Isle de Jean Charles (known locally in Louisiana French as Isle à Jean Charles) is a narrow ridge of land situated in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. For over 170 years, it has been the historical homeland and burial ground of the state-recognized tribe of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians. Residents of the Island have long been threatened by Louisiana's coastal erosion, as coastal Louisiana loses a landmass the size of Manhattan every year. In 1955, Isle de Jean Charles consisted of over and has since lost about 98% of its land due to saltwater intrusion, and subsidence. In January 2016, the state of Louisiana received substantial funding from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to fund a community resettlement that was designed .
Background
In the 1830s, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe's ancestors moved to Isle de Jean Charles to escape the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears. By 1910, the island had grown from 16 to 77 families. The population of Jean Charles sustained themselves through fishing, oyster farming, trapping and subsistence farming. In the 1930s, a missionary grade school on the mainland was built for the nearby indigenous peoples. In 1959, Daigleville Indian High School in Houma, inland from the Isle de Jean Charles, became the first Indigenous high school in Louisiana. Until 1953, when the road that connects the island to the mainland was built, the tribe could commute to and from the inland only by boat. Due to the road's traveling through open waters, it was extremely susceptible to flooding and erosion, and frequently became uncrossable. In the 1940s, companies began offshore oil drilling projects and dredging near the island, activities which contributed to the erosion of the island and its island road. Processes such as fracking hastened land subsidence in Isle de Jean Charles, threatening the land mass.
The Isle de Jean Charles was over 5 miles wide and 11 miles long, but today it has shrunk to 1/4 mile wide and 2 miles long. The causes of land loss have been both natural and man-made. Hurricanes, such as Katrina in 2005, flooded the area with salt water, ruining homes and causing land subsidence. Rising sea levels have also contributed to land loss. The increase of sea level rise due to climate change in the past century has hastened the erosion process for coastal islands such as Isle de Jean Charles. Man made disturbances such as dams and levees as well as the dredging of canals for shipping and oil pipelines all eroded the marshland to almost bare nothingness. Fracking leaves the area vulnerable to land subsidence as the extraction of subsurface materials decreases support for the land, causing it to gradually sink. Levees promote sediment pollution around the area, which furthers a loss of biodiversity among vegetation.
These disturbances have decreased the plant and animal biodiversity in the marshland, negatively impacting the tribe's quality of life. As a result, most of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw members who could afford to move off the island have done so. The dispersal of their tribal community disrupted their customs, traditions, and culture. Recent coastal restoration efforts have not been able to salvage the island. The Army Corps of Engineers left the Isle de Jean Charles out of levee projects, making the land even more vulnerable to natural disasters than the other surrounding areas. In the early 2000s, only 25 families remained on the island, and the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw's Chief Albert Naquin began tireless efforts to relocate the entire community to save the tribe's culture and traditions. In 2016, over a decade later, the tribe was finally rewarded with a partial victory. The relocation of Isle de Jean Charles inhabitants reflects the first case of climate migration in Louisiana. The impact of climate change increasing sea level rise and land subsidence in this island have hastened the urgency of Isle de Jean Charles' erosion.
Before the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw's tribe's victory, an award-winning documentary, Can't Stop The Water, was filmed in 2013 about the community's on-going environmental hardships.