In the New Isle

A year since Louisiana's first state-supported climate migration, former Isle de Jean Charles residents reflect on the imperfect solution to the loss of their ancestral home

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This article was published in partnership with Tele-Louisiane and the Louisiana French language digital newspaper Le Louisianais, where you can read the French version of this story at louisianais.com. 

Chris Brunet spent most of his life on Isle de Jean Charles, tucked away in marshes on the edge of civilization a stone’s throw from the Gulf of Mexico. The island once spanned 22,000 acres, dotted with pockets of forest and enough room to graze cattle. Today, it is a sliver of land, totaling around 320 acres and surrounded by an expanse of water. 

In September 2022, Brunet made the decision to move forty miles north to Gray, Louisiana. He realized that staying on the island meant a storm surge from even a weak hurricane could flood the area or damage his home, like it has many times in the last two decades. Each year, he’d watched the marsh around him dwindle One day nothing but the encroaching sea will remain.

“I didn't think relocation was going to happen in my lifetime,” Brunet said. “I felt it coming maybe two generations after me, but certainly not for me to experience that. But I did.”

Brunet now lives in a government-built home in a subdivision called The New Isle, part of the Isle de Jean Charles resettlement program spearheaded by the Louisiana Office of Community Development (OCD). The voluntary retreat project was funded with $48.3 million the state agency received as a result of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) National Disaster Resilience Competition, which OCD used to buy 515 acres and build thirty-four homes to resettle families who once lived on the island. Residents started moving to The New Isle in August 2022.

In 2002, almost 300 people called Isle de Jean Charles home. In the years since, little by little, they’ve left for higher ground, usually after a flood or a strong hurricane struck the area. Before the relocation last year, there were about a dozen left. 

[Check out this photo essay by Frank McMains, capturing moments of life on Isle de Jean Charles in 2017.] 

There are four families who decided to not resettle on the New Isle, instead remaining on Isle de Jean Charles. Sense of place—attachment to the land that birthed stories, holds cultural memory and contains ties to ancestors—has always been strong for the island people. The community has been almost exclusively Indigenous with the majority of residents now enrolled in the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, and others who belong to the United Houma Nation.

For some, the island is the only home they have ever known. Brunet’s family has lived on Isle de Jean Charles since the 19th century. 

“Because of climate change and man-made decisions, I was forced to make a decision I didn't want to make,” Brunet said. “I did decide to move, but I'll always have this sense of displacement because of that.”

Keeping Community Together

The relocation of Isle de Jean Charles’s predominantly Indigenous residents is often framed as an urgent necessity under the assumption that the island will soon be underwater. The real story, however, is more complicated. While coastal land loss has claimed over ninety-five percent of Isle de Jean Charles since the 1950s, the currently-inhabited strip of land has no imminent risk of being submerged by rising tides, thanks to a six-foot-high ring levee installed in the early 2000s that is maintained by the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District (TLCD) and the Terrebonne Parish government. 

The ring levee, however, isn’t designed to stop storm surges from hurricanes, and the island has been inundated numerous times in recent years. In 2019, Hurricane Barry, only a Category 1 storm, flooded the island with eight feet of water, and the U.S Coast Guard evacuated about a dozen people. During the active 2020 hurricane season, island residents evacuated seven different times. The powerful winds from Hurricane Ida in 2021 destroyed the majority of homes that were left. 

“Because of climate change and man-made decisions, I was forced to make a decision I didn't want to make. I did decide to move, but I'll always have this sense of displacement because of that.” —Chris Brunet

The island could have been better protected from flooding that resulted from these sorts of storms—and at one time such an initiative was included in a plan called the Morganza to the Gulf Hurricane Protection System, an eighty-nine-mile system of locks, levees and flood gates that would provide hurricane storm surge protection to 150,000 coastal residents in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes. However, in 2001, Isle de Jean Charles was excluded from the plan. While the majority of residents at the time still didn’t want to move, relocation slowly began to appear as the only option. 

Elder Chief of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation Albert Naquin is a native of the island who now lives a few miles away in Pointe-aux-Chênes; he relocated after a storm destroyed his home on the island in 1974. After the Army Corps announced its decision to exclude Isle de Jean Charles, in order to maintain community cohesion, Naquin decided to apply for the HUD grant to fund a relocation plan for his people. On behalf of his tribe—then called the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimatcha-Choctaw—Naquin developed and led the grant application process with Kristina Peterson of the Lowlander Center.

“The original plan was to move all the island people together again, like it had been,” Naquin said. The hope was for Naquin’s tribe to assemble after being displaced by storms, and to retain their cultural traditions. 

When the federal money was awarded by HUD in 2016, the tribe couldn’t receive it directly because they are not federally recognized, explained Naquin. Instead, the $48.3 million had to be administered by the state. After the project was in the hands of OCD, Naquin said tribal leaders were left out of decision-making, and its scope changed so much that his tribe and the Lowlander Center eventually didn’t support it; the tribe even asked that Isle de Jean Charles be removed from the project’s name, a request OCD denied. 

Naquin said the original resettlement requirements included being a tribal citizen, but those conditions abruptly changed. Under the OCD plan, in order to qualify for a home, state officials said a person had to currently live on the island or had moved after Hurricane Isaac in 2012—under these rules, forty-two households qualified for a new home. Naquin described these restrictions as too exclusive, leaving out too many former island residents who had been affected by the loss of their homes.

Those who accepted a new home and have moved to The New Isle also have restrictions on what they can do with their Ise de Jean Charles property. Specifically, signees cannot sell their property to anyone without approval by OCD or another entity approved by the agency. They cannot use their island property as a residence, cannot rent or lease it, cannot apply for disaster assistance funds for it, and cannot make or allow for substantial repairs. 

While these provisions might seem restrictive, Pat Forbes, executive director of OCD, pointed out that this is the first time in history HUD has allowed people to retain their homes and property after a buyout. 

“Allowing somebody to keep their land and their home on the land is unheard of,” Forbes said. “It's never been done with federal funds before, and HUD recognized the importance of that place to this community and culture.” 

According to Forbes, the federal restrictions ensure that those who took the free home from HUD use it as a primary residence. It also ensures that former island residents aren’t in harm's way on the island—federal or state funds are often used for evacuation and repairs after hurricanes strike. 

In the second phase of The New Isle project, the Louisiana Housing Corporation (LHC) is working with Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative to build twenty-seven single-family homes, the first of which could be completed next year. They will cost potential residents between $150,000 to $175,000 to purchase, with initial preference given to former island residents with low to mid-range incomes.

Eventually, though, the homes will be offered to anyone who has a qualifying income. As of November 2023, parts of Phase One of the project remain incomplete, such as the community center, retail spaces, playground, and marketplace.

Naquin argues that these homes and the remaining lots should be given to former island residents or tribal members who, at one time, were interested in resettling with their community but didn’t meet the government’s requirements.

Many former residents of the island and tribal members remain scattered. Some are only a few miles away, like Naquin, while others have relocated to Houma or nearby cities and states to escape the constant threat of hurricanes and rising tides. 

“We have some along Pointe-aux-Chênes; we have probably fifteen families of them,” Naquin said. “Probably ten in Montegut, Bourg, Chauvin. And we have some in Houma.”

As long as those families are still out there, Naquin said he won’t give up his dream of assembling his tribe together. He’s trying to figure out a way for the tribe to buy land for a second relocation area with up to seventy-five homes that would allow everyone to resettle together—like he had originally planned. 

Looking to the Future

For Brunet, the resettlement plan wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was one that allowed some former island residents to remain together. “And I know that for Chief Albert, a lot of it didn't go his way,” Brunet said. “But I think there's one thing that came out of this that was his number one intention: it was the preservation of the community of Isle de Jean Charles foremost of all. At least he got that.”

No one knows for sure how long the island itself has left. Reggie Dupre from the Terrebonne levee district said his staff will maintain their half of the ring levee as long as possible. But, he noted, if a powerful future storm damages the levee severely, fixing and maintaining it might not be a viable option. 

The four island families who chose to stay don’t have any restrictions at all; neither do the owners of the fishing camps that dot the island. Since Hurricane Ida struck, many of those camps have been renovated, while the homes of the very last full-time residents remain damaged.

For Brunet, Isle de Jean Charles is never far from his mind. On the New Isle, the breeze doesn’t carry the smell of the ocean. The marsh isn’t just a stone’s throw away. You can’t spot shrimping boats on this horizon. The New Isle isn’t an island at all, in fact, but a subdivision in a former sugarcane field. Replicating the home he came from, Brunet contended, will never be possible.

At the same time, he recognizes he has a lot to be grateful for. His community is nearby, his home is in a more sustainable location and, above all, his people’s culture and ancestral ties will be preserved. 

“It's a small example of not bringing it back like it was, but to be able to preserve what you have,” he said. “And that's what it's about. That's the significance. The significance of it is being able to preserve what you have.”