Inequitable Climate Responses and Their Impacts on Southern Louisiana Tribal Communities

Southern Louisiana Indigenous communities have been confronting the harmful results of exploitive capitalist exploration and development in their bayou areas for decades. Oil and gas exploration cut massive swaths of canal-works through important marsh and wetlands, which serve as storm barriers. The network of canals allows salt water from storm surges to reach farther into the area, killing freshwater root systems. Consequently, these communities are experiencing unprecedent land loss, while simultaneously enduring subsidence and sea level rise. Climate crises contribute to higher water inundation levels during storm surge, devastating flooding, and increasing numbers of hurricanes that are landing at higher strength levels. These storms are threatening cultural survival and livelihoods because of forced displacement from homelands. Louisiana’s massive coastal protection project offered hope, until it was announced that the tribal communities were to be excluded from the barrier’s extension. Since then, the communities have been fighting back, developing projects to backfill some of these canals to restore marsh ecosystems to reduce land loss and protect sacred sites. Other Indigenous nations have engaged in the use of recycled oyster shells to create new reefs. The presentation will discuss the evolution of the canal project with partners that include members of the First Peoples’ Conservation Council of Louisiana, several Indigenous nations, the Lowlander Center, and other stakeholders. Resistance to these efforts at the state level will be presented, along with strategies that have been used to overcome and circumvent this resistance to create more disaster resistant communities.