

The natural hydrological circulatory system that had sustained the Louisiana coastal wetlands was destroyed beyond repair. The land began to evaporate. The shoreline crumbled, and saltwater poisoned the plants. The animals that ate the plants starved to death. The soil dredged up during canal construction was piled into heaps so heavy they caused the land around them to sink. As all this happened, people moved their houses farther and farther inland — which is why Isle de Jean Charles is now just two rows of houses lining the road that leads to the bridge out.

The critically acclaimed 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild is based on the submersion of Isle de Jean Charles. At one point in that movie the child protagonist says, “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece… the entire universe will get busted.” Now, even the federal government has recognized that the bayou around Isle de Jean Charles is busted, and will never be restored.

It’s an appalling story, but there’s a silver lining. With its decision to relocate the community to an unsettled area on the mainland, the US government is acknowledging the extent of human-caused ecological wreckage, and beginning the important work of figuring out what to do with refugees of climate change. Unfortunately, there’s no doubt that this knowledge will prove useful in the future.