Indigenous Removal and (Un)Recognition in the Plantationocene: Documenting Louisiana's Rising Waters

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In the 2012 documentary, My Louisiana Love , United Houma Nation (UHN) artist and activist Monique Verdin shares maps that display how her tribe was forced into the wetlands of south Louisiana by settler colonialism (5:40-6:00). In Can't Stop the Water (2014), a documentary about the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw (BCC), the tribe dubbed America's "first climate refugees" by The New York Times , Chief Albert Naquin describes his community as made up of "refugees from the Trail of Tears" (4:29-4:35). The issues of subsidence, seawater intrusion from canals dug by gas and oil companies, and rising waters impact all of south Louisiana's residents, yet the state's coastal Indigenous peoples whose cultures and economies are directly tied to the diminishing land are most immediately affected. My Louisiana Love and Can't Stop the Water address these issues within the Indigenous communities at the center of their narratives, communities with a legacy of displacement directly resulting from Plantationocene practices who are forced to consider relocation again in the near future. These documentaries unblinkingly indict the petroleum industry, underscoring the ways it has participated in the destruction of the Gulf Coast with little involvement in its restoration. This article analyzes the efficacy of the films in portraying the challenges faced by their communities and the activism each work depicts and engenders, as well as illuminates the role that southeastern Indigenous Louisianans have played and continue to play in the Plantationocene.