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Hello and welcome to the very first Louisiana spotlight, formerly known as Louisiana Public Square.

I'm Drake LeBlanc co-founder and creative director of Télé Louisiana.

We're excited to Premiere this brand new series, which features more in-depth documentary storytelling and the important panel discussions you've come to love.

We're inaugurating this program with a deep dive into one of Louisiana's most unique communities and the existential threat it faces.

The Pointe-Au-Chien Indian tribe is made up of 800 members, primarily of Chittamacha, wassa and to watch the descent.

Their ancestors thrived here centuries ago, living off the land long before the first Europeans ever arrived.

The tribe lives at the bottom of the boot on one of the five fingered bayous and terrible and Lafourche parishes.

The Terrebone Basin, where Pointe Au Chien is located, is the fastest eroding basin in the United States.

The relentless land loss now threatens their very way of life.

Tonight, I'll talk with members of the Pointe-Au-Chien tribe to discuss their culture and their fight to preserve it, their struggle for federal recognition and what the future of the town and tribe looks like.

Following Hurricane Ida's devastation five months ago.

But first, let's take a closer look at who the Pointe-Au-Chien are and their way of life down the bayou.

Pointe-Au-Chien is one of the oldest inhabited communities in the state of Louisiana, continuously inhabited by my ancestors, and we continue to live here.

It's very important to our culture and our whole way of life.

You just have a feeling whenever you're here, the heritage that's here.

It's a great place to be.

So this area is historically China macho washer and chow washes.

So when the first Europeans came to Louisiana, this was inhabited.

I want to share with a self-sustaining community you could grow food to eat, you could catch food to eat, you made your houses from the materials that was here, the palmetto for the roofs, but your houses were on the ground.

There was a great risk of flooding.

You had fresh water.

We don't have fresh water now.

People had big gardens.

So everything you needed, you had available to you to be a self-sustaining community.

My name is Patty Ferguson, Bonnie.

I'm from the Porsche Indian tribe, and I'm also the attorney, one of the attorneys for the tribe.

Some of the things I work on are federal recognition.

That's one of my main areas of work on behalf of the tribe assisting in obtaining federal acknowledgment from the U.S. government.

And when we're talking about land loss, being able to protect our cultural heritage, our language assert our self-determination.

All of that impacted by federal recognition.

I also work on environmental issues and cultural issues supporting the language, heritage and culture of the tribe.

I just got a good look at them all lives.

My name is Christine Verde, and we're going to share Live Oak Baptist Church.

So these past few days, starting on Wednesday, we we began our culture camp that normally begins in June, the end of June or beginning of July.

Culture camp is important because our children, we realize they're not know about their culture.

So this is our ninth annual culture camp.

We felt that it was time that we start bringing back culture to our community language.

My heart is in the land of my family or my family's name.

It is your heart.

Traditional plants that we had stopped using the dresses, the jewelry just to show them how our people lived.

They that.

Where you you'll see that with all eyes will be.

There was like a horror.

What do you think of that?

When they left it off.

Very good for.

They let me in the river, no more fresh water coming down, so our boat ride.

Most of our kids haven't been past the end of the road here, but that's where our ancestors lived.

They were able to see our mouths and could really see that the mounds were on high ground.

Also more trees on the mound because because they're not been exposed yet to the salt water, we want to teach them that here.

Lower portions, not where we began.

We began past that.

Look right here, you can see the oil company.

She is opening up.

That was not about you or anything right there.

So sooner or later, this will be all water.

What do you think?

Yeah, we are directly impacted by things that other people are deciding without our input, so we contribute least to the climate issues, but we're impacted the most because this basin, the terrible basin, is the fastest eroding basin in the United States.

And it is that way for a reason because people have made decisions, man decisions about who should be protected when they should be protected.

You know, maybe these people should just move.

This man traditionally was just bland, just big pieces of blank.

I mean, one piece of land and one bayou.

So when all companies came in in the early 1900s, they dug these little fences, the little waterways that were probably just wide enough to put a collar or like a little boat to bring things.

So the land was never put backward need it to be so it was never closed up.

So these little waterways became wider and wider and wider.

So if you have all these little waterways that are kind of intersecting, then then your land is in pieces, which makes it much easier to erode because because all these little waterways water's coming through from the Gulf.

And so you have these hurricanes that come each year and just pound and pound and land is lost every day.

We don't want to be recognized and not have any land and not have this land because this is who we are.

This land is a reflection of us, our ancestors.

And that's why in the song, it says, my heart is in the land of my people because this is who I am and our ancestors have toiled this land.

They've lived here.

They're buried here.

This is part of who we are.

Why would we want recognition if we're not connected to the land?

That's right.

We have been seeking federal recognition since the mid-nineties to be fully recognized means that the government recognizes that you are an indigenous community and that you have a government to government relationship with the United States.

And along with that, you have rights, certain rights to health care education.

You also if there's a storm, for example, which were important share, we would deal directly with the federal government with FEMA.

Right now, everything goes through the parishes or the state and basically put as an afterthought.

The bayou parishes are bracing for impact as Hurricane Ida strengthens to a major storm.

They expect to feel the first impacts from IDA in less than 24 hours.

I've enjoyed getting to know the point of the Sand Tribe members with my work with telling Louisiana over the past few years.

As you can see, it's an unusual and beautiful place.

Paddy and Christine will be joining me later in the show.

But first, we've asked the tribes lead historian Dr Laura Kelly to share more with us about the tribe's rich heritage.

Dr Kelly is a professor at Tulane University and is integral to the tribe's petition for federal recognition.

Dr Kelly, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you for the invitation.

It's real pleasure to be here.

So if you can't tell me, how did you first meet the people of Point Shan?

It was in January of 2005.

I remember it so well because I had actually been in New Mexico and Arizona in December of 2004.

And as somebody who had a Ph.D. in U.S. history, I was struck by my lack of knowledge about the indigenous peoples of North America.

And I resolved right then and there.

When I got back to Louisiana, I said, I'm going to learn more and I'm going to integrate it into my teaching and try to make up for that.

That lack, you know, the one that I experienced, but not for the students at Tulane.

I wasn't home, but a couple of days, and Patti Ferguson sent me an email and asked if I was interested in helping to do research for the tribe and research specifically for the federal recognition petition.

So it's like the universe heard me called out and I responded, and that was that was what, 17 years ago.

Wow.

So 17 years, I mean, 17 years, you've been working with Patty and the people of Plantation to help them get federally recognized.

Is it normal for that process to take that long?

Yes.

And in fact, it would be great if it was only 17 years.

The first step when you in this whole process is you have to send the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Office of Federal Acknowledgment, a letter of intent, a letter that says we are going to apply to be federally recognized entered the petition process.

The tribe sent that letter in 1996.

You know, stop and think about that for a moment.

That's before I was born.

There you go.

There you go.

But that's a great juxtaposition because as historians we normally look at, 25 years is like the length of a generation.

And so it's been that it's been a generation.

It's been before you were born.

And here we are in the process is still ongoing.

So putting that much time and energy into this process, what does it mean to be federally recognized?

What are the benefits that that come with that?

Well, as Patty spoke about on the video that we watched right before, it puts the tribe in a nation to nation government, to government relationship with the federal government.

And that opens up all kinds of benefits in terms of education, health care services and in terms of storms and the environment.

It means that the tribe would be able to deal directly to FEMA directly to the federal federal government and work on helping their members.

So there are a lot of different benefits, but I think it's also an important recognition about a tribe that's been here for a very long time and who inhabit this land.

And we should do what we can to to recognize that.

So essentially, you're trying to help tribal members prove that they're of Native American descent, right?

Yeah, it's kind of a really odd situation when you think about it, you know, prove you're an Indian, you know, prove who you are.

We don't really ask that of almost any other group that I can think of.

And it's a complicated and it's an onerous process.

So there are seven criteria and you have to meet all seven.

You can't meet six and a half.

You can't meet six and three quarters.

You have to meet all seven.

It's all or nothing.

The part I work on is the historic part.

You have to show descent from tribe or tribes.

You have to show direct connections to people, to the progenitors, to the ancestors of punishment and follow it down through the time.

Now that's difficult.

But then you stop and pause for a moment and think about what's being asked and the type of evidence that's being asked.

So you're asking that we use basically Eurocentric type documents.

You go to church records, marriage records, baptism.

Now what happens when you have to try to find evidence for?

People who didn't get married in your church or who didn't get baptized in your church or who weren't even considered and counted in other government documents, you're you're asking them to prove they're Indian, but you're also asking them to prove it using these Eurocentric institutions.

So what kind of documents do you look for?

Like, I'm assuming the Eurocentric documents may be cause problems or how does that work on your side of the work?

We have to use the voices of post commanders, the voices of Anglo-Americans, of Europeans, of colonials and see what they have to say.

And so, you know, right now we have some documents that are being played here.

This one, you know, you get some that have this beautiful handwriting and they're easier to read.

Others can have really bad bleed through.

But again, going back to the first point, it's not even just enough to find mention in those documents about a tribe mucha.

You have to find specific people.

What I did and what my students have helped with and tribe tribal members have helped with is that we looked at the Spanish archives.

We had gone pretty thoroughly through the French archives.

But then nobody's really taken deep, deep dives in the Spanish archives, in part because there are millions of documents bound up in these things called legales.

And these legales have thousand 15 hundred documents in each legal.

So we went through them and we went through them, and ultimately we ended up going through 50,000 documents.

Wow.

Yeah.

50,000 documents, I'd say about 85% were in French.

10% were in Spanish and about 5% were in English.

And just reading through all of these looking for clues and hints to what we could find and we found stuff it was it was an effort that paid off.

So I have a question about the terrible and basin, which is sometimes called the Cajun Bayou country.

Mm hmm.

The plantation people aren't Cajun, but Cajun speak French.

The plantation people speak French.

What's the difference?

Well, again, I'm not a linguist, but I would say that your question is wrong.

And that is that the Cajuns, the Acadians, right?

Cajuns, they came much later.

They came on to pretty much a land.

So the question is from if you change your perspective, what is it like for the Cajuns to live in pretty much a country?

That's the question I'd ask.

And it's great in the sense of the way you phrased it, because I think that is the typical way to phrase it.

It's as if history started with the arrival of the Europeans, and we forget that this whole area was chocked full of nations chock full of tribes.

I didn't start, you know, 1782 with LaSalle or 1699 with Iberville and Bienville.

It's much older, much older than that, and we should incorporate that into Louisiana's cultural heritage much more.

I agree, definitely.

Thank you so much for coming out today and sharing this information with us.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Coming up, I'll sit down with tribe members in our panel discussion to take a deeper look at the issues they're facing.

But first, let's see how Hurricane Ida affected this small community and what the future looks like for Point Ocean.

The day usually starts around 3:30 4:00.

Head out on the water to start working right around daylight, let's get it.

If you didn't know this place before the storm, it was unrecognizable.

You'll see more when the sun comes up.

My name's Alex Marriott, where in Plantation, Louisiana, and I fish crabs and by crabs for eleven.

I've been fishing almost my whole life.

I grew up doing and watched all my relatives, you know, elders, they all done it.

They they grew up doing it from trapping to two to fish and shrimp, and they've done it all.

This area right here, they basically lived off the land and they made a living, living off the land and growing up.

Watching them do that kind of gave me the excitement of wanting to do it myself.

And like I said, as a kid, if you see something like this, it gives you an even more of a desire to want to do it.

You know, when when you got gear coming up, that looks like this?

I mean, if you love the water, there's nothing else you'd want to do.

We're basically offshore here.

You have the anade and so on what's left of our coast.

And then when you look to the south, there's absolutely nothing left.

There used to be islands out there, close down lakes.

Just one word my dad used to tell me the story of how they used to have clothes in lakes out there and my generation comes along and it's all all gone.

It's very mind blowing, just fans, and it's just after this one hurricane that we just got Hurricane Ida, you look over the levee right here in the back and land that was there before the hurricanes completely wiped out and gone.

And that's on the inside the levee system.

So just think how much land we're losing on the outside.

You know, when you lose that amount on the inside, it's it's very scary.

We evacuate and stay gone for a week on September first, the came back and and we come back down and it took me three or four days before I come right down here because I didn't want to face.

I didn't want to face reality.

I guess another way of putting that.

You know her story?

I didn't want to see it for myself, and finally, I thought, you know, I got to go down there.

Oh, right, right by.

Everybody asks me why you want to stay that way.

His beautiful.

I mean, any way you go, you're going to have some.

But.

This is real life, good fishing and family.

But there's only five others that in.

My family.

Well, I hope they come back.

They've got to come back to right now.

That's Freddy's place.

He has gone.

At the ALP in that house, he lost that.

That Henry and any right.

And as you ride right there.

That right, right there.

Oh, right, you.

All right.

And then Lou lived there, everybody.

It's a ghost town.

I don't believe we're going to stay that.

Cheryl, mopping those floors of Clorox and washing dishes.

We talked about the things that we did here, the memories we had.

This is the Sandlot.

We play baseball.

My God, what pitch right here to us?

What in the yard?

Roosters in the trees?

At the moment, I'm standing in front of my house where I grew up, childhood home, being torn down can be fixed, so we figured we'd just tear down, but it's in a very emotional day for us.

The memories of there, but I still have the memories, even though the house is a mess.

You know, I mean, in my heart and we all survived.

I was lucky.

I got to bring my mom and my dad to my camp in Mississippi, and we're taking turns taking care of them.

But I know that it would break their heart if they were here to see what was going on.

It's just devastating, can you believe that only 14 houses in this whole community survived this hurricane?

No one wants their childhood home to be destroyed like mine is right now.

Hopefully, Christina will build something and it'll have a new life.

We're hoping that people don't leave.

So instead of saying, well, let's build like it was built before.

No, we're going to research and see, let's build something, find something that's going to withstand those hundred 60 6065 mile an hour winds, which is what we have to look at now because the only way we can say that we're going to come back and and and be comfortable about not this happening all over again.

Unfortunately, our people here don't have the resources.

I would say that probably 5% of the people that live here in Toronto should have insurance.

That's the reason why I love you.

Me too.

So you just got this.

I just got that today.

OK, good.

So we can look at your house.

I'm not lying.

I don't know how it looked.

I mean, you don't look great in the eye.

I think you look good in there.

They don't want me.

Adobe, I challenge you.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

What?

It looks like a wall in a close enough.

Wow.

Whoa.

It is.

I don't think I'm going there, but yeah, that's.

Pungent.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

They need to clean this up.

You don't have insurance, huh?

Oh, on the House, oh no.

He had insurance in it.

But then after that, when you went to renew the insurance because of the tree here and the tree in the back, they didn't want to shoot it out because because of that , you.

Where's our government?

You know, it's not that we wait around for government before we start and, you know, we cleared the roads ourselves so that the people can come home.

You see over here, we don't have the government coming.

We have family that came from Mississippi to help us.

You know, where is our government?

Where is our parish president?

Where is our governor?

You know what?

Get them, boys.

They don't want to clear the road from that first half gone down.

The powers.

Then I've been coming on at one time.

Who's helping you all the most right now?

Nobody, no idea.

As our land erodes and some people, they may feel it's already too late.

But whenever a community breaks down and people start moving away because of hurricanes or the erosion, natural, just natural disasters down here, well, then they shut down the schools, then they shut down the only store.

And what else there is for me and my family?

I think there's no other way, but you know, you don't stay kicked at the bottom.

I mean, you just got to do the best you can to save what you have or rebuild what you have and move on.

But leaving not an option.

We are fortunate to have put a Sand Tribe members with us here in the studio.

Patty Ferguson Bonnie is a tribe member and the tribe's lead lawyer.

Christine Vernon is a tribal council member and a lifelong plantation resident.

And Alex Biblio, who we just heard from, is a tribe member and local fisherman.

I'm so glad that y'all could join me.

I have a question that I want to start with.

Christine, I'll start with you first.

What does it mean to have grown up in plantation?

So to grow up and polish and was great?

I grew up on chapel inside.

My parents bought property on one terrible inside, but of my relatives were all on the food.

And so my mom would take us to visit them.

There was a little bridge next to my house to cross the bayou and we go into my grandmother's.

We'd go every day and we'd play my grandmother's yard.

She would call it the form she raised on cattle, pigs and chickens ducks in her yard, where in the back, where the cows were, we climb trees.

There was a lot of land.

They are not at all like we just saw.

My dad was a shrimper.

He was an oyster man and then later on getting shrimping and so he'd dock his boat ride and decide to buy you our house and we go shrimping with him.

My brothers learn how to shrimp and ran their own boat when they were teenagers.

It was great growing up with my cousins, and I'm not just cousins with them.

I'm friends, we're friends.

So, yeah, I would not trade that.

I wish my kids could experience the way I grew up.

Yeah.

Have you always identified as an Indian?

Yes.

Yes, always.

Since I was real little.

Actually, I'm a show you my age.

I started school at the Indian school.

When I started first grade, I went to an Indian school.

We weren't segregated yet.

Well, we weren't integrated.

It was still segregated.

And I was in school, probably about, I guess, maybe over a month.

And that's when we integrated to the school.

And and that was because we were Indians.

And so I always knew and I've always been proud of my mama taught us to be proud of who who we were and where we came from.

So, yeah.

And Patti, what is your connection to point out, Shane?

Yeah.

So I didn't grow up in my mom's from.

And when she got married, she stayed around the Baton Rouge area.

And when she was growing up, as Christine said, My mom's older than Christine, but she wasn't allowed to go to school, so she had to go all the way to the rose cut off.

She would cross the bayou and in a boat, and then someone would take them with a boat to grandma and then a bus would pick them up.

And it was a very long journey.

But they also face a lot of discrimination and racism because they were Indians.

And because of that, I think my parents wanted to make sure that we had the opportunity to have education.

But we spent a lot of time on plantation when we were growing up visiting my grandma, staying with my cousins and I spent a lot of time in Cornish.

And now I know that I've had different opportunities than my cousins, and I knew that I was Indian because we were different than other people were going to school with.

But I only learned that we weren't fully recognized when I started college, and I really wanted to work with the tribe.

We had tribal leaders who were already working on this to ensure and hopefully win the fight for federal recognition.

Right?

Alex, what was it like growing up in point of saying, Wow, man.

It was exciting.

You know, different.

But at the same time, you know, it got stressful.

You know, whenever you see footage of all of these hurricanes that come through Hurricane Ida, when these people don't know where they're coming back to, you know, always having to to leave or for that, that's a stressful part of it.

But man, drag you down there.

You seen how it was.

You have been on a crab boat.

But I don't think I've been on a crab boat.

I've been on a pit road.

The two different things.

Maybe one day I can take you.

But on the other hand, you know, it's we're going to run out and paddle up here and just hot jump in a boat and go fishing.

Like Christine was saying, she went on the boat shrimping with her dad, and it's, you know, we could go do that stuff and enjoy doing it.

But at the same time, you know, whenever it's really heart wrenching, when you see videos like this and you hear of people not wanting to come back to this community.

And um, but man, there's no other place I'd want to live or grow up.

Yeah, you know, and did.

You, Alex, did you speak French at home growing up, but what was your primary language?

You know, being an endpoint?

Well, I learned how not necessarily how to speak the French.

I learned how to communicate with my grandparents, my grandparents.

They had the the gathering house of the community where everyone would just come in there and have coffee and shoot, shoot it off, and their main vocabulary was speaking French to one another.

But we don't have that anymore.

You know, it's it's it's dying off.

So that wasn't only in your household, in your experience.

But do you think other people in your generation, your age group have also maybe not picked up French as much for for different reasons?

Let's look at it in this perspective.

My real name is Alex.

Everybody knows me by Alex.

I was named after my great great great grandfather, which pronounce his name Alex on his son.

Edmund was still French, pronounced Edmond.

My grandpa was for forest and my dad.

Forest is English.

So as the generations went on, the French speaking language, it just it went away, dissolved slowly.

And if there's one thing I regret not learning more of is the French speaking language.

And Christine, what was it like for you?

Growing up, was it more French spoken at home or English?

It was all French, so I grew up in the old community was French, so wherever I went, everyone spoke French.

So and I learned French as my first language.

And so I didn't speak English until I went to and to the school first grade.

I did speak it at the Indian school a little bit, but mostly French.

But when we went to the plantation school up the road, which was the white community, it was English and so teachers didn't understand French.

And so we were punished for speaking French.

But we went back home where we went back down to buy to punish.

Everybody still spoke French, so we kept our French.

We did not speak English in my home until the early 1980s, when my brother started dating his wife and she didn't speak English.

I mean French.

We spoke English because of her, just a of respect.

But still, now I speak only French to my brother.

Very little English in my house and my whip.

My parents is French.

When I go to a plantation, it's it's French.

Still to this day.

Still to this day.

Yes, yes.

If you come to one of our meetings, more than half of it is going to be French.

And I mean, the tribe is like, what that video has shown us is that the tribe is not only slowly over time lost language, but also land as well.

And why do you think that is?

Well, there are several reasons why we're losing land.

one, because of the early 1900s, like Patti said earlier, is when all fuel companies came in and dug these little waterways.

They didn't come back and fill them.

And so you have these waterways that have gotten bigger and bigger.

And then plus with the storms coming in, we've had terrible storms.

You know, Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Lili, Andrew.

We had Betsy when I was real little.

Those are huge storms that have come through Spanish and each time have taken chunks of land away.

Alex, you just mentioned in this video that during your lifetime, you have seen the changes in the land as well.

How does that affect you personally?

Big time.

There's.

People don't realize how much marshland we're losing on the inside the levee systems, these manmade levee systems, we're losing just as much land on the inside because the marsh it is no longer has passage of water to keep it hard, no more sediment flowing through it.

It gets soft and it just it washes away.

At the IDA, I come down and I've seen how much of the marsh that I used to grow up dug cotton.

It's just gone.

You know, my eight year old son could go back there and paddle a row, and I wouldn't have to worry about him getting lost because there's nowhere else for him to lose himself.

But I rely on these, this marshland, these estuaries that we still have for work.

It's my way of life.

It's what I do for a living.

Yeah.

And once we lose this, I don't know what else there is.

There's only what we can save now.

And on that note, we're the front line.

I believe we're the frontline of that seafood industry that people don't know in New Orleans.

Baton Rouge As far as the blue crab capital of the world, Baltimore, Maryland, we supply we had a supply chain for all these big cities all across this country.

And once we lose the last little of this estuary that we have, what else is there?

Yeah, you can go into towns where I could tell my kids, Are there used to be a Shoney's right here is gone.

You can rebuild that chimneys.

You could go and say, Oh, there's this bowling alley just got wiped out by Hurricane Ida.

You could rebuild that bowling alley because you still have the land.

But once you lose this marsh, you can't rebuild.

You can in a certain way, but it's all a memory of someone else telling it.

How can you rebuild their memory if you haven't seen it?

Yeah.

Patti, what is what is this land loss?

What is it?

What is it do for you emotionally?

Well, there are a couple of things and some things that Christine and Alex have mentioned that really stand out to me because when I look at it at, the big picture is that it indicates that people don't care about us.

They don't care about our way of lives.

That our rights are an important.

That our livelihood is an important, that there hasn't been investment or accountability in our community.

And that's, you know, that's tragic.

And every, you know, people may not have realized initially what was happening when the oil cuts were coming in.

But once you realize that the answers shouldn't be, well, let's just abandon this area and give up.

We should look at the traditional ecological knowledge of what should be done to protect the area, to restore the area.

Because there's multiple factors.

It's the oil company canal cuts, but it's also the freshwater flow that's no longer coming into our community because they lived off the Mississippi River.

And when they did that at the time, they knew if nothing was done that the communities outside of that levee system would face subsidence.

So they knew, and they put us at risk.

So they made the decision to do that.

And when they create these other systems, they put us more at risk and we're never consulted.

We're not part of the conversation.

So the people who contribute least are impacted the most, not just by, you know, the Mississippi River or the oil.

Canal cuts, but also now we're compounded by sea level rise.

So all of this is affecting us, and it's just making everything happen much faster.

So do you think the tribe becoming federally recognized can help overcome some of these obstacles that you all have been facing?

I do think that being fairly recognized will give us a stronger voice.

It will first help us in responding to disasters because we would have a direct interaction with emergency services and able to respond.

But with restoring the land, we can apply directly for grants.

We have to go through other government organizations or other entities to apply for grants for restoration.

We have knowledge that isn't respected, that we could try to get people to recognize and take those traditional knowledge holders.

And use that knowledge to do whatever restoration we can.

We have threatened sites and sacred sites and burial mounds that are threatened because they're outside of this levee system that has been created.

I think that there's a lot that could change and some of our fishing areas and village areas where people are living now is right now .

There is a court case and the Federal District Court of New Orleans, where the judge said I can't decide this case until the federal government decides whether or not you're fairly recognized.

And as a result of that, there's been a lot of exploitation that's just been since the mid-nineties.

But over the years there's been a lot of exploitation and that pours with us not being recognized results in more exploitation of our natural resources.

So after the hurricane, it seems like there wasn't much of a response from government and other entities that could help.

Has anything changed?

Has anyone come to help, y'all?

As of today or recently?

No, no.

I mean, we've had our stuff picked up.

But as far as like to help us or to help with rebuilding, it took a long time for FEMA to come down there a good while.

I don't know how many.

Well, we think the thing to recognize that after IDA for at least a month, there wasn't water or electricity in.

Yeah.

And and there wasn't gas.

There wasn't any gas.

And that took a while to restore and there weren't communications and there weren't people.

There were individuals who came in to help people in the community and there were people in the community helping people in the community.

But it wasn't as if tribal members were relying on the government to help them clean up.

And even yesterday, Christine's house, her family's house, that the debris picked up the house.

So how many months out from the storm are we sure that the debris picked up the house and some people?

You know, we have to look at this in phases.

one is a response.

We want people to be safe.

And that was, you know, there was not a coordinated effort to work with the tribe to ensure that people were were safe.

So that was tribal members helping tribal members and other entities that were assisting in the community.

But then looking forward, how do we have people rebuild resiliently so they can stay in the community when people don't have the resources and there aren't going to be enough resources with whatever FEMA gives to people for for them to rebuild?

And I think the important thing is that right now, people may be thinking, well, people should just leave if they don't have the resources to rebuild.

They should just leave.

But the important thing to think about is that people have been put in this situation through no fault of their own.

They didn't make the decision to levy off the Mississippi to cut up all the oil and gas to bring the water in homes 50 years ago could be on the ground.

Right homes, even 20 years ago, could be 25 years ago could be on the ground.

And so there hasn't been an investment in the community for people to harden their homes, to be able to adapt to the changing environment.

And I think that's very important to recognize that we're dealing with people who've been thrust into a situation that they have no part in making and that's the last thing on people's minds whenever they come home.

You've seen the elders, they come home and they have nothing left.

I mean, I go down there as a generation or two, even younger than these people, and we took it among ourselves to help them out, to cut trees off the roads, to cut trees off of people's homes.

You know, that's just the way we are.

We go down there and we see some needs done and needs help.

We help them out.

But a lot of them, like in the video, my aunt was asked if she had any kind of insurance.

There's no way these people can afford insurance down there.

I mean, it's it's just out the roof.

So a lot of people need to rely on that, that government entity to come in and help them out.

You know, but when they first got down there, I can guarantee you that was the last thing on their mind was , you know, just when are they going to come?

They wanted to figure out what they still had left.

That's the biggest.

That's the biggest thing is the loss.

But so, so would federal recognition have prevented any of this loss?

What would that have changed if y'all would have had it before this, these major hurricanes did?

I think like Patti, the response would have been quicker, but it also could have helped us secure funding to harden the homes so tribal members have elevated their homes.

But as Christine was mentioning, she grew up on the terrible and side.

Across the bayou is the lower food site and all of those homes her own family property.

So when there was this road home program in Louisiana after Katrina and Rita, the homes homeowners because they are homeowners, they were not provided the same amount of resources as other people because they were considered renters because they live on family property.

So they had to make a decision.

Do I fix my home on the ground or do I elevate my home?

But it may not be hardened as much as it should be, because once I go up into the air, what does that mean?

That means my house is going to take more wind when that?

Winds coming through and I need to have a strong roof, I need to have strong walls.

It needs to be stripped down and people didn't have the resources to do everything to harden their homes in your heart.

You're raising a home that may have been built 50 years ago and that was OK, right?

Because when my grandmother, when my mom was growing up, they lived in a palmetto house.

That house was on the ground, right that were the those were the circumstances in which you could live.

You can't.

You can't do that now.

You can't have your house on the ground and you can't live in a at a house.

So do you think the people of Pakistan can survive the loss of the land that they're currently facing?

So after this storm, so we have a neighboring community tribe that was asked to relocate and so people ask us because we're next, you know, we're after them and we don't want to relocate, but there is something people could do to me if you can pipeline from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Canada.

Why can't you bring in sediment pipe in sediment from the travel base of the Mississippi into our areas?

When I was growing up, I'd go to the last island, Kimberly Island.

We would ride four wheelers on there and walk for miles.

And I was not even there anymore.

It's not there anymore.

There are no landmarks.

When I'd go out there, my dad.

I know.

OK, well, we're going to turn here because I see such and such on a turn here.

You know, I know where dad's gone now.

To do that, I cannot.

There are no no marks.

Yeah.

But I feel like there is something that can be done.

But not only that, when you look at some of Lafourche, they seem to be protecting their land more than Chamberlain restoring.

Why?

Why do you think that is?

Oh, well, there's a big port there, so money potentially trying to protect their investment?

Yeah, there's more money that flows down there.

You know, they're they're protecting what breaks in the revenue.

Tammany Parish, does it bring in that much revenue with the oil?

We do it in a different source with the seafood, but the fish borer, the T-Bone basin and you look on the map.

The future's still looking good, marshland wise.

But the terrible basin from Pontchartrain Montagu du LAC Chauvin, it's all part of the T-Bone basin.

You know, we're concentrating on plantation right now, but if you look at it as a whole, the whole coast as a whole.

And it's something that we're pushing for as a tribe.

But I think it's a step that everyone along the coast has to take into consideration because we can't be the only voices.

There has to be more to step up and say, Look, I want to save this.

I want to save my livelihood.

I want to save, you know, I want my kids to be able to do what I'm doing.

And at the rate we're going.

My eight year old son won't see what I seen.

I don't see what my dad seen.

All right.

You know, there's memories.

Do you feel like the efforts are equal from surrounding communities, the neighboring communities?

Do you feel like they're putting as much into it as far as speaking out about the land laws and, you know, the changes that they're facing?

I really I don't hear a whole lot besides what's coming from our politicians about the levee system.

Levee systems are all fine and dandy if a hurricane comes and that levee withstand the strength of a hurricane, but you don't hear them talking about the marsh on the outside of it.

They're investing millions and millions of dollars on these levee systems.

That, to me, the only thing they're good for is a hurricane.

But that's that's the only thing you hear about the restoration dredging.

There's so much technology out there you don't have to go all the way to the Mississippi River.

You don't have to go to the river.

You can go right down the gulf and set up some stuff and dredge and just pump sand or sediment back into the marshland just to build it back up.

You don't have that.

Yeah.

Patty, I want to ask you, do you feel like Hurricane Ida affected the timeline for getting federally recognized, getting punishment federally recognized?

So this year was our year to focus on our petition, so it's definitely set us back.

But we just met last week and we're moving forward to because we know how important this is to.

Everything to the, you know, to the whole survival of the community.

The other thing that I just want to mention is last week at the tribal meeting, the tribe passed a resolution to oppose the development of RV camps and campers coming into the community because right now people's livelihoods are being threatened because they lost their home.

For IDA, there's not sufficient support to rebuild.

So people may be selling their land, turning them into camps.

And we feel like as a tribe, we should be consulted whenever these decisions are made because they threaten the health, safety and welfare of our community.

And to go to your question, are other people complaining about our advocating for restoration of the terrible basin?

There's a lot of people who look at this area and they have great fishing and great resources, and so they want to have sports fishing camps.

They want to go sports fishing, and we want to make a statement that we don't want permission to be a sports fisherman's paradise.

And there's been investment from the government for that to happen because we're a residential community and we want to continue our way of life and our culture and have our community and have that support .

And I just think that goes to your question, and it's important to note that that we're going to push back on that.

There's already been a lot of that.

There's been land that was turned over in the past.

That is questionable.

But we want to maintain a residential community and we think we're going to have a stronger voice if we get fairly recognized.

So we have to move forward to work on federal recognition.

Well, I definitely hope and know that you all will get that federal recognition, and it's really inspiring to see everything that y'all are putting pouring into your communities, staying there.

And, you know, just speaking out about the things I said, change.

So thank you all so much for coming out today and sharing what you all have appreciated us for our final segment of the show.

I'll be speaking with the director and producer of Louisiana Spotlight, Ben Johnson.

We'll find out about his experience filming this project and what's next for LBJ's programing about Pono share.

So, Ben, what brought you down to point of Sam?

Originally, it was the closing of their elementary school.

So as you've seen that, you know, a lot of the facilities and points in the closed pre-storm.

And one of the big things that the community did an outcry about was the closing of their elementary school in April.

And that's what originally brought me down there to start filming that culture camp.

And it was because of some local journalists this journalist named Keziah, who brought me down there of some of her stories on the school closing.

And that was it.

Yeah.

So have you seen any of the themes that were going on as far as help from the government with punishing things that you were noticing with the closing of the school or attempting to close the school?

Have you seen, even if that's definitely a theme, the show was going to develop further into a documentary about Point and Tribe.

And so we're going to dove a little bit more into the themes that pop up that goes over their history.

Yeah.

When can we expect to see that the documentary were hoping to have out on the anniversary of IDA?

And we're also going to be doing this Louisiana spotlight quarterly.

So the next one will be in April, and it will be kind of the same, more documentary based exposes of culture and community in Louisiana.

Yeah.

Awesome, man.

Well, I'm sure me and everyone else watch and looks forward to seeing much more about the people of punishing the work that you're going to put out about them.

Thank you.

Well, we've run out of time for our discussion tonight.

We want to thank Mr Ferguson, Bonnie Miss for that, Mr. Biblio and Dr. Kelly for sharing a knowledge of stories of point share.

We encourage you to comment on tonight's show by visiting LPV Sawgrass Louisiana Spotlight and clicking on the Join the Conversation link.

We love to hear from you.

Thanks for watching and good night!