On Jan. 15, The Alaskan Institute for Justice submitted “Rights of Indigenous People in Addressing Climate-Forced Displacement” on behalf of the Native Alaskan Village of Kivalina and multiple Louisiana tribes, including the Pointe-Au-Chien Indian Tribe, the Grand Bayou Village of the Arakapa-Ishak Chawasha Tribe, and the Grand Caillou/Dulac and Isle de Jean Charles Bands of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians.

“Despite their geographic differences, the Tribes in Louisiana and Alaska are facing similar human rights violations as a consequence of the US government’s failure to protect, promote and fulfill each Tribe’s right to self-determination to protect Tribal members from climate impacts,” states the complaint. “These rights include the rights to life, health, housing, water, sanitation, a healthy environment and food, among others.”

Each tribe faces similar issues albeit under different circumstances and levels of severity. Whether its rising sea levels, catastrophic storms or unchecked extraction of oil and gas, each tribe is being forcibly displaced from their ancestral homes, according to the complaint. In the case of the Louisiana tribes, their lack of federal recognition hinders the tribes’ ability to get the help they need from the federal government.

Scott Hemmerling, director of Human Dimensions at the Water Institute of the Gulf, said that a good example of how Louisiana tribes suffer from non-federal recognition is the case of the Isle de Jean Charles relocation effort in collaboration with the state of Louisiana. The project was originally to ensure the culture and “life-ways” of the community.

“How do you just move a culture?” Hemmerling said.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development gave the state of Louisiana a grant that included $48 million to fund the Isle de Jean Charles Tribal Resettlement plan. But because of the federal nature of the grant, the State of Louisiana asserted that “tribal affiliation” would not be a part of the resettlement plan. Trust was quickly lost between the Isle de Jean Charles tribe and the state when the tribe realized that they had no say in the plan.

“In our opinion, the State of Louisiana has managed to ruin their chance to be leaders of our country and world by ignorance and ‘good ‘ole Louisiana politics,’” wrote Chief Albert Naquin in a letter.

The complaint states that while relocation efforts between Louisiana tribes and the state government betray the tribes’ right to self-determination, the fact that little to nothing is done to prevent their land from disappearing highlights a grim truth.

“It’s a way for communities to see that the state can’t protect them,” said Hemmerling.

Similar Problems on the Other Side of the Continent

Although the Alaskan Native Village of Kivalina is federally recognized unlike the other tribes represented in the complaint, the approximately 400 Inupiaq people living in the village know that their home will inevitably be gone.

The village is located on a barrier reef island on the northeastern coast of Alaska. According to the UN complaint, no roads lead to or from the community, which is only accessible by small planes or boats and is approximately 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 1,000 miles northwest of Anchorage, Alaska.

According to a 2003 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration study, Kivalina Island shrunk from 55 acres in 1953 to 27 acres of livable space. The UN complaint states that coastal erosion from severe storms and rising sea levels from the ever-shrinking Arctic Circle threaten the existence of the island and that by 2025, it will be inhabitable.

Subsistence hunting and gathering is the main source of food in Kivalina, according to the UN complaint. But the changing environment is now too unstable to reliably provide sources of food.

“We have not caught the bearded seal for 2 years, due to lack of solid ice formation,” said Kivalina’s Tribal Administrator Millie Hawley in a statement. “All the marine mammals we gather to feed our families for the winter are lacking and our childbearing women suffer the most due to low iron in their blood.”

Now Kivalina relies on western food delivered by plane, making the cost of living exponentially higher for families. At the same time, marine animals like salmon have been washing up dead along the Alaskan coast from rising sea temperatures, according to the UN complaint.

Like the Isle de Jean Charles tribe, the Native Village of Kivalina’s attempts and resettlement have run into problems with government bureaucracy and inaction. The complaint states that as early as 1998, relocation sites chosen by Kivalina residents were rejected by the U.S. Corps of Engineers after deciding that it would not be cost-effective to shore up the sites against flooding from permafrost melt.

A protective rock barrier and funding for an evacuation road are the only solutions that Kivalina has received from their state and federal government, but these are less than ideal, short-term solutions that leave the community with a sense of abandonment and hopelessness, according to the complaint.

“A lack of dedicated federal and state funding has meant that the relocation process moves too slowly for Kivalina’s residents whose lives are in danger every time a storm inundates the community,” states the complaint.

The post The UN Needs to Address Indigenous People Facing Climate Displacement: Complaint appeared first on Rising Waters.

Richard found himself again in the process of clearing everything out of a beloved home, albeit under much more pleasant circumstances. Before he was selling household items at a bargain in preparation to sell the house he grew up in, Richard was ripping soaked electrical work out of his Texas home in the aftermath of 3.5 feet of flooding from Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Growing up in Louisiana, the Molaison brothers lived through more than their fair share of hurricanes. Fortunately, Houma is located farther above sea level than New Orleans or the bayous of Louisiana, which means that the house their grandfather built never experienced severe flooding.

“We’ve been through at least a half a dozen hurricanes, direct hits, and probably 10 or 12 being on the outskirts, and they just knock a few shingles off,” Roger said.

But it was a completely different story when it came to Richard’s house in the community of Kingwood in Houston, Texas during Hurricane Harvey, and he learned firsthand what happens when a city is ill-prepared for a storm of Harvey’s magnitude.

Richard said that north of his house was a disaster waiting to happen. The water levels of Lake Conroe were already high before Harvey, but nothing was done to slowly drain the lake in a controlled manner. So when the Conroe Dam was nearing its breaking point, the decision was made to open the spillway and release the water.

“When they unleashed Lake Conroe, that was it,” Richard said. “We were toast.”

Richard said that, despite him never seeing or hearing a warning, water from Lake Conroe was released at 2 a.m. Then at 6 a.m., his heart sank as he watched out his window as water began to swallow his back yard. 

“We started scrambling,” Richard said. “We just grabbed stuff that we felt we needed.”

At the peak of the flooding, 3.5 feet of water filled the inside of Richard’s home. One of his neighborhood’s residents took a video of the devastation while he paddled down the neighborhood’s street in a canoe. At one point in the video, the red roof of Richard’s car can be seen barely peeking out from the water even though he deliberately parked it on the highest point of his driveway. The rest of Kingwood fared no better.

“The middle of Kingwood, called Town Center, in 30 years, never flooded,” Roger said. “For Harvey, it had 6 feet of water.”

“You go down the road, and there were mountains 6-foot-high covering their yards of debris,” Roger said.

Richard said that when he called the salvage yard to come pick up his car, they told him that they couldn’t pay him for it because of possible contamination from the water. Much of the water that flooded Kingwood passed through drainage systems after Lake Conroe was opened. 

“What’s flowing through that is real nasty,” Roger said.

That same water flooded the community’s brand-new grocery store, which had opened only a few months prior to Harvey. One of the largest groceries Roger had ever seen, the store was forced to throw out all the food from its shelves.

Now every part of Richard’s house below the 4-foot line is brand new. He said that while he did have flood insurance, 90 percent of the people living in Houston did not. Flooding of Harvey’s magnitude just wasn’t on the minds of people living in the city, but it’s something that the people who lived through it will never forget.

“Two weeks before the storm came above Houston, I’m talking with my neighbor,” Richard said. “He said, ‘Rick, we’ve been here 19 years, I’ve never seen more than 2 inches of rain on the street.’ He had almost four feet of water in his house. When you’ve never flooded before, you don’t think that you’re going to be flooded.”

The post Two Brothers Recall Living Through Hurricane Harvey appeared first on Rising Waters.

“The big ol’ talk is climate change, climate change, climate change,” Brunet said while raising his arms in exasperation. 

Today, Brunet and the remaining residents of Isle de Jean Charles are living through a relocation effort while water encroaches on their beloved, ever-shrinking isle. He’s sad to think of the possibility of losing the land that seven generations of his family called home and see his community scatter, but he’s not convinced that climate change is the main culprit. 

“For us, when it comes to climate change, the problem is erosion,” Brunet said. “If you’re talking about the number one thing, it’s erosion.” 

Brunet is more willing to point the finger at natural causes like hurricanes and land subsidence and human causes like boat traffic and dredged channels. That’s not to say that Brunet doesn’t recognize the existence of climate change, but when it comes to Isle de Jean Charles, it’s not the concern. Brunet was also hesitant to place blame on the oil industry, which plays such an important economic role in the lives of many Louisianans living near the coast. 

“Man has played his part,” Brunet said. “The oil industry, I really can’t hit too hard on him, ‘cause down here if you weren’t building the tug, you was the captain of the tug, you know?” 

How the landscape of the isle has changed over the decades cannot be ignored, though. While Brunet himself hasn’t noticed a major change, he recalled a story of his father growing up down the road from where Brunet lives now. One of his father’s favorite pastimes was to go fishing with friends at a local lake. 

“He would be able to walk to the lake…and he would never walk in mud because it was dry land; it was marsh land, but it was dry because it was high,” Brunet said. “Now, we go to the lake by boat.” 

Not only the land, but the way of life on Isle de Jean Charles was much different in his father’s time. Brunet said that his parents didn’t have modern amenities like electricity until the 60s. 

“There’s whole life and death experiences of good and bad that went on over here that was part of the life,” Brunet said. “And it was not about making money, but it was about surviving. Some days were good, some days were bad.” 

The bond between members of Brunet’s tribe was forged from generations of people living off the land and helping each other survive. Living down in the bayous of Louisiana gives the state-recognized groups of native peoples a unique history and culture. 

“One of the things that gives this little place its own identity is that if you were Indian, then that’s where you belonged at,” Brunet said. “On the far end of the bayou out of everybody else’s way. And that not only goes for over here, but that goes for the bayou next to us in the east and along the coast.” 

Brunet recalled sitting on a wooden chair with a tanned cowhide seat listening to stories told by his grandmother of the tribe’s history. Although Brunet has few physical possessions from his ancestors, their history and memories remain through stories. 

“All that we have is the oral tradition,” Brunet said. 

When the rising waters became a threat to his family’s traditional home, his grandmother raised it on stilts of timber in 2003 to escape the clutches of frequent flooding.  

“She had got tired of hurricane mud and water getting into the house,” Brunet said. “But she didn’t want to leave the island.” 

Besides a raised home, flood protection comes in the form of a small levee and a water pump behind Brunet’s back yard. But it’s not a perfect fix, as high winds and strong tides from the Gulf of Mexico can overwhelm both the levee and pump and take days to remove the water. 

“If it wouldn’t be for that, by now I think I would have had maybe some low-level flooding,” Brunet said. 

But Brunet said that the levee system could have been more comprehensive and effective. He said that back when the Army Corps of Engineers was designing the Hurricane Levee Protection System, it chose not to include Isle de Jean Charles from cost-benefit standpoint.  

“That why with this relocation thing, we told the state from the beginning, ‘we weren’t included in the protection system, well then this [land] is ours,’” Brunet said. “I’m not moving over there and y’all taking this. This is mine.” 

Under the guidance of their traditional tribal leader Chief Albert Naquin, many of the isle’s residents refuse to sell their homes to the state government. But at the same time, some like Brunet are still weighing the possibility of relocation. Leaving the land that he holds so dear to his heart is a daunting thought. 

“Me and the kids, we used to take the afternoon and just take off walking and spend the whole afternoon talking to anybody outside on their porch.” Brunet said. 

He fears what might happen if the closely-knit community spreads apart. And if the Isle de Jean Charles’ band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians do leave the land for good, Brunet is determined to retain their oral history and hopes their tradition will live on. 

“That’s just something we’re going to have to work on,” Brunet said. “It’s going to be up to us.” 

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