Breaking the Cycle: S1E2 Protecting Land and Place, Transcript

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Chiara Beaumont and Karankawa Kadla

Jessi Parfait and United Houma Nation

 

Transcript

(Intro Music)

Courtney Naquin: Howdy folks, welcome back to Breaking the Cycle, a podcast about the impacts of the fracking cycle, from extraction in the Permian Basin to exports in the Gulf Coast, and the amazing people working towards a future freed from the grip of polluting industry. I’m your host, Courtney Naquin, recording in Bulbancha, also known as New Orleans, on the ancestral lands of the Houma, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Ishak, and Biloxi people.

In our debut episode - which if you haven’t listened to yet, I recommend going back and giving it a listen - we heard from four women activists who live on the frontlines of the fracked gas industry. And they described how industry has impacted public health, the environment, and even local economies — but they also sparked our imagination of what a different world could look like by sharing their hopes for the future. But it’s critical to acknowledge that where fossil fuel and petrochemical industries operate, where these activists live and work, and where you are listening from, and from where I sit today, and where our vision for a just transition will unfold, is all on stolen Indigenous land.

In the Gulf Coast, several Indigenous groups don’t have Federal recognition - some are State recognized, and many are not - which makes their land even more vulnerable to the whims of industry development (even though, as we’ve seen with Dakota Access Pipeline, the Keystone XL Pipeline, or the more recent Line Three Pipeline, federal recognition  definitely does not guarantee protection from fossil fuel companies). But even if there aren’t federal reservations, even if text books or plaques in public places talk about Indigenous people in the past tense, Indigenous people still live on these lands today.

Our second episode is about Indigenous Peoples’ efforts to protect and reclaim culture, history and land from polluting industry in the Gulf Coast. We spoke with two Indigenous women activists, Chiara Beaumont, who is Karankawa Kadla, whose land extends along the Coastal Bend in Texas - including the now so-called Corpus Christi,  and Jessi Parfait, a member of United Houma Nation, whose lands span most of Southern Louisiana, including major cities now known as Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

One episode is not all enough to cover Native resistance to the violence of polluting Industry, but it’s important to hear the lived realities of Tribal communities like Houma and the Karankawa Kadla, whose land is now arguably the most industrialized area of the United States. In our interview, Chiara and Jessi describe the colonial force of polluting industry in the Gulf, and how their resistance is an act of both survival and reclamation.

(music)

Courtney Naquin: I guess we could start with Chiara, maybe? Um, can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about who you are, where you are, what you do, and who your tribal community is?

Chiara Beaumont: Hi, howdy my name is Chiara. I am a Karankawa Kadla woman from the Hawk Clan. Right now, I’m in the land of so-called Austin, Texas. But all of my people, the Karankawa Kadla, were descendants of the Karankawa. We've been on the coast since forever. My Clan specifically, we come from the land we now call Corpus Christi. And I do what I can. As of recently, that means being able to make graphics for our call to actions that we organize. I organized a protest here in Austin, and I help out my People as we try to protect our land from these oil distribution giants.

Courtney Naquin: Thank you. Jessi, can you also introduce yourself and tell us a bit about who you are, where you are, what you do, and who your Tribal community is.

Jessi Parfait: Halito. My name is Jessi Parfait. I’m a member of the United Houma Nation and, I grew up, born and raised, in Houma. But I currently reside in Itsi Huma, or Baton Rouge. Most people know French for a red stick, but that’s also what my Tribe called it. The Itsi Huma was a literal red stick which separated my Tribe’s hunting ground from those of the Bayou Goula.

I’m a campaign representative with Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign. So, we do a lot of advocacy and outreach about oil and gas, the oil and gas industry here on the coast. Like, I’ve done a lot of research into this. I got my master’s in anthropology from LSU just a few years ago, where I wrote my thesis on the effects of forced migrational culture, specifically my Tribe, you know, practicing native anthropology in the footsteps of my favorite anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston. So, I've studied this for a long time and I really got to see through maps, other visuals, and tons of decades of texts about how the oil and gas industry has affected my land and my people.

Courtney Naquin: Both of your communities are along the Gulf Coast, but they’re pretty far apart. So, Chiara, what’s the land like Karankawa region, and what’s your and your people’s relationship to the land like? And how has oil and gas affected that relationship?

Chiara Beaumont: Yeah so, we Karankawa have been taking care of the land from South Padre Island to Corpus Christi all the way up to Houston. That’s always been our home, give or take a little bit up north that, in the way way back time, my ancestors used to share with some of the Tonkawa. But, right now, I would say that the land is definitely suffering. When you’re driving into Corpus, the first thing you see are these tall metal towers. I remember when I was a young girl going to visit the land, I remember my mother being like, we’re going to the homeland. This is special, this is where you’re from. I remember seeing all these lights and being like, oh wow a beautiful city. She’s like no, those are oil refineries. It immediately made, unfortunately, my relationship with the land start to feel ugly. I understood as a child that ok, these big machines are taking things from the Earth. They are going inside and taking the insides out, that’s how it was explained to me. But that also, it was like, the only job that anybody was ever able to secure. So, it's this strange, like, yes we love this land, this is our home, we come from this land, we need to protect it, and also this strange relationship where people that we know, people that we love, are working for these oil refineries. Um, the beaches are beautiful. Some of them are being completely trashed, both by the oil refineries, um, and also by people that have come in. The land is always beautiful. I’m a big believer that you could never ever ever destroy the land, that she’ll repair herself eventually you know, if that means us two-legged folks will leave. She has been definitely forgotten from people’s minds. Definitely forgotten by big corporations like Enbridge or Exxonmobil, things like that.

Courtney Naquin: Thank you. Do you feel that, as an Indigenous person or within your Indigenous community, that industry has separated you from the land? Like, you kind of said at the beginning that it made your relationship to the land a little bit ugly. Do you feel that’s true for others as well?

Chiara Beaumont: Yeah. You know, I can’t speak for everybody but growing up with my family and telling folks that I’m from Corpus, the folks immediately like, they grimace, you know like they know what’s happening on the land. So it starts with them drilling into the land, it starts with them buying out the land around it and pushing folks that have been living there forever and ever out. It’s this huge chain that unfolds into folks just being so impoverished and so disconnected from the land. Because rather than respecting it, you know, they’re mining it for profit.

Courtney Naquin: I relate to that a bit in that whenever I was growing up, I was born in southeast Texas which is also a very industrialized part of the state. The environment isn't really one that you want to interact with. Where it feels like, you kind of grow up with these advisories like don't drink the water, don't eat the fish that come out of it. So, like the environment sort of becomes villainized, and then the environment becomes these places outside of where I grew up that were not really accessible to me and a lot of others around me. That’s, yeah, industry sort of disrupts a healthy relationship with the land that you come from, which is unfair to say the least.

Jessi, um, I would like to pass the same question to you if any of this resonates with you as well but what the land is like in Houma, not just Houma but I suppose the river parishes of south Louisiana. What is Houma’s relationship to the land like and how has industry changed or shaped the land and your relationship to it?

Jessi Parfait: Not that you asked me to, but, if i could describe it in one word, I would say abundant, because that’s what this land has always been. I'm very fortunate to still live in what would have been my tribal lands before colonial forces and other, like,  pressures pushed us further and further south. So, that happened over the course of hundreds of years. We were actually north of Baton Rouge, which is a beautiful place, naturally beautiful place. The river flows through here. We have oak trees and cypress and swamps and I know that that does not sound appealing to everyone but, it’s beautiful to me. I love our landscape here. I love our nature and our wildlife here. And, to get to how industry has affected us, we used to have towering cypress trees, enormous, enormous, over like six feet wide. Thousands of years old cypress trees all over the state that were clear cut by logging so thoroughly that literally only one remains in the entire state. We literally only have one virgin cypress tree left in the entire state. It's actually north of Baton Rouge on Cat Island.

This place is so special. It is home to some of the oldest human-made architecture on this continent. The mounds on LSU’s campus are older than the pyramids. That’s how long Indigenous People have inhabited this land. And we did so utilizing what it provided but also not using it to damn near extinction, like they did with cypress trees. Regardless of how abundant this place is and how beautiful it is, it was never going to be enough for extractive industries. When the cypress trees were gone, they had to look for another way to extract from my home. Plantations came in and, after that, oil and gas came into the coast around the 1920s and 30s. It took them a little bit longer to figure out how to get the oil out of the marsh. Because you know you couldn’t use heavy equipment that you could use in other parts of the country. Even places that had survived the logging weren’t safe from these industries. And the early days of oil and gas exploration were just, just, it was like the Wild West. They talk about it very nonchalantly in the Louisiana Conservation Review, which is an old publication that was done here in this state. They would talk about things like a wild well in Terrebonne parish that spewed oil for like ninety days and nobody could cap it. I mean, it should come as absolutely no surprise that, if you look at maps, like current maps, where these oil fields were, there’s nothing, there’s nothing there anymore. Nothing can survive. And so, we once had fresh water lakes in the area, but dredging canals, both for navigation but also for like, pipelines and things like that, introducing salt water intrusion in a lot of ways. So between that, oil spills, we’ve lost so much land here on the coast and all of that land, however you want to think of it, I think a lot of people don’t see the true value in it because you can't really monetize it exactly. But, it has value, not just of course, in its beauty, but in the fact that it’s our first line of defense against storms. And so, in losing all of this land, we’re starting to see, like, worsening impacts from storms. All of that to say is, it needs care. We really need to care for it the way it has cared for my Tribe for literally thousands of years. It’s still beautiful.

Courtney Naquin: Yeah, thank you, thank you both. I like Chiara’s point of, um, the land will heal itself eventually, whether that means with or without us. But at the same time, how much better would it be that people can actually, instead of being the enemies of the land, they can instead be the stewards of it, like the original People had been.

(music)

Courtney Naquin: An interesting thing that I’ve learned through both of your activism for the Karankawa Kadla and Houma is that there is a direct connection between protecting the environment and preserving or reclaiming your culture and history. For example, Chiara, I’ve read a couple of articles that feature you in the Texas Tribune and Texas Highways, where you set the record straight for non-Indigenous people about the history for the Karankawa Kadla - essentially correcting the false stories told by Texas institutions that have been written into textbooks and public history. So, can you talk a bit more about how you got involved in this effort and why it’s been so important for you?

Chiara Beaumont: I was and am so, so, so blessed and lucky to always have known I was Karankawa. My mother made this a point. It was so important to her that we knew where we came from. And in that article, it mentioned that, I remember now in elementary school we had a culture day where you go in, maybe you go in and share a dish or a dance. So I asked her, like, “oh are we Mexican” because we were in a Mexican neighborhood. She was like, well no we are Tejanos. That’s what they call us now. That’s because we’ve been on the land. Our ancestors are the Karankawa. We’ve been there since before the border. We’ve been there, as was just stated, for thousands and thousands of years. That’s your culture, those are your people, but we don’t know where anybody else is. Because of what happened to us, we all had to flee, and that kind of turns into like two different directions into how important is this correction of history and how did I get into this big ol’ world of environmental activism, that’s what they call it. Well, I had always read and it was incredibly traumatizing in these recent years. I’ve only just started to heal. Every time I would try to learn about my people outside of my family, every time I would try to do my own research or ask people who knew maybe more about my Tribe, all I got was that we were extinct. And it was said so casually, like that isn’t an atrocity to just say. And, what was so upsetting is that it felt that way. I just had my immediate family and my family back in Corpus, and I wanted to know where all the rest of my people were. We had all these wonderful stories and parts that we kept alive but we didn’t have anyone to share it with. So, my mother, she also started communicating and reaching out to folks on like, Facebook, and found that there were other Karankawa folks who were going through the exact same thing. It was like oh my gosh I thought I was the only one.

We started to revitalize little pieces that were lost forever, like our language, our medicine, our spirituality, our stories, our culture, and it was so freaking cool. So, when we all started to really build our community back up again and to share all this knowledge and wisdom that we had kept really really sacred, you know, really kind of quiet, to ourselves. My Karankawa sister, Love, she was a land defender. She still is a land defender and a water protector and that, understandably so, because it’s how her spirit is, it was all she would talk about. What are we going to do about the land, how are we going to protect the land, they’re coming for it, this is ours, and we need to do something, we need to do something. I asked her what could I do? We had a Zoom meeting where just her and I, that we need to think of something big. I was like how about a protest and she’s like, yes a protest. Over maybe three months of planning, with my sister’s blessing, because she’d been doing this for years and years and years and she deserved a break, I organized our protest. and since then, the organization role has fallen with Karankawa Kadla women, which is so wonderful. Me being the first youth, and then another young Karankawa Kadla woman is organizing the other one, which is such a joy. So that’s how I got started trying to save our land and the importance of re-educating people. I have like this mantra in my day to day that everything I do is for the benefit of my future generations, however long they decide to keep this going. And I never ever, ever, ever, ever want my future generations to have to go through reading textbooks or telling people about our history and have them say, oh I thought y’all were all extinct, or oh I thought y’all were cannibals, or oh I thought y’all were just savages, I thought y’all were causing all this trouble. That’s what people thought. Oftentimes I am met with one of two reactions: a really strange incredulousness, like you’re lying to me, or an oh my gosh I can’t believe I’ve been lied to.

Bridging that gap, just properly educating people about what actually happened on these lands we now call America, I’ve always believed is so vital. If people were just taught the atrocities of what happened to the Indigenous peoples of these lands, and that we are still here. The Western expansion never truly ended, we are still on our land. We are still being pushed off, and it’s fucked up. That kind of wakes ‘em up. So I just want that re-education to just get right into people’s brains so they start asking more informative and introspective questions like, oh wow if that was a lie, what else is a lie? And that opens up this really wonderful Pandora’s box of questioning these colonizer corporations where everything has the incentive of profit at the extreme cost of destroying the land and, in process, destroying our future generations’ home and happiness. So, just bridging the gap really.

Courtney Naquin: For people who don’t know, I wanted to ask about the specific protests that you are leading with Love’s blessing, and this other woman that you mentioned is helping organize.

Chiara Beaumont: So, I'm not leading anything right now; I have stepped away from organizing. It was something though that was a tremendous honor and something wonderful to do for my people and I would do anything. It didn’t serve my spirit, so I’ve stepped away from organizing until I was able to kind of calm myself back down from it. What I’m doing now is just creating those graphics. I go to all the call to actions. I’m a speaker for the call to actions. I’m here to help in any capacity outside of organizing. And what is happening is there is a company now, so it used to be Moda, that was the oil distribution facility that was on the site. So they’ve already built on the coast, which is Karankawa land. But, they want to expand specifically on a Karankawa settlement. That word settlement, for these purposes, is used to describe a historically significant place that archeologists and Texas historians can be like, wow there were Indians here. But, to us, it’s more than just a settlement. It’s where tons and tons, tens of thousands of artifacts that our ancestors left behind, art, like pottery, jewelry, tools, arrows. They lived there, so everything that they used is still there. And not only that, but because we know that, from all of our history, this is the place where we do have the most recent connection. It’s also a sacred site. It’s a place where lots of my relatives go for prayer and ceremony or quiet reflection. It’s also a piece of land that has a natural spring on it. That whole land is where Enbridge wants to expand their operation on to. So the protest is us telling them that to do this would be an absolute evil thing to do to us, the Karankawa who were nearly decimated because of the settlers that came here. It was not too far that we could’ve gone extinct. We have very, very, very little left because of what happened. But what we do have left are these artifacts. I have them in my home, some of them. You can walk along, you used to be able to walk along these lands and you could find these artifacts that our ancestors gave to us. It was a very sacred place. And they built on top of that. It’s already happened. We don't have access to the land anymore. They're going to destroy all those artifacts. Because there's that sacred spring water there, they're going to dirty it. That spring water is where a lot of people, still to this day, get their water from. Mostly, I’m all about the preservation of our culture and our artifacts, but also there’s a whole ecosystem out there that, if you were to look at this place from an aerial view, everywhere alongside it has already been “bought and sold” except for this part. So, we’re just trying to have that not happen.

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Courtney Naquin: Jessi, there’s also an important element of preserving history and culture in your activism. You very often show how everything is connected: polluting industry is forced onto Native land, polluting industry is driving climate change, and climate change is actively impacting Houma people as Southern Louisiana faces significant land loss and frequent violent storms. Can you talk more about this relatedness, and how it drove you to create Houma Nation’s archive?

Jessi Parfait: Yeah, for sure, I don’t know why I’m always so shook hearing stories like this because colonization has a playbook and it really sticks to it. They know what they’re doing and it, unfortunately, in a lot of ways has worked for them for the past couple hundred years. Hearing you talk about the way they said that your Tribe did not exist is all too familiar. The same thing happened with my Tribe under Thomas Jefferson, my favorite of the founding fathers. The Declaration of Independence, in that very document, called the Indigenous Peoples of this land merciless Indian savages. I mean, that has never gotten better. My grandmother wasn’t allowed to go to school. She was Native and, you know, we were Native enough to not be able to go to school, but when we want Federal recognition, we’re not Native. It’s so ridiculous. Again, I don’t know why I’m always so shook by this. I don’t know why I’m surprised at this point, sadly. But true…

I guess that brings us pretty current. Like I said, my Tribe was pushed down further and further into lands that were considered uninhabitable, you know, lands that nobody wanted because they were in the marsh. We thrived there for a long time. That land was not considered valuable until it was. And when oil and gas exploration came in, like I mentioned earlier they got marsh buggies and they actually figured out how to extract the oil from this place. It’s not, the history of that is not lost on me. And I think that’s what really motivated me to take a more active role in these things, because I saw it. We were pushed from Baton Rouge down to the bayou communities, primarily Terrebonne and Lafourche Parish. For anybody not from Louisiana, we have parishes, unlike the rest of the country that has counties. So that’s what that means. Um, yeah, we were pushed down into the bayou communities of Terrebonne and Lafourche parish, which are, if you look at a map, right at the bottom…like the ball of the foot, of the boot that is Louisiana. And, now, because of coastal land loss, which we are losing land faster than anywhere else in the continental United States, because of coastal land loss, these once havens are now becoming uninhabitable. And, I guess my activism started a little bit differently because I was hired on by my Tribe after I finished my undergrad, to be the Tribal archivist. I had no background in this whatsoever. Again, my training was in anthropology, but I was like, my Tribe needs me, I must go. And so I did.

One of the first things that they did with me was, they took me down to one of the old Indian schools in Golden Meadow, where Tribal citizens were allowed to go to school. That is where all of our historic documents are from literally the past decades. So, all the Tribal Council minutes, all the research that had been done by the Native American Rights Foundation, NARF, everything involved with our Federal recognition process was there. I walked outside of that school and just looked down the road and, within my eyesight were the levees that kind of close in Lafourche parish. All I thought was, if those were to break, if anything were to happen here, we would lose decades of history. There were no backups. This was not in the cloud. This was barely on computers, floppy disks. I am not joking. I wish I was. [laughs] But decades of Tribal history were being held at this school, and so my first priority became, I want to digitize as much as possible, as much as I possibly can. So, I set to work right away doing just that. So all the Tribal council minutes are now digitized, beginning in the 70s, not just digitized but, like, text searchable. I made it text searchable. A lot of the research that was done by NARF for Federal recognition process. A lot of newspapers that people had been saving and just kind of like throwing into the space. It was not organized. So I really set to work digitizing a lot of this. Of course as I’m digitizing it, I’m reading it and looking at it. The history was just, it was laid out so clearly. I mean, my parents have always told me who I was and where I was from, but we didn’t really talk about the history all that much. It wasn't super bright for a lot of people there, even well into, like, the 50s, 60s possibly. There was a lot of dispossession of land, a lot of oil and gas folks coming to people who had been denied an education and telling them, you sign this, this is a lease. We’ll get the land but you will continue to be able to hunt and trap on it or fish on it or, you know, some other lie like that, that made them believe they would continue to be able to inhabit this land. But those were not leases. Those were bills of sale a lot of times. I’ve even heard rumors from elders of people signing these bills of sales from beyond the grave, clearly fraudulent. And, there was a lot of that, unfortunately a lot of dark memories tied to things like that. Just in my archival work, a lot of it came to light for me personally. So it became really important to me to do what I could to stand up for my People. I’ll never feel like it’s enough because of everything my Tribe has given me.

But, I want to try my hardest to make sure that this land remains inhabitable, because at the trajectory we’re going right now, it’s not going to be. Between climate change, and sea level rise, and these worsening storms like this last one, Hurricane Ida, last year. My parents moved to this community that we lived in in Houma because it had never been damaged before. They moved there, away from the place where I grew up. My grandmother moved from where she grew up to safer locations, only to see those safe havens decimated by Hurricane Ida last year. My parents’ house was absolutely destroyed. The walls were there, but very much within, like, we had to gut it, basically. We had to gut the home. It’s not lost on me that we were pushed further and further and further south. And now, because of all the destruction of our environment, these forced migrations aren’t over. They’re happening again. You don’t need to look further than Isle de Jean Charles, which is a Tribal community down in coastal Louisiana, that was displaced. I think the New York Times called it “the first climate change refugees.” Which, you’re not a refugee in your own country, first of all. But, more importantly, they’re also not the first. This is not the first time. This is only the first time in recorded history. This is only the first time that people are paying attention. Because my elders have taken me to places that were once inhabited, but are no longer inhabited because they’re only accessible by boat. There are so many of these communities on the Gulf coast and in Houma and Terrebonne and Lafourche, specifically, are the parishes are the ones I know about. Just coastal erosion you know. There’s no roads. There's not even land bridges or anything like that. You literally need to take a boat to get to some of these places. And, of course, the homes aren’t there but there’s shadows of them. There’s like pilings and wooden planks and other things like that. There’s trees in some of these places because they’re so high. They’re on high ground because Tribal citizens knew to do that, to build near those trees and to build on the high ground. Those trees are still there, but the people aren’t. Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see more of that. I want to do the best that I can to slow that.

Courtney Naquin: Yeah, thank you for sharing that, Jessi. It’s a dark reality and it’s important to amplify the work but to also acknowledge the loss of people’s homes and of collective memory. I know that neither one of you are alone in it. Y’all have your community and your People and thank goodness for that. But also it’s, I think there's something to be said for holding space for, like, the grief of it. So thank you for sharing, because I know it can be hard.

(music)

Courtney Naquin: Like the Karankawa resistance to Moda Midstream’s expansion, Southern Louisiana is also facing several destructive industry projects right now. So, Jessi, can you talk a bit about projects happening in the region and the impacts they might have on Houma?

Jessi Parfait: Yeah, I specifically focus my work here in southeast Louisiana, specifically. Plaquemines LNG is going to be an LNG export terminal, and they’re currently in construction right now. They have a comment period out right now for expansion alone and it’s going to be the equivalent of five coal plants. I guess the implications of this are wild to me, that you would build something as big, because they’re huge. LNG facilities are enormous. It is wild to me that you would build something that big in the location that literally flooded last year during Hurricane Ida, and stayed flooded. It stayed flooded for a good little while. That water did not go away. They want to put something like this, this enormous facility, in a place that’s already overburdened with industrial land use. They’re in very close proximity to a number of historic Black communities as well as an Indigenous community out there including Ironton, West Point à la Hatch, and Grand Bayou. They’ve paid their dues. They’ve more than paid their dues over and over and over again. This area has been written off as a sacrifice zone to industry.

Courtney Naquin: Thank you alot for being here, but I would like to ask y’all both what your hope and vision is for your community, for yourself, and for the areas where your people are, and then to add anything additional that you really think that people will want to know. So, Chiara, what is your hope for the Coastal Bend?

Chiara Beaumont: Jeez, so much. I feel that it is, well i can't speak for everybody but as an Indigenous woman who is doing what she can for her People, that oftentimes means anything, anything. And it comes from such a deep, deep, desperate place to acknowledge what my ancestors, while I hold back this, like, surge of emotions when I talk about this, to do right by all the evil that happened to my, to my People. I want to tell strangers on the street, that’s my goal. I want to be able to just tell everybody what happened and what is still happening. I wanna make people uncomfortable. I want to make people angry about it. For me though, I also want to feel peace. Like, we’ve already been through so much. And I just want to feel peace. For my People, I would be willing to not feel peace. I want us to gather in our numbers, like we used to. I want us all to speak our language to each other, something that we’re working on. I want us to be able to gather on this land that’s at risk, that we’re losing, to hold ceremonies like we had been doing for the past thousands of years. I want the Indigenous Peoples of these lands to be returned to them what is rightfully theirs, which is the stewardship of the land. Thus, my goal is to just give everything that I can to my People, to try within my very small capabilities to show my ancestors that it’s okay. That we’re still here, and it was thanks to them. And I will continue to fight, and I want to have as many children as I can [laughs] so that I can ensure that we are here.

Courtney Naquin: Thank you for sharing that for sure I really feel how much you care. Jessi, I would like to ask you the same question too. What is your hope for South Louisiana, for Houma, and anything else you’d like to add.

Jessi Parfait: As sad of a hope as this is, I just hope these lands remain inhabitable because at the rate we’re going, everyone has seen the maps, it’s not going to be likely in 50 years. I don’t want everything my ancestors went through to have been for nothing. I want to be able to stay here. I want my future children to be able to stay here. I just want this land that has done so much for us for so long, it gave us everything we needed. It gave us the materials to build homes, to build pirogues, which were boats, to navigate the waters, it gave us everything we needed. I just want to be able to give something back to it. I want it to stay here. I want other people to come and see how beautiful this place is so that maybe next time they’ll think twice when they see the devastation of hurricanes and then ask us why we don’t just leave. Because I promise you, if you saw this land the way I do, you would know why we just don’t leave. That's what I want.

Courtney Naquin: I think you’re both going to make me cry. Thank y’all so much. It’s really powerful to listen to y’all. I feel very lucky to. It’s nice to hear from y’all because I have the pleasure of working with you, Jessi and Chiara. I feel really honored to have followed the things that you’ve done. So, thank you both for taking the time out of your evening to speak with me so passionately and boldly about where you come from and why you care so much.

(music)

If you don’t live on your own ancestral lands, and you don’t know whose land you’re on now, please take a moment to find out and learn the history through sources from Indigenous groups and leaders. Let this episode and this discussion with Chiara and Jessi guide your experience through this podcast. Remember that colonization is where this all starts, that the origins of pollution and climate change began with the violence against Indigenous people. We know that climate change and environmental destruction is caused by extractive and polluting industry activity. We know that extractive and polluting industry activity is happening and expanding on stolen Indigenous land. It’s happening on stolen Indigenous land because of colonization. So we must understand that any continuation of industry and its expansion is colonialism. So the way out of this and the way to actually see our world is protected is through Indigenous leadership, through and back. Thank you all for tuning in. Thanks to Roddy Hughes, my coworker at Sierra Club and producer of Breaking the Cycle, to Thomas Walsh, our editor, and our project manager, Natalie McLendon, and of course, Purly Gates, for her wonderful music that helps bring this podcast to life. See you all for our next episode.