ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La. (AP) – Hope that their way of life will be saved is dimming among the American Indians who live on this ribbon of land in coastal Louisiana, a place of golden marsh, alligators and exotic birds that has been torn apart by hurricanes, oil drilling and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Still, two last-ditch projects – a new blacktop road to replace an old one washed out by Hurricane Rita in 2005 and new floating plastic marsh patches meant to bring back land lost to erosion – are cause for a small amount of celebration among the American Indians of Isle de Jean Charles, a marsh community on the verge of disappearing due to coastal erosion.
This summer, crews finished a $7 million road to the island, a spit of soggy land six miles from the Gulf of the Mexico and home to a collection of interrelated families with French, Choctaw, Houma, Biloxi and Chitimacha bloodlines that go back 170 years when a Frenchman came here with his Choctaw wife and named the island after his father, Jean Charles.
And then this week, more than 300 volunteers from corporate giants Shell and Entergy Corp., sport fishermen with the Coastal Conservation Association and students from local schools helped with an experiment to build new marsh with 1,500 linear feet of plastic mats that look like big pot scrubbers. The mats were anchored in an area of open water that, at one time, was covered in thick marsh. Today, the single road to Isle de Jean Charles crosses this open water.
“This is not one of those Army Corps of Engineers’ studies where millions of dollars are spent and nothing is done,” said Chris Chaisson, a 28-year-old member of the United Houma Nation, one of several American-Indian tribes in south Louisiana. He lives in the nearby Indian village of Pointe-au-Chien and helped plant the mats on Friday alongside dozens of Shell office workers from New Orleans.
The project using the “floating islands” is costing about $150,000. If all goes well, the mats made from recycled plastic drinking bottles and threaded with marsh grasses should take root in about a year and a half, said Nicole Waguespack, the president of Martin Ecosystems, a Baton Rouge company that makes the mats.
She said the mats are anchored to the ground by heavy-duty cables and should be able to withstand tides and hurricanes. Mats have been placed in two other locations in south Louisiana and are now rooted to the land, she said.
Clearly, the mats will play only a small role in solving Louisiana’s bigger problems. The state has lost about 1,900 square miles of land since the 1930s and continues to experience erosion. The loss is expected to get worse with sea level rise.
Eugene Turner, a coastal scientist at Louisiana State University, said projects like these are worth doing. “I like to see people try different things,” he said. But he added that they need to “get quantitative results to see if they work.”
In the big scheme, though, this recent attention to the plight of Isle de Jean Charles has not changed the bleak outlook many American Indians here have.
Near his home, Edison Dardar, an American Indian in his 60s, cast a net for shrimp and had little to say. He called floating islands “silly.” As for the new road, he was glad it was done, but added: “They could have made it higher.”
Before it was rebuilt, the road habitually flooded in storms and even when the winds and tides pushed out of the Gulf. Residents said the new road still floods because it was not built high enough out of the water.
Albert Naquin, the chief of Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, said Friday that the new floating islands might work, but he questioned why they were placed on the north side of the road. He reckoned that location would do little to help stop the surge coming from the south.
“To me it’s a big joke,” Naquin said. “It serves no purpose at all for the island people. I asked myself this morning: `Do they think we’re stupid? If they want to truly help the island, why don’t they bring some rocks (as buffers), and then bring the little islands in?”’
The future looks bleak, he said. Not long ago, the natural gas line to the island was cut off because it would have been too costly to rebuild it, he said. He figures the loss of telephone service to the island is next. In the meantime, he said families continue to move away.
The village is a sad sight today. Half the houses are empty shells, blown apart by hurricanes. Most of the others are raised high on pilings – not for the view, but to keep their homes from flooding. The village sits outside the main levee systems of south Louisiana, and in the middle of some of the fastest eroding wetlands in the world.
Charles Verdin, the chairman of the nearby Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe, was gloomy too.
Although his village is protected by low levees and remains intact, he said the future was uncertain.
He said any work to save the area was worthwhile, but he was pessimistic because coastal restoration efforts have not included robust plans to allow the Mississippi River to run wild again. Since the river was hemmed in by levees in the 1930s, the Louisiana delta has been deprived of land-building sediment.
“I’m glad they’re trying, don’t give up, but as long as they don’t open up the Mississippi River, we’re just going to keep eroding away,” Verdin said. “All they can do is try to slow it down.”
He said Pointe-au-Chien faces a fate similar to Isle de Jean Charles.
“Our turn is coming too,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time. We’re going to go back into the Gulf.”