South of New Orleans

One of my tutoring students here is a woman who works at the School of Social Work at Washington University. She's studying to take the GRE so she can get her Ph.D. In the meantime, she's working on a project that involves various American Indian tribes. She's organizing a benefit for the Houma Indians, who have lost all their land in the hurricane.

I've been so focused on New Orleans, but what happened to the bayou communities south of New Orleans is possibly a bigger tragedy. They've been losing land for many years--it used to be, driving out to Grand Isle, that there was land on either side of the road for many miles, but now the road is like a long bridge, with nothing on either side but water. What was eroding gradually has now just suddenly disappeared. Entire rural parishes are gone and will never really come back. The Houma have lost their land, and they don't know where else they can go.

This is tragic not just ecologically, but because it is probably the end of the very strange and wonderful culture of coastal Louisiana. And maybe the end of Louisiana fisheries as well.

After we talked, I went to a bookstore in the city and bought a book called Bayou Farewell by Mike Tidwell, about the culture and the destruction of coastal Louisiana. It came out a few years ago and I'd been meaning to read it--I heard it was gripping and heartbreaking. I ought to have read it before; I need to read it now. I'm a little annoyed by the way he tries to translate the cajun accent phonetically--I find it distracting to read. Otherwise, though, I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone trying to understand what's gone wrong in South Louisiana.