A panel of legal experts, social justice organizers and local indigenous leaders came together to reclaim what is normally "Columbus Day."
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In three years, the United Houma Nation of Southern Louisiana has been hit by the storm surge of four separate hurricanes. In 2005, Katrina and then Rita inundated the homes in the bayous and again in 2008, from Gustav and Ike. On the Federal Government’s “Columbus Day,” representatives from southern Louisiana Indigenous Tribes spoke at a forum organized by students at Loyola University. Despite historically being protected from storms, Houma representatives said their homes have been made vulnerable in the last fifty years by retreating wetlands, which once acted as a buffer by knocking down waves from the Gulf of Mexico. Biologists, geographers and tribal members have documented how the loss of wetlands is directly correlated to activities of the oil industry. Oil extraction creates subsidence, dropping the soil lower to fill in the missing layer of oil. Salt water intrusion through manmade canals—there are eight to ten thousand miles of oil pipelines—causes plant erosion. The prediction of rising sea levels magnifies coastal Louisiana’s vulnerability. The tragedy of losing homes quickly translates into the loss of a cohesive culture, as more people consider moving away and fully integrating into mainstream America. “Our histories are full of stories of landloss,” began Michael Dardar, a Houma tribal council member. “As a Houma fisherman you were free. You had your own equipment, you had your own boat, your own traps. And you made your own living at your own pace. At the time there wasn’t much government oversight. “And, unfortunately, from our perspective a lot of the multinational corporations that are involved in this globalized business of stealing and spoiling indigenous peoples’ land got their start in Houma territory.” In 1904, a dam on Bayou Lafourche started the process known today as coastal erosion. As engineering projects continued to try and control nature, landowners began to come in and lease land out to Houma for trapping rights in the 1920’s. “When my daddy was growing up, you actually had to pay a lease fee on land that was originally ours. And then the oil companies came in the ‘30s and that process accelerated.” Oil corporations such as Texaco, Humboldt and Standard Oil learned their capitalist processes in southeast Louisiana. “They developed these tools on Houma land, on Houma people,” Dardar continued. “We’ve been facing a century of this economic exploitation.” It is in this climate that the United Houma Nation feels that it is time the U.S. Government finally accept their tribe’s long standing request for recognition. “We are seeking federal recognition, but not because we need the Federal Government to say ‘yes you are Houma,’ to validate our heritage. We know who we are,” Brenda Robichaux emphasized at a forum on what the nation calls Columbus Day. “We’ve lived generation after generation of our history, have it documented that we are Houma Indians.” Robichaux and the Houma of southern Louisiana have fought for Federal Recognition from the U.S. Government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs since 1979 when they sent a formal letter of intent. The bureau responded twelve years later, in 1991, stating that the Houma tribe only met four of the seven criteria. One is a requirement that they must exist as a single community, which the bureau views as small and clustered together. The Houma tribe is unusually large at 17,000 people and is spread over a large swath of bayous from Plaquemine Parish at the end of the Mississippi River to St. Mary Parish, more than a hundred miles west. Though Houma council members have conversed with Washington bureaucrats about changing the wording of the criteria, there are no commitments. In fact, there is a strong and determined opponent: oil and gas lobbyists who sent letters to oppose the Houma petition for recognition due to its geographic position on resource-rich land. As part of the recommendations to the Houma, a Bureau of Indian Affairs official said that certain parts of the Houma nation might have a better chance of federal recognition if they took on a distinct identity, often called “splinter groups.” Houma council members view these divisions pessimistically as a way for the federal government to subvert their petition, and deny the history of a United Houma Nation in favor of granting jurisdiction over smaller swaths of land. Faron McGraw, who identifies as a Point-au-Chien tribe member rather than a Houma, countered this accusation. With 680 members, Pointe-au-Chien is a state-recognized tribe which has been trying for federal recognition since the 1990’s. Like the Houma, they only fully passed four of the seven criteria. The point is “not to become wards of the State, but to get resources from the BIA to help us to overcome some of the problems of the past with education, job training,” explained McGraw. The primary reason to achieve recognition, according to both McGraw and Robichaux, is for educational and economic opportunities that have been closed to unrecognized Indian tribes. “I was the first in my family to go to regular public school,” Robichaux relayed. “Prior to that there were Indian schools that only went up to 7th Grade and so my dad’s generation has just a seventh grade education. It’s not that you didn’t want to continue with your education, but you had nothing available to you. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights movement that Indian children were allowed in public schools.” After Hurricanes Gustav and Ike this September, in Houma’s neighboring town of Dulac, community center director Jaime Billiot has used the building as storage for relief supplies. They’ve received water and ice from the parish government, but everything else needed to gut, clean and restore homes has come from faith-based groups and community organizations. Afterward, “people are left strictly on their own to repair and replace their whole lives,” said Billiot. McGraw agreed and claimed that despite receiving the heaviest flooding during Rita, Lafourche Parish has not forwarded any funds that were received from the Federal Government for rebuilding. Receiving aid from FEMA and other government agencies is difficult due to the nature of property in the Houma Nation and Pointe-au-Chien tribes. “There’s no paper trail of who owns what,” explained Billiot. “How do you document that you’ve ever lived in your house if it’s been turned over from generation to generation?”
Please visit unitedhoumanation.org for more information and to donate relief supplies or other resources.
Focuses on water quality standards determined by various indigenous people in the United States and their interaction with the state and federal government.
Speaks to important issues facing her tribe currently, especially reeling from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike that had a severe effect on the south Louisiana bayou lands where the Houma Nation resides.
