Precedent or Cautionary Tale? The U.S. Climate-Driven Relocation of Isle de Jean Charles

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CHAPTERS

01:44 Louisiana's Disappearing Coastline
07:46 Previous Failed Relocation Attempts
09:07 Federal Funding and National Goals
13:50 Miscommunication between Tribes and the State
17:30 Outreach Efforts and Voluntary Relocation
22:02 The Relocation's Legacy

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:02.120] - Julian Hattem

Welcome to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. This is a podcast from the Migration Policy Institute that traces how climate change is affecting human migration. My name is Julian Hattem. I am your host and the senior editor of MPI's digital magazine, the Migration Information Source. Today we are turning our attention to the southern edge of the U.S. state of Louisiana. About an hour and a half south of New Orleans, there is the remains of a community by the name of Isle de Jean Charles. It's a narrow strip of land that for years had been slowly eroding into the Gulf of Mexico. Back in the 1950s, the island was about 22,000 acres, which is roughly the size of a small city. Since then, it's shrunk by 98%. In 2016, the U.S. government gave Louisiana $48 million to relocate the residents of Isle de Jean Charles in what had been described as the federal government's first attempt to relocate an entire community because of climate change. The story then is a complicated one. That relocation is the subject of today's episode. My guest is Jessica Simms, a cultural geographer who was previously the lead outreach and engagement coordinator for the state of Louisiana's community resettlement effort.

[00:01:23.360] - Julian Hattem

She's currently working on a book about the Isle de Jean Charles relocation. Jessica, thanks so much for coming on.

[00:01:29.340] - Jessica Simms

Thanks for having me.

[00:01:30.640] - Julian Hattem

So let's start with the background then and kind of, you know, zoom out as much as you like. What was the situation like in the Isle de Jean Charles and why did the federal and state governments decide to support relocation of this community a decade or so ago?

[00:01:44.500] - Jessica Simms

Yeah, so I'm going to start with this bigger picture of Louisiana, state of Louisiana, which Louisiana has the highest rate of wetland loss in the contiguous U.S. So the reasons for these losses are inclusive and both exacerbated by climate change. So first you've got relative sea level rise, which means that at the same time as Gulf seawater is— Gulf water is rising, the land itself is sinking. So the impacts are amplified. Thousands of miles of exploratory oil and gas canals let saltwater into places where there had been none, and the plants and trees whose roots need fresh water to hold their, uh, to keep them alive, um, that were holding the land together washed away. Then you have the Mississippi River levees, which were built mostly after the great flood in 1927, and these do mostly a great job of protecting cities, but it, uh, straitjacketed the river and, um, 200 million tons of sediment that had been building a delta for 7,000 years are now shooting off the continental shelf. And then finally you've got hurricanes and storms that can kind of just blast through this weakened network of fragile land and waterways also contribute to the erosion.

[00:03:10.210] - Jessica Simms

If you look at a map of Louisiana, which I have behind me but it's sort of blocked, you zoom in on the sole and the toes of the boot and you can see that they're latticed. Like the boot is dissolving in acid. So since 1932, the state's lost about 2,000 square miles, 5,200 kilometers of land. That's roughly the size of the entire nation of Trinidad and Tobago. So there's the Louisiana coastal context. Now we get to Isle de Jean Charles, or the island as it's often called. I will call it just the island throughout. The island is in Terrebonne Parish. In Louisiana, we call parishes, I mean, we call counties parishes, and Terrebonne is French for good earth. Today, Terrebonne Parish is more than 40% water. So I want to kind of paint a picture for you of how you get to the island if you were going to leave from New Orleans, where I lived for a long time. So you, you drive about an hour and 20 minutes southwest, you turn onto Island Road, you cross over an earthen levee of a hurricane protection system. This is the system that the Army Corps decided on a cost-benefit analysis in 2002 would exclude the island from protection.

[00:04:40.640] - Jessica Simms

You cross over the levee and the water and sky really just open up on both sides of the road. The land ends, you're on this 2-mile, 2-lane ribbon of pavement. It's about level with the water on both sides. There's riprap on, on both sides. Um, high winds, um, high tides, strong winds combine and push water regularly up onto the road, and during strong storms, the road would just disappear entirely. So this was trapping island residents on the island or off the island. Kids couldn't get to school. School bus will not cross the road when there's any water on it. People couldn't get to and from work, and of course medical care. So this is a statistic that is, is often cited when the island is, is referenced. In the 1950s, the island was about 22,000 acres. 89 square kilometers for the rest of the world. It doesn't— anyways, um, metric system, about 1.5— this is the size of about 1.5 Manhattans. So it was a place where the residents hunted, they trapped, they fished, they raised cattle, they grew rice, potatoes, had gardens, chickens, they had fruit groves, they built their own houses, their own pirogues.

[00:06:05.370] - Jessica Simms

They were largely self-sufficient. Today, 2% of that land mass remains. So about 320 acres, 1.3 square kilometers. So less than one-third of Central Park, to use that Manhattan metaphor. Elders will tell you, "There used to be land as far as I could see, and now it's water." As far back as the records go, the populations The island's population is, is indigenous, so families of 4, 5, 6 generations, 7 generations, um, their ancestors found refuge in the island's remoteness, um, and each time there was a hurricane— Hilda, Betsy, Juan, Andrew, Lily, Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, most recently Ida— um, residents were displaced and they were pushed inland, and the communities really— their social and cultural fabric tore apart. By the time the $48.3 million relocation grant arrived in 2016, there had already been a couple attempts to relocate islanders. After the Corps excluded the island from the levee system in 2002, they estimated that it would cost something like $100 million to include the island inside the system, but only $8 million to relocate the island residents. So the Corps worked with Chief Albert Naquin, the former chief of the Isle de Jean Charles— I'm sorry, the former chief of John Charles Choctaw Nation, that's a state-recognized tribe whom many islanders are members of, to try and relocate.

[00:07:46.530] - Jessica Simms

The deal required 100% participation. Not everyone wanted to leave the island. This first attempt failed. Then in 2008, after Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, the United Houma Nation, which is another state-recognized tribe with members on the island, and they applied for disaster funding to relocate their tribal members from the region. They didn't get it. Then Chief Albert Naquin tried again. He got funding from Terrebonne Parish. It was disaster money to move islanders to the nearby town of Bourg, which is on a ridge. Bourg residents pushed back hard in a— actually, it was also just like the first community meeting, another contentious, raucous, emotional meeting. So that relocation attempt failed. 100% participation was required. It didn't go. So by 2016, the islanders had been through this process several times. They'd watched the relocation efforts fail, fail again. And that history is really important for what comes after. And by the time that the $48 million finally arrived, they're Their reactions, which were based on their lived experience, was disbelief and distrust. Yeah. So why did the federal and state government support it in 2016? So the $48 million came from a one-time $1 billion competition, the National Disaster Resilience Competition.

[00:09:24.250] - Jessica Simms

This was— organized and funded by HUD in 2014.

[00:09:28.900] - Julian Hattem

The Department of Housing and Urban Development, for people who— yeah, the acronym. Yeah, sorry. Continue.

[00:09:34.450] - Jessica Simms

Yeah. Yep. This was during the Obama administration. So its intention was to give states and cities and counties money to help rebuild resilience to future climate-exacerbated disasters and disruptions, both chronic and acute. So At the time, some folks at HUD, they understood that it isn't the hazard, you know, the natural hazard, the hurricane, the flood event, fire, that makes the disaster. It's the hazard that intersects with the community that isn't adequately protected. Poverty, racism, failing infrastructure, right? That's, that's going to determine largely who lives, who dies, who spends 10 years trying to get back on their, on their feet. It's, it's basically a social calculus. So HUD understood, right, we're rebuilding again and again, same place, storm after storm. It's, um, climate change is intensifying these hazards. This is a waste of public money. Let's try and do something different. So it's, it's, it's my understanding that in HUD awarding the state of Louisiana the $48.3 million, they intended it to be a scalable framework that other similarly threatened communities could use as guidance. Um, there was a New York Times article, and that came out shortly after the grant was awarded, that was headlined, "Resettling the Nation's First Climate Refugees." Um, sure.

[00:11:07.640] - Jessica Simms

Um, and, uh, the, the HUD— I have many things to say on that headline, but keep them for later. Um, a, uh, a HUD representative told the, the reporter doing that story that the relocation would set a precedent for the rest of the country, the rest of the world. So pretty, pretty high stakes. Yeah. And then the state, they knew and they understood that Isle de Jean Charles residents were facing existential threats to their ancestral homeland, their community, their livelihoods, and that people were getting threatened on or off the island. And broadly, the state is well aware of these impacts of storms, flooding, land loss, and all these other factors that are pushing Louisianans. Louisiana has the highest nativity rate of any other state, so if you're born there, you stay there. If you leave, you come, come back. So people are being displaced from their homes and they don't want to go. So the state knew that and they knew that other community relocations would be happening. I think that they also wanted to demonstrate the importance of a U.S. government agency, an official procedure, a funding stream dedicated to community relocations and that this project would reveal that need.

[00:12:43.980] - Julian Hattem

And so, I mean, I guess in so many words, did it work? I mean, you know, if it were— if it was intended to be, to use the words you mentioned, a kind of scalable framework for other communities and to set a precedent for other at-risk communities around the US, was it? I mean, what happened? Right. So after two efforts to relocate. At the third effort, the community decided to relocate and moved, what, 40 miles away to a place called New Isle. Um, did it work? Did it take? Has the precedent been set? Or, uh, yeah, what happened?

[00:13:18.990] - Jessica Simms

Yeah, um, what happened? A heavy question. It is, it is a heavy question. Um, let's see. So this is an ex— extremely extraordinarily difficult process. And anyone who works on community relocation, studies relocation, that's to be expected. But this one carried an extra complication from day one, and that was a fundamental miscommunication or misinformation about who lived on the island. So when the, when the application period was, during the application period before the money was awarded, Chief Albert, who had been working for many years to relocate his tribal members from the island, they brought the idea to the, to the state. They had been working on resettlement relocation plans. The funding rules didn't allow a tribe, state, or even federally recognized to apply for this. This funding. And this structural fact that a tribal nation needed a government intermediary to apply and access this money turns out to be pretty consequential. So the application went into HUD describing a community relocation. I think at that point everyone briefly thought the hard part was over. So, um, a couple weeks after the announcement happened, the, the principal chief of the United Houma Nation wrote to Louisiana Governor he said, you know, we're glad that money is coming to the island's plight, but we're shocked that we've never been told because we have citizens living there too.

[00:15:09.040] - Jessica Simms

And the press release had only named Chief Albert's tribe.

[00:15:13.210] - Julian Hattem

So there were two, not competing, but two different tribes, only one of which had been selected, so to say. Yeah.

[00:15:19.850] - Jessica Simms

Yes. So exactly. So state staffers who were working on the application had understood that everyone on the island was part of Chief Albert's tribe. So underneath this, this kind of surfaced these two different visions of the relocation. So tribal leadership wanted and envisioned a tribal reunification, so gathering their displaced members back together, and the state saw a resettlement of island residents, whoever they were. Many of the islanders were caught off guard when the funding was announced. Most were unaware that funding was being sought, and only a minority had been involved in the recent planning effort. So for a year or so, a lot of them were even unclear who the grant was for, and that gap in the relocation's goal was never fully closed. In addition, I mentioned that Islanders are Indigenous, and they're predominantly Indigenous, and For most, the island had been the only home that they had ever known, same as generations before them, and they are deeply attached to the island. They're deeply attached to the island's future and the sense of belonging that it imprints on them. And so to me, there's this deep and enduring connection to the land, which is linked to their culture and traditions and food and history.

[00:16:53.370] - Jessica Simms

It is a a living, breathing family member in many ways, this sacred sentient being. So this official recognition that the island is disappearing and that now money had arrived and made it really a reality for folks to have to make this decision was disruptive to To say the least.

[00:17:24.830] - Julian Hattem

Destructive, say more about that. What do you mean? In what way?

[00:17:28.060] - Jessica Simms

Disruptive.

[00:17:28.960] - Julian Hattem

Disruptive, sorry, okay.

[00:17:30.410] - Jessica Simms

Yeah. So yeah, it was incredibly emotional. Yeah, just incredibly difficult. So I was hired to really be the liaison between the island residents and the state. So when I first started going down to the island, which was spring 2017, I went with a colleague who knew the residents, and we started knocking on people's doors. So I introduced myself. I basically told people 3 things: I will be here every week, so you're going to be seeing a lot more of me, and I'm going to carry your questions and your desires and your wants and needs back to the state, and I will come back with answers. And the last thing that I told them, that it is never going to be my job to try to convince you to leave the island, and that really I am here to listen. And I think that that was one of the main reasons why people kept opening their doors to me. Yeah, so there's really just kind of this whole range of reactions. I remember one woman like clapping her hands together and giggling almost and saying, "Where can I sign up?" Another neighbor, you know, barely opened her door and said to me, "That money is just Monopoly money." And then another man said to me, "The only way I'm leaving is in a damn box." So it ranged.

[00:19:26.090] - Jessica Simms

I will say that the questions that I heard most often were the really the hardest ones, which were, the island isn't gone yet. Why are we moving now? Why doesn't the state Why is the money for us to move instead of protecting our homes? And these are questions you can't answer with a flood model. So these are, you know, these are houses that are still standing and many of the houses were built by their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents. So the state's kind of risk map and the residents' risk map largely we're counting different, different things.

[00:20:06.930] - Julian Hattem

I mean, but I guess to, you know, you mentioned that there had been a couple of efforts or discussions about moving previously. What changed? I mean, why did the latter, did the final relocation take to the extent that it did? I mean, why did people ultimately decide to leave when they had been, in some cases, very resistant for more than a decade previous and from your own experience continued to be resistant even when you, when you came to the door? I mean, what, what changed, if anything?

[00:20:37.830] - Jessica Simms

One, one thing that did change that was really important was that, um, the relocation was 100% voluntary, and you as an individual could move. Your neighbor didn't want to move, that didn't affect, um, whether you moved or not. So the state didn't require 100% participation. I think the timing of it was also something that was different. So, even though the timeline and the deadline to many residents seemed very, very short, several years that they had to kind of make the decision. So, the The funding was announced in January 2016, and the application period was January 2020, I think. Might have been 2021.

[00:21:37.340] - Julian Hattem

So several years.

[00:21:38.450] - Jessica Simms

Several years. Yeah. And I think another key difference was that I was going to the island every week and talking to people and trying to be as transparent as I as they possibly could. And it didn't come down to one community meeting where it had to be decided.

[00:22:02.790] - Julian Hattem

But I mean, to be clear, the issue remained contentious, perhaps still remains contentious, right? I mean, as some tribal leaders have said, they were essentially ignored in the relocation process and that the way it occurred amounted to, quote, cultural genocide, which is a very big claim. I mean, can you respond to that? What do you make of that characterization? And I mean, how, from your understanding, how do people feel about the relocation now, now that it is in the rearview mirror, so to speak?

[00:22:35.750] - Jessica Simms

Yeah. So I'll respond to the first part of that question first. And I want to respond really carefully. Because that phrase, which comes from the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation's 2022 press release, carries enormous weight. So, you know, the working definition of cultural genocide is a deliberate act intended to destroy a group's language, religion, or culture. So for the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, that's not an abstraction. It's It's the Indian Removal Act, which is their ancestors' literal displacement. It's elders I've sat with who were barred from school because they were Indian. Chief Albert wasn't allowed to ride the school bus or go to school in 1964. It's language suppression, right? Land dispossession, a federal recognition process that puts the burden on tribes to prove that they are indigenous. And it's not my place to characterize tribal leadership's experience. And I will say that there is a real wound at the center of this project. The Jean Charles tribal leadership's vision was reunification. They wanted to bring back together their tribal members who were displaced and scattered around by decades of storms. To bring them back together in a higher, a higher land place, a drier place that also could reflect their culture, their indigeneity.

[00:24:15.390] - Jessica Simms

The grant couldn't legally deliver that. So federal disaster funding rules tied eligibility to a new house, to living on the island when again, this kind of speaks back to the translating of the rules, the parameters of the funding that I had to translate to residents. It's complicated. Sometimes they seem completely nonsensical, but if you weren't eligible for a new house if you did not live on the island the day that Hurricane Isaac hit in 2012, which meant that tribal leadership didn't live on the island at that time and had been displaced years earlier, you know, displaced by the very storms that had justified the relocation. They weren't eligible for new homes in what the residents called, that they named the New Isle. So the people who did so much of this legwork are not together living in the community that they fought for. And I think I, I will also say that what I can speak to is what island residents repeatedly stated, which was that they wanted to speak for themselves. The island was home to, like I mentioned, members of two tribes, people who were once in one tribe, then the other, people with a parent in each tribe, people unsure which tribe they belong to, people who claimed neither.

[00:25:56.130] - Jessica Simms

Fair housing law required that the program serve every single person who was a permanent island resident on, again, Hurricane Isaac, which was August 29th, 2012, the day it made landfall. But before the law required it, I think morality did. I personally wasn't going to be part of a project that would offer some Islanders the chance to relocate but preclude others. That being said, there were failures, mistakes, missteps, communication breakdowns, decisions made in conference rooms, right, that should have been made in living rooms. There were delays that were so long people died waiting. And the tribal leadership's goal of tribal reunification was something this grant that used to community development block grant dollars wasn't legally built to do. And I think that that's a failure of how the US funds and offers little to no support for planning community relocations, which we know are best done when the community who will be relocating initiates them and they drive the process.

[00:27:12.440] - Julian Hattem

We are, we're almost out of time, but I guess I want to return to this notion of the Isle de Jean Charles relocation as a template or as a framework for the future?

[00:27:24.640] - Jessica Simms

Yeah.

[00:27:26.410] - Julian Hattem

I mean, there had been a lot of focus on this relocation, acknowledging all of the concerns you just raised and the issues, the missteps. I mean, what is its legacy? Is it— no policy is basically right the first time. Is this— is the legacy of the island's relocation one of a model, an imperfect model that can be reapplied elsewhere? Or is it a cautionary tale? Is it a sign of growing pains for the federal government and states and communities in figuring out what this relocation looks like? Or, yeah, I mean, taking a broader look, how— what is the legacy? What is the characterization of this relocation in terms of kind of the broader broader national and international process for relocating communities?

[00:28:16.600] - Jessica Simms

Yeah, I mean, I guess if we were going to put a model on one side and cautionary tale on the other, and we were to call it some kind of a continuum, it would fall somewhere on that scale. And I think to really understand a relocation and its and its legacy, we will have to return to the New Isle in 5, 10, 25 years, you know, perhaps 3 generations from now and see where it is. I will say, you know, 37 families are on higher ground. They live next door to cousins and aunties and uncles. They live in their home parish in fortified houses. The residents used their collective power to change this federal rule that HUD has usually in buyouts. You know, this had never been done before in this way with CDBG dollars. They were going to tear down the islanders' homes and the residents said, "No." forget it, we will not participate if you tear down our houses. So the state went to HUD and said, you know, we're gonna have to work on this, and they changed the precedent. So you can relocate. I can't speak to individual buyouts, I don't think that's the same, but for community relocation, this precedent now exists for communities that come next.

[00:29:58.140] - Jessica Simms

And I think that that's That's really important. I will say there was not a monitoring and evaluation process that HUD thought was important to fund with their $48 million. That's part of the reason why I'm writing this book is that in a way it's, you know, it follows 6 individuals and their families kind of through this process and what it was like for, for them and what it is like now. Where the residents live is, let's just say, you know, there are parts of their houses and part of their community infrastructure that is riddled with problems. Everyone has an air conditioner that doesn't adequately cool their house, you know, when it rains water comes in through people's front doors. There was a commercial building that was supposed to generate income to offset Islanders' expenses that has been largely empty. And, you know, people will text me, I haven't worked for this state in more than 5 years, and say, "Hey, do you know who I can talk to for this issue?" There's just been a real lack of communication. And I think if I were going to say that what this project really showed is that nothing matters more than clear, consistent, careful communication from the very beginning discussions throughout.

[00:31:41.420] - Julian Hattem

That's a great note to end on. So we'll have to wrap things up there. But Jessica, thank you much. Jessica, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate, appreciated this conversation and hearing about your experience. This was really informative.

[00:31:54.660] - Jessica Simms

Thank you. I enjoyed talking about it. Thank you.

[00:31:57.480] - Julian Hattem

Jessica Simms is a researcher and writer. She's the former Outreach and Engagement Coordinator for the Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Program. Her forthcoming book, which she's writing on the, on that relocation, is tentatively called Our Island Is Not Dead. And most recently, she was the Laborde Endowed Chair at Louisiana Sea Grant based at Louisiana State University. Thank you for listening to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. Subscribe to the podcast to catch all of our new episodes as soon as they are released. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. All of our episodes about climate migration in all of its shapes and sizes are in our archives. Those are online at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. This is one of several conversations we have had about planned relocation efforts. And if you want to hear more, you might check out our recent conversation with the researcher Sargam Goundar, which is on similar efforts in the Pacific in an episode called Fiji on the Front Lines of Climate Mobility. Or check out the episode Retreating from Climate Disaster in the United States. in which I speak with Kavi Chintam and Chris Jackson. If you want more from MPI, you can subscribe to the free Migration Information Source newsletter.

[00:33:14.330] - Julian Hattem

It comes out twice a month, and it's available at migrationpolicy.org/signup. Daniella Espacio produced this episode with assistance from Lisa Dixon. Editorial oversight was provided by Michelle Mittelstadt. Our theme is Touch by Patrick Patrikios. I am Julian Hattem. Thank you again for tuning in. See you next time.