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15 June 2010

Jordan Flaherty : Cultural Extinction and the Deepwater Spill Photo of Bayou Pointe-au-Chien from a backyard in the Louisiana Indian community. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.
Cultural extinction and the Deepwater spill

Louisiana’s coastal communities fear they may never recover from BP’s drilling disaster.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / June 15, 2010

“The cultural losses as a consequence of the BP disaster are going to be astronomical,” says Advocates for Environmental Human Rights (AEHR) co-director Nathalie Walker. “There is no other culture like Louisiana’s coastal culture and we can only hope they won't be entirely erased.”

Walker and co-director Monique Harden have made it their mission to fight the environmental consequences of Louisiana’s corporate polluters. They say this disaster represents an unparalleled catastrophe for the lives of people across the region, but they also see in it a continuation of an old pattern of oil and chemical corporations displacing people of color from their homes.

Harden and Walker point out that at least five Louisiana towns -- all majority African American -- have been eradicated due to corporate pollution in recent decades. The most recent is the Southwest Louisiana town of Mossville, founded by African Americans in the 1790s.

The southern Louisiana towns of Diamond, Morrisonville, Sunrise, and Revilletown -- all founded by former slaves -- met similar fates. After years of chemical-related poisoning, the remaining residents have been relocated, and the corporations that drove them out now own their land. In most cases, only a cemetery remains, and former residents must pass through plant security to visit their relatives’ graves.

The town of Diamond, founded by the descendents of the participants of the 1811 Rebellion to End Slavery, the largest slave uprising in U.S. history, was relocated by Shell in 2002, after residents had faced decades of toxic exposure.

In the mid-1990s, Chemical producer Georgia Gulf Corporation poisoned and then acquired Revilletown, a town free Africans had started in the years after the civil war.

“We make the mistake of thinking this is something new,” says Harden. She adds that the historic treatment of these communities, as well as the lack of recovery that New Orleanians have seen since Katrina, makes her doubt the federal government will do what is necessary for Gulf recovery. “Since Obama got into office,” she says, “I have yet to see any action that reverses what Bush did after Katrina.”

Harden says Louisiana and the US must fundamentally transform our government’s relationships with corporations. “We’ve got to change the way we allow businesses to be in charge of our health and safety in this country,” she adds. As an example, Harden points to more stringent regulations in other countries, such as Norway, which requires companies to drill relief wells at the same time as any deepwater well. Pointe-au-Chien community leader Theresa Dardar. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.


Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe is a small band of French speaking Native Americans along Bayou Pointe-au-Chien, south of Houma, on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Their ancestors settled here three hundred years ago, and for them, the ongoing oil geyser is just the latest step in a long history of displacement and disenfranchisement. “The oil companies never respected our elders,” explains community leader Theresa Dardar. “And they never did respect our land.”

In the early part of this century, the oil companies took advantage of the fact that people living on the coast were isolated by language and distance, and laid claim to their land. Over the past several decades, these companies have devastated these idyllic communities, creating about 10,000 miles of canals through forests, marshes, and homes. “They come in, they cut a little, and it keeps getting wider and wider,” says Donald Dardar, Theresa’s husband and part of the tribe’s leadership. “They didn’t care where they cut.”

Sitting on a church pew, Theresa said they had met with indigenous natives from Alaska who discussed their experience in the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. “We don’t know how long we’ll be without fishing,” said Theresa. “It was 17 years before they could get shrimp.” And, she noted bitterly, this disaster is already much larger than the Valdez, with no end in sight.

BP has promised payouts to those who lose work from the oil, but few trust the company to make good on their promise, and even if they did, they doubt any settlement could make up for what will be lost. “It doesn’t matter how much money they give you,” says Theresa. “If we don’t have our shrimp, fish, crabs and oysters.”

“It’s not just a way of life, its our food,” she added. “It’s the loss of our livelihood and culture.”

The anxiety that Theresa expresses is also increasingly common in New Orleans, a city whose culture is inextricably linked to the Gulf. “How do you deal with this hemorrhaging in the bottom of the Gulf that seems endless?” asks Monique Harden of AEHR. “That is just scary as hell. I’ve been having nightmares about it.”

As the oil continues to flow, people feel both helpless and apocalyptic; depressed and angered. Residents who have just rebuilt from the 2005 hurricanes watch the oil wash up on shore with a building dread. “I never thought I’d be in a situation where I wanted another Katrina,” says Harden. “But I’d rather Katrina than this.”

Drilling economy

Across the street from the church in Pointe-au-Chien is a bayou, where frustrated fishers wait on their boats hoping against all odds that they will be able to use them this season. Behind the church is more water, and a couple miles further down the road ends in swamp. Dead oak trees, rotted by salt water, rise out of the canals. Telephone poles stick out of the water, along a path where once the road continued but now the encroaching waters have taken over.

The miles of swamp and barrier islands that stood between these homes and the Gulf used to slow hurricanes, and now the entire region has become much more vulnerable. Brenda Billiot, another local resident, gestured at her backyard, about a few dozen yards of grass that fades into marshes and water. “This used to be land,” she says, “as far as you could see.” Billiot is still repairing her home from the 2005 flooding, including raising it up a full 19 feet above the ground. She wonders if that will be enough, if there is anything they can do to make themselves safe and hold onto their culture.

Theresa believes that the government and oil companies are looking for an excuse to permanently displace the tribe. She believes this latest disaster, and the upcoming hurricane season, may spell the end for their language and culture. “I tell people; if we get another hurricane, take everything you want, because I don’t think they’ll let you back in,” says Dardar. “It’s scary because I don’t know where we’re going to go.” Labels: British Petroleum, Deepwater Horizon, Ecology, Economics, Environment, Jordan Flaherty, Louisiana, Oil Spill, Rag Bloggers 

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