In FERN’s latest story, produced in collaboration with Harvard Pubic Health Magazine, reporter Barry Yeoman describes the challenges faced by a Louisiana tribe in the face of repeated climate disasters and the burden on a young chief trying to chart a path forward.
“The 1,100-citizen tribe has traditionally fished and hunted along this fertile edge of the Gulf of Mexico. But human engineering and extreme storms have reshaped Louisiana’s coastline, swallowing up 2,000 square miles of land since the 1930s. Many of the land patents granted to the tribe’s ancestors in a 19th-century treaty are now largely or wholly underwater. Land loss has chiseled away at tribal livelihoods and traditional diets, exacted a toll on citizens’ mental health, exacerbated chronic illnesses, and displaced families,” Yeoman writes.
“The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band and its neighbors also serve as harbingers of a climate crisis that threatens more intense high-tide floods on every U.S. coast by the mid-2030s,” Yeoman writes. “Unless protective measures are taken, rising waters could displace up to 13 million Americans by century’s end—“a magnitude similar to the twentieth century Great Migration of southern African-Americans,” wrote the authors of a 2016 University of Georgia analysis.
Trying to navigate this future is the tribe’s new chief, Devon Parfait, a 25-year-old scientist who has studied land loss in the region.
“Parfait understands the changes he sees represent both an existential crisis and a leadership burden. He prepared for this moment by leaving Louisiana to study geosciences. Now he’s back, crafting a plan to hold his tribe together, and shaking the hands he needs to get it rolling. Still, he’s cognizant of the obstacles ahead,” Yeoman writes.
You can read the full story at FERN or at Harvard Public Health Magazine.