气候变化领域集成服务门户

“We lose land, every hurricane we lose land,” he said. “And now all we have is the little bitty strip of houses and the road.”   

Last year, the chief arrived four days after Hurricane Ida to find Isle de Jean Charles deserted. “There was nobody on the island,” he said. “No one.” Only a few families have returned. 

The fate of the island was decided in the early 2000s. That’s when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chose not to extend the new, 98-mile long Morganza-to-the-Gulf Hurricane Protection System of levees, locks and floodgates — designed to shield against Category 3 storm surges and floods — to Isle de Jean Charles. According to calculations at the time, it would have cost $100 million to protect Isle de Jean Charles with levees, much more than the price tag to move everyone off it. Army Corps research showed that excluding the island from the levee would increase flooding and worsen storm surges.  

In June 2002, more than 100 island residents gathered at a local fire station with public officials and Army Corps engineers to discuss their options. 

“They’ll have to move me in a box,” one resident shouted, according to press reports. 

Naquin had a different view: “We have to look at an alternate plan to keep the community alive. I hate to say this, but maybe relocation is that alternative.” 

His efforts to resettle his tribe, bringing those displaced by hurricanes back into the fold, began soon afterward. 

Two attempts failed. The Army Corps offered in 2002 to move everyone off the island, then walked it back after some residents declined. Later that decade, the parish government offered to build more than 60 houses for the islanders in a new subdivision in nearby Bourg, a plan that fell apart after resistance from Bourg residents. 

In 2010, the Jean Charles tribe asked the Lowlander Center, a local nonprofit group, to help them in their resettlement efforts. Lowlander, founded by sociologists and disaster experts Shirley Laska and Kristina Peterson, helps lowland communities of coastal and inland Louisiana adapt to climate change and recover from environmental disasters. Peterson met the tribe’s chief in 1992 during the Hurricane Andrew recovery, and they’d stayed in touch. 

Laska’s work as a professor emerita of sociology at the University of New Orleans and the founding director of the university’s Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology opened doors. Peterson was a senior research fellow at that center, before both of them left and founded the Lowlander Center in 2010. 

Naquin hoped they could help the tribe raise money for land. For several years, Lowlander and the tribe worked on a blueprint for resettlement. The idea was to find a place large enough for the dwindling number of people on the island and the hundreds driven off it. There would be a tribal community center. A clinic. Pow wow grounds, traditional gardens, a market.

And then came word of HUD’s National Disaster Resilience Competition.

The announcement in June 2014 from President Barack Obama invited state and local governments that experienced a federally declared major disaster in 2011, 2012 or 2013 to “compete for funds to help them rebuild and increase their resilience.” The effort promised nearly $1 billion in funding for innovative projects demonstrating solutions to increasing climate disasters. 

HUD’s Tregoning considered the one-time competition — administered in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation — an opportunity for her agency to overcome institutional inertia and begin to change a system of disaster recovery that no longer works. Instead of dispersing money only after disaster strikes and rebuilding exactly the way things were before as if the same problems won’t reoccur, the country needs a forward-thinking approach, she said. 

“Yes, we’re gonna address the disaster that happened,” Tregoning said. “But how can we do it in a way that builds resilience to future disasters in a community?”

As soon as HUD released the competition rules in September 2014, the Louisiana Office of Community Development got to work. 

The staff had no time to waste. HUD gave applicants 180 days to prepare their first submissions outlining factors such as “recovery needs, relevant risks and vulnerabilities (current and future).” Those who made it to the second round had half that time to develop project proposals and solicit public comments.

“Even a community that has already embarked on this work is likely to find the timeframe challenging,” HUD acknowledged in its notice. Stan Gimont, who oversaw the competition, said in a recent interview that the deadline was standard for HUD.  

Former employees of the Louisiana Office of Community Development said they thought it was flat-out unreasonable. Staff rushed to find cutting-edge ideas as the clock ticked down. 

The proposal for the Isle de Jean Charles resettlement occurred almost by accident. 

On September 26, 2014, emails and interviews show, Forbes — the state agency’s executive director — ran into Lowlander’s Laska at an unrelated press event. The two had known each other for years, since another state agency Forbes previously worked at funded some of her research. Laska told Forbes that her team was working with the Jean Charles tribe on a plan to resettle them. Forbes, thinking of the HUD competition, invited Lowlander and Naquin to a meeting, documents show.

There, according to records, the parties agreed to work together to determine whether tribal relocation would be a viable proposal. 

Over the next five months, the agency, tribe and nonprofit pulled in other partners to help them gather data and put together a grant application. Records and interviews show Lowlander was responsible for providing outreach and demographic data about the island to the agency.

Four current and former employees of the state’s Office of Community Development told Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners that Lowlander officials had led them to believe that all full-time residents of the island were members of the Jean Charles tribe. At one point, deep into the process, the nonprofit provided a report about resettlement best practices that mentioned that the island “is made up almost entirely of Isle de Jean Charles Tribal members.” The line did not set off alarm bells, one of the state employees said, because the agency knew some “campers” ineligible for relocation lived there part time. 

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In an interview, Peterson said Lowlander gave the state information about the tribe rather than the island as a whole because the grant was for the tribe to reunify.

“It was not a proposal that was put in for the geography of a space. It was for a tribe to reconnect all of its people,” she said. “When somebody starts arguing, ‘Well, you didn’t tell us that there was Sam or Gertrude or whoever else was living there,’ that becomes very irrelevant when it was for a tribe to reassemble itself.”

But tribal reunification wasn’t what the HUD competition aimed to do, one former HUD official told Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners in an interview for this story. 

State officials say they did not talk to residents on the island to check who was there because they relied on the information from Lowlander.

Years later, researchers brought on by the state to help with the resettlement would tell the Office of Community Development that it should have done its own homework. One of them, the anthropologist Oliver-Smith, said in an interview that state employees recognized the severity of the misstep, calling it the project’s “original sin.” 

But in March 2015, before any of that was apparent, state officials submitted the first application. Three months later, Mathew Sanders, the Office of Community Development policy manager leading the effort, told the Lowlander team that Louisiana had made it to the next phase. 

“The work begins,” Peterson responded in an email. 

The state tasked Lowlander with spearheading the vision for the proposed resettlement, which the tribe expected would allow reunification of current and former island residents. Peterson and her colleagues brought together sociologists, disaster experts, architects, engineers and funders to create a blueprint. 

One of the resulting documents described “a pilot site for climate change relocation with tribal livelihoods enhanced by innovation, teaching and sharing activities while … cultural traditions are rekindled with the tribal members living in one community rather than scattered as they are today.” The document emphasized the importance of community participation in the process.

The team eagerly waited for HUD’s decision. It came on January 21, 2016: Louisiana finished fifth, receiving $92 million for Isle de Jean Charles and another project. 

Four days later, the state Office of Community Development touted its grant as a victory for “this Native American community in critical need of locating [to] a safer home,” and “a resettlement model that is scalable, transferrable and supportive of cultural and social networks.”

Thomas Dardar, then the chief of the United Houma Nation, found out about the award soon after, in passing, from his real estate agent. Dardar said he couldn’t accept that his tribal citizens living on the island would not be included in the relocation. 

“Our Tribal Council, although excited to see some much needed funds come towards the plight of Isle de Jean Charles, is shocked that we were never informed and brought to the table in the discussion as UHN citizens reside there as well,” he wrote in a letter to Louisiana’s governor, John Bel Edwards.

Sanders, the Office of Community Development staffer, shot off an email to Lowlander: “Anything you all can shed light on?”