Louisianans Watches Native Land Sinking Into Sea

MONTEGUT, La., Dec. 6, 2009 — -- For 170 years, members of a tiny Native American tribe have lived and celebrated their traditions on a speck of land here off the Louisiana coast called Isle de Jean Charles.

They fished and they farmed, carving out an existence amid the bays and marshes.

But now the waters that have sustained them are threatening to overwhelm them.

"I don't think we're going to have any choice to leave because we're getting washed away by every storm that comes by," said Albert Naquin, chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe. "We lose more and more land, and it keeps happening."

Surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the bayou on the other, Isle de Jean Charles sits at the southern tip of Louisiana's rapidly vanishing wetlands, an area that is 3- to 4-miles long and about a mile wide. The tribe has been living here since 1840.

But about a football field worth of land in the region is lost every half-hour to erosion, storms and to rising seas -- a relentless process that is expected to worsen with climate change.

Isle de Jean Charles has flooded five times in the last six years, transforming a once lush landscape into a barren disaster zone. The floodwaters have spread large amounts of salt across the tiny island, making it nearly impossible for much to grow here anymore.

Residents of Isle de Jean Charles have seen their lives and livelihoods literally wash away.

The road to their village floods so often now, only one lane is useable -- and it is often covered by water. The fire station was closed a few years ago, and the island's church was relocated. Now, only 25 families are left, with a "few dozen" people.

A controversial $900 million system of sea walls and levees proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers to save endangered communities along the Louisiana coast raised hopes here that the tribe could remain.

But the final design did not include Isle de Jean Charles because officials concluded it simply would cost too much to protect the relatively few families that are left.

Jaquetta Reid and her sister, Brenda Varret, are the fourth generation in their family to call the island home. They likely will be the last. They have left for good, moving across the road bridge to Point-Aux-Chenes in Louisiana.