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The First Climate Change Refugees In The U.S. Are Native Americans

  Commentary:   "It's like you have a cancer and you don't do nothing about it, and then by the time you do something about it it's too late."

 

The words of Chief Albert Naquin are an apt metaphor for the west's response to climate change. They are not, however, a fair description of what is happening to his people, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, who are leaving their homeland on the Isle de Jean Charles of Louisiana. What's happening to them is an extension of the Trail of Tears, of one long process of indigenous removal from the American continent.

 

This island off the Louisiana coast has been home to this band since the nineteenth century. In recent decades, however, the island has lost 98 percent of its surface due to conditions worsened by human behavior. Climate change has increased and intensified hurricanes, worsening erosion and pushing sea level rise. Levee and dam projects have led to sediment starvation and salt water intrusion. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 contributed further to the loss of accessible land in the coastal zone - to losses of livelihoods and traditional diets, the destruction of traditional trapping and fishing.

 

Indian removal policies drove this band to the island and the remote bayous during the nineteenth century. First there were numerous geographical removals as native peoples were pushed out of their traditional lands, their cultures uprooted and tossed into piles in parts of the continent designated by the United States. Later came the removal of native children to boarding schools where they could be "saved" or "civilized" from their traditional language and culture. The Isle de Jean Charles Band momentarily found a haven from these phases of indigenous extermination, from the social discrimination they found on the mainland. They established their home here and now the social forces that have exacerbated climate change have forced them to relocate anew, as homes and burial grounds disappear into the Gulf of Mexico.

 

In a grim irony, until last month they were denied federal relocation help, long sought by Chief Naquin, because the federal government did not recognize them as Indians. In January, federal assistance finally came by way of a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to help relocate them to a new "homeland" further inland.

 

It suits this dark history of conquest and genocide that the first ecological refugees from the continental United States, the first peoples forced to move by the effects of climate change, are native peoples. Elsewhere, the coastal village of Newtok, Alaska is vanishing to coastal erosion, due to be washed away in melted permafrost sometime next year. The village is primarily a settlement of the Yup'ik people who recently voted to relocate en masse.

 

As Daniel R. Wildcat of the Haskell Indian Nations University foresaw in his 2009 book, "Red Alert," these Choctaw and Yup'ik peoples are being removed once more "not as a result of something their Native lifeways produced, but because the most technologically advanced societies on the planet have built their modern lifestyles on a carbon energy foundation."  It is to Wildcat I owe the metaphor of climate change as another phase of Indian removal. "Here we go again," he wrote - with many more to follow.

 

The natural bill for this expensive, unsustainable way of life is coming due, and the first ones holding the check are those the conquerors pushed aside in the first place, while our "advanced" political system lurches half-heartedly, unable to confront the industries profiting from the burning of eco-systems and homelands.

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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the "Desert Sage" column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Write to him atDesertSageMail@gmail.com.