Community Resettlement in Louisiana: Learning from Histories of Horror and Hope

Abstract

This chapter explores one of the biggest challenges that risk reduction professionals and policy-makers face regarding community resettlement in Louisiana: the need to reconcile efforts to address growing risks to flooding and extreme weather with the experiences and initiatives advanced by communities whose vulnerability to those risks is connected to histories of forced displacement, dispossession of land and resources, and social marginalization. The Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal Council, for example, has spent nearly 20 years planning their resettlement inland to address not only increasing extreme weather and flooding but also multigenerational experiences of displacement, environmental injustices, and threats to their tribal self-determination and cultural survival. After initially embracing the tribal-driven efforts during the application for federal resilience funding, state planners have since transformed their resettlement, situating the effort primarily within their emerging framework for coastal resilience. This chapter argues that ahistorical approaches to environmental adaptation threaten to reproduce the vulnerability of marginalized communities. This chapter also provides additional support to the growing demand for adaptation policies at multiple levels of government that honor the rights of indigenous peoples and commit resources for the implementation of community- and tribal-driven plans when they already exist.