 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to this afternoon's briefing. What if the water can't be stopped? Tribal resilience plans in an age of sea level rise. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We thought this was a very appropriate topic given especially that it is Earth Day week and that we had the opportunity to have people in town this week also who are telling their story, talking to people in different communities in Philadelphia and New York as well to really look at some of the issues that are happening with regard to Indigenous people and to particularly tell the story of a particular tribe in Louisiana. Now this whole thing is part of obviously a much larger picture that we are seeing here in the United States and certainly globally and as we said this is the second in a briefing series that we have held with regard to recommendations coming out of the White House Task Force on climate resilience and adaptation from perspectives of state, local and tribal nations. So today we are going to take a particular look at what this means for tribal nations and in terms of looking particularly at the situation confronting a very charismatic and important leader and great connector among tribal nations in terms of Chief Albert Nakain who is unfortunately not able to be here but we will see him in the film clip that we are soon to see. There is illness in his family so he was not able to join us today. But he is the Chief of the Band of Isle de Chant Charles of the Biloxi Chittimacha Choctaw Nation and is of course in Louisiana where they are watching in terms of their isle, their island in terms of the bayou literally disappearing before their eyes after having been there for generations and generations. But what they are doing is another very, very interesting story. So we are first going to start to hear this story by taking a look at a film that has been made and we are going to just see a little clip of that and for that I would like to just introduce the filmmaker Rebecca Ferris to introduce this. Thank you so much for having us here. I really appreciate the EESI for organizing this. So the film is called Can't Stop the Water and my husband and I made it together while we were living in Louisiana and deeply concerned about coastal erosion and sea level rise. For many, many reasons we should all be concerned because of just the environmental impacts on wildlife and habitat and the economic risks that poses to the port, the Mississippi River Port and the economic impacts it will have on that but also most importantly the human impacts. So this film is about a community that's dealing, they're really on the front lines of this coastal erosion and sea level rise. They are planning on relocating because they have no choice. So this is just a five minute clip that will show you, introduce you to the Chief of the Tribe. You'll also get a sense of a little bit of the family life that is becoming more and more difficult to sustain on the island and then also the plan for solution to really preserving the community and keeping them together. So I will let the clips speak for themselves and then the experts take over. Thank you. When I was a kid, the island basically at that time we probably had land about five miles across and on the north end, going to the south end, we probably were looking about seven miles of land. Today we have probably a quarter mile wide, I guess counting the whole thing. I mean then after that it comes out to be open water. It's totally, totally different. They had the removal act of 1830 that was going to chase us all to Oklahoma. And during the removal act we came down here to get away from the trail of tears. Basically that's when we moved to the island. But today our land is almost gone. You're helping me now. That's real good. But now you knew I couldn't do that by myself, I used a calculator. Do that with your idea, close it. The kids have to wake up so early to go to school because of the travel time. Come on down in the elevator. The island children does have transportation for school. But since the hurricane of Gustave and Ike, the road has been too damaged for the bus to come down because it's too dangerous, the road is too narrow. And so now what the children have to do to go to school, they have to be shuttled in the morning and in the afternoon where they got to pick up spot at. And that's as far as the bus is going to go. We've been stuck now with a one lane road that connects the island to the mainland to come in and to come out. The road is actually a barrier and a road at the same time. But the road was never constructed to be a levee. If I went for this road breaking the saltwater coming in and out every day with the tide everybody rode this 5,000 acres right here in a matter of a couple of years. And what we're going to try this time is we're putting this stone and water can go in and out of it. Placing this fabric, it also helps with erosion. Plus we're going to elevate the road about another foot. And six inches of asphalt and the revampment in and hopefully it'll hold off a wall. I do think them raising up the road, it is a big step. And I do, do I think once it's fixed that everything will be okay? No, not at all. I'm thankful for what they are doing. But a foot up, whenever that water comes up, comes up almost three feet. What are foot's going to do? Right now everybody in the island is going into different communities because they have to move off because of hurricanes. The community needs a place to go to put them back together. So this property here could redevelop not just as a home for the island people. We could redevelop our culture, which is dying. Called it Die, Alegion Shaw, New Reservation. I haven't won too many battles but I bought quite a few out to the field. So we all know how that is. For me, it stands for the freedom and the tribe. But we're going to do it together as a community. And eventually the war is going to be won. Well, Rebecca, thank you. And I would love to see the rest of the film. That gives us a little bit of a glimpse into the story, the important issues that people are confronting. And to help lead us through this discussion this afternoon to tell the story, some of the impacts and some of the solutions that are being talked about by a tribal nation that is asking a lot of questions, is being very resilient and indeed a model, I think, for all of us. So to start us off, I want to introduce Dr. Julie Maldonado, who will basically lead us through this discussion and introduce Bob Goff and J.R. As we talk about these issues, Julie did her doctoral research based upon her experiences of environmental change and displacement in tribal communities in coastal Louisiana. So she's done a lot of consulting for the UN Development Program and the World Bank looking at post-disaster needs assessments. And she also worked for the National Climate Assessment for four years and was a lead author on the third National Climate Assessment, Indigenous Peoples, Land and Resources Chapter and also co-organized Rising Voices 2, which is adaptation to climate change and variability, bringing together science and Indigenous ways of knowing to create positive solutions, which is what we're really going to hear about in terms of this story today. Julie? Thank you, Carolyn, to ESI for having us and to all of you for taking the time to come today. I want to, it says, greatly honored to live with folks in Ildezhan Charles and have worked with them for several years now. And with us today, unfortunately, as Carol said, Chief Albert really wanted to be here with us. He does have an illness in the family, and so he needed to be at home with his family right now, but he is thinking of all of us. I want to introduce you to J.R. Nakhan, who is a tribal member of Ildezhan Charles, and he is gracious enough to step up to the plate in Chief Albert's absence, and so we're lucky to have him here with us. And also Bob Goff, with the Inner Tribal Council on Utility Policy. Bob is also a tribal attorney, and he has worked very closely with Ildezhan Charles the last couple of years through the Indigenous Peoples Climate Change Working Group, as well as specifically what you'll hear about today, the Relocation Plan and strategies for renewable, energy-driven, sustainable community in their community-led relocation actions. And so to start us off, I'm going to ask J.R. to introduce himself a bit, tell you about his story of growing up on the Isle and what's now happening with the community. Thank you, Julie. Thank you all for coming. This is tough. Growing up down there, it's changed a lot. I'm 52 years old and it's changed so much. Where there was land, everything, we were all a community, and when I was a kid, I remember my dad telling me when they used to add on to homes, I mean, it's not like you could drive today. They'd go get lumber, they'd all grab it together, and they'd go, if somebody needed an addition on a house or building a new house, they'd all get together, the whole community would get together, and they'd build that person's house. And it's amazing the stories that you hear. It'd be nice if they would have put it on paper, but it's not. It's passed on to the kids, the kids pass it back on to their kids, and that's what I'm here. But the island people are a tight-knit group of people, but the erosion has chased a bunch of people out. The coast of the erosion has chased a lot of people out. Storms. When the road was damaged last time, as you see in the picture, they said it was not going to fix the road again. This was the last time that they was going to repair that road, and that's the only road in, it's the only road out. And we still have families living down there, and the goal here is to relocate everyone as a tribe, as a group, back as a community. And the people that moved, we want to get them back into the same community to live like on a reservation like we grew up with, and it's going to be a tough fight for that. There's a lot of people against us, but the chief is going to fight. He's wish he could have seen some rest of that video because you would have known he's dedicated to this. And we all are. We're all dedicated to this. And the relocation is needed because say this year, there's a storm, the road's knocked out, they're not going to fix it. People are going to take a boat to get their homes. And kids won't, kids won't be able to go to school or they'll have to relocate, they'll have to move. So what the chief's trying to do is get a bunch of agencies to get other groups of people and which he has, he's spoken to many groups of people. And our goal is to relocate everyone as a community back in one type group is to go here. And what else? Can you relocate it yourself? Yes. I've relocated. I moved. I had to because I was missing work. Todd comes up, rode floods. I had to turn around. The water was too high. You couldn't pass your vehicle over the highway. And picture yourself on a two-lane highway with nothing on the side to guide you to show you where to go. I had to relocate. I moved. So I could keep on working. I've got two kids and one of them lives close to me which I didn't move that far away because I was born and raised down there. I was moved from there. I was 19 years old and I moved. And I miss it. I miss it a lot. So I think I'm going to pass it on to Bob. My name is Bob Goff. I'm the secretary of the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, Intertribal COO. We're one of the co-chairs of the first Native Peoples, Native Homeland's Climate Workshop back in the 90s through USGCRP and we've been involved in climate issues for some time. I'd like to ask how many people here are here with a connection to climate and adaptation? Just to show you. How many people here with some connection to the Bayou in Louisiana? Okay, a couple of you. How many people here are under age 20? Thank you. You represent our youth. Half of our populations are under 20 years old in Indian country today. All the rest of you are elders. You're on the elders side of the line. Welcome. So there's a lot that we have to do to help that coming generation because they're the ones going to be bearing the brunt of what this is all about. I'm just going to take a couple of moments here and get into a context and then we can get a conversation going. The context of what's going on here in the Bayou in Louisiana. Worldwide indigenous peoples are the first and worst hit with the impacts of climate change because subsistence culture is based on intact habitats and climate change is disrupting habitats. Now, I realize it's a risk coming all the way to Congress and mentioning that C word. So usually when we talk about it, we talk about weather extremes because adaptation to weather extremes is basically the same kinds of things you've got to do. It's not the mitigation, but it's how you're going to cope with it, how we're going to live with it. And for all of my world travels and U.S. travels, I have not met one weather denier. I don't see any here. You're all experts. You've all got stories. You've seen records. You've been engaged in this. That gets the conversation past denial and into what are we going to do about it? Now, there's not a lot of communities as communities looking to see what we can do about it. We work with folks in the Pacific. Those islands are getting inundated with salt water from underneath, ruining vegetation, lapping into the land areas on the islands. We're seeing in Alaska the Corps of Engineers estimates over 100 villages are going to need to relocate due to stormwater surging, permafrost melting, erosion along the rivers and sea levels. Seacoast at the tune of $1.5 million per household was the EIS estimate for relocating villages, whole villages, a tremendously expensive undertaking. Some communities up there have been working on this 15, 20 years. In the Bayou, this community has been working on it for at least 15 years, and they are likely to be the first in the Lower 48, in the mainland, in the Lower 48 as a community to take this problem as a nation, as a group, and look to relocate it. JR just said he personally had to relocate. Most of the evacuations that come with hurricanes and storm surges, it's individuals go someplace as refugees, and they don't always come back. But it's not consciously, deliberately moving as a community, and that's what this community, this tribe is doing, and they're not new to it. They moved as a community, as a tribe in the 1830s from Florida, from the Seminole area, the Everglades, moved along the trail of tears and didn't want any part as a marine-based, fishing-based culture. You really don't want to be in Oklahoma for that kind of culture. So they took a turn consciously as a group, found themselves someplace on the island, back right after Lewis and Clark had come through and the Louisiana Purchase had set that up, and have been there for the last 200 years. And now, once again, without federal recognition as an American Indian tribe, their state recognized, but they have been behaving as a community and as a tribe for over 200 years, and now they're called upon again to do that. And in so doing, they're trying to get the best of 21st century expertise, advice, looking at how do you rebuild or maintain a marine economy when you move maybe north of Highway 10 in Louisiana? How do you keep that orientation going? I mean, these folks have been hit. We're meeting today on the fifth anniversary of BP Deep Horizon spill. We're not here today to look back. We're here today to look 100 years forward, seven generations forward, to see how this community can continue to being viable and being, maintaining their culture and maintaining a life way and values for their young people. So we're looking at, what are the renewable energy opportunities maybe for building new housing development, very energy efficient homes? What kind of work can we do around that? We've talked about jobs on the mainland that are associated with the devastation that more and frequent and more intense storms are likely to bring. What if this community got engaged in, you know, tree limb removal after the storm and land filled all of that back out on the islands, back out in the bayous, start really being very proactive in an environmental kind of way as well. There are facing issues when the sea level rises or the land falls as another popular notion has it. All the extraction of oil and gas from that gulf has caused the land to sink while at the same time the sea level is rising. So they're getting hit with both ends of that very dramatic story and trying to make the best of it. They're looking at maybe, if you could collect derelict hulls and use them as incubators for marine life to give those small critters an extra month, a couple of weeks, extra time to grow, get strong, deal with predation and repopulate, re-vegetate, rejuvenize those waters. Looking at technology of putting mushroom, oyster mushrooms in to detoxify the petroleum pollution that they're dealing with. Finding ways of keeping that habitat, being good to it. The same way that habitat's been good to them for the last 200 years. So all of this is what's in play and I just wanted to put that out there so that you can see this in that larger indigenous picture of how communities are looking to address that. We don't see that a lot throughout the rest of the country but these guys are not going to be climate refugees. These folks are scouts. They're indigenous scouts for a new way in the 21st century to be able to thrive with culture and values and dignity intact. Thank you. Thank you, Bob, for that. You know, Bob mentioned, it's really a conglomeration of factors that's happening here. We do acknowledge it's the fifth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster but really the disaster we're talking about here is a continuous, immense amount of land loss that is occurring in Louisiana. Land that was supposed to be lost 20 years from now was lost 10 years ago. A U.S. Geological Survey, if you look at a map, it's already outdated by the time they drew it. You cannot keep up with it. And so this is happening to many communities across coastal Louisiana, across the Gulf, as well as other parts of the country. Chief Albert's community, as Bob said, being one of the few that is really taking a proactive approach and coming up with their own solutions. They've been doing so for 15 years. They've been cut out of hurricane protection systems and so have really looked at their own initiatives and what they can do together as a community, as a tribe, and make sure that they do it with dignity and they do it to maintain their cultural sovereignty and heritage as they move forward. And so just to highlight a few things, as Chief Albert and the Tribal Council and other members of the tribe has been working over the last two decades, they've been working at this from really the local up to the international level. They've met, as you can see, with the United Nations at the United Nations Indigenous Forum, spoke with the United Nations Repertory for Human Rights. They've talked with, you know, across the agencies, the EPA, TANOA, working at the local level with the parish equivalent to a county level and across many NGOs and a lot of universities as well. They've also created a lot of partnerships and formed a lot of viable supporters along the way. And by doing this and by forming these various partnerships with academic institutions, with agencies, what they've done also is partnering together with these communities to write a number of grant proposals to really put together a relocation plan, that's a big broad spectrum. You have a lot of components there because at the rate it's not just about building houses and moving people into them. This is about bringing an entire community back together to maintain social networks, to reinvigorate the culture, and how do you do that with dignity in place and maintaining their rights. And so they've pieced together many different components and looked at it, you know, at a microcosm scope, what is it that we need to do to make sure all these pieces come together. So as you can see, they're looking at many different angles reaching out across the table to a lot of different agencies, supporters, advocates, working with them to look at the different components that are necessary to move forward. And in doing this, they've also been heavily engaged. Chief Alberts Tribe is one of the ones who's really been a connector to where we are today in this conversation. They were part of an initiative that put forward a recommendation to, as Carol mentioned, state, local, tribal leaders, Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience. Because of Chief Alberts' words and what his community is doing, a recommendation went to the Task Force talking directly about climate migration. And there are conversations going on last week on the Hill, this week, and I believe next week as well, directly related to these recommendations. This was also put forward in the Bicameral Task Force report in 2013. So this is happening across the board and Chief Alberts and his tribe has been really one of the main voices coming through that. So you often, you know, I know a lot of folks in this room see those reports, see the outcomes. These are the folks and the voices behind why it's gotten to that point. So just a little bit of a broader scope as to what they've been doing to connect this for the rest of the country as well and for all the communities that are facing these issues. But obviously, there's a lot that needs to be done between today and when eventually we do have a legislative action. So really, what Chief Alberts' community is looking at doing is being an exemplar model a teaching community that says, we're ready to do this now. We have a plan in place reaching across for support, for partnerships, let us engage together so we can also learn how this process works, right? This is something, relocation, if you decide when that water comes, it's too late to make that decision that waters on you, as JR mentioned. And so one of the key things, like Chief Alberts is doing in some other communities across the country is saying we need that plan in place and we need to act now because once that water comes, it's too late, we're scattered and our culture's been lost. And to really maintain that viability. So he's looking for folks to partner with them really at this moment to say, what can we do now today to work with us, support us in this effort, but not just for the community, for agencies, for their partners to say how can we learn about these different processes because this is a very long process to make happen. And so looking at who you work with, what are your components, how do you feed into this process and what could be learned for other communities facing these issues so we can do it in an efficient, respectful manner. And if JR wants to speak at all to some of, really, you know, what the community urgency right now. The tribe has about 650 members total, but, and actually I'll give a plug for the film, it talks, if you see the whole film, it talks more about the specific populations, but for example on the island, there was about, up to 2002, there was about 325 people, about 78 homes. 2002, you had Hurricane Lily, 2005, you have Katrina, Rita, 2008, you have Gustav Eich, then you have Lee, then you have Isaac, today there's about 25 homes. So even just in the last 10 years, you've lost two thirds of the people that were there as recent as 2002. With Bob said earlier, I'm sorry, with Bob said earlier about the community, we're trying to keep the community together, is our main goal, is we want to keep our tribe in one place, one area, to get it back together. And the road's going to erode, we know that for a fact that it's going to go. It's just a matter of time when it's going to happen, and the people that's there now, they don't want to leave, they don't want to go, but they know they'll have to go one day. So what the chief is trying to do is get everyone back together as a community like it used to be. That's his goal. And whatever help we could get, whatever agency we could get in contact with for the help to have this relocation happen, I know the chief would be very elated. So I think we have some time. Bob, did you have any last comments? Thank you. By way of background, I'm Irish on my dad's side and Lenape on my mom's side. And they're the people who lived in Lower Manhattan, New Jersey, Delaware, the Delaware tribe. We left from New Jersey as a tribe after the French and Indian War, because we were the allies with the French. A lot of the folks ended up down in Cherokee in Oklahoma, where these guys were headed. Our folks went up to Canada, and individuals came back, my family members as individuals came back, and we had a tribal tribe. So we had tribal members back in our homeland, where we fished, hunted, gathered, crabbed, clammed, all of that stuff. I grew up doing that until the 60s, when the pollution that came from oil refining in Jersey polluted the waters, you couldn't do it. But I tell you that because after 200 years, people could go back to a homeland that's still there. We're now working with the community. Their homeland is disappearing underneath their feet. They've got no place for that last 200 years to go back to if the rise of sea level continues the way we're seeing it happen. So it's an extraordinary spiritual blow, as well as historical and economic and political and all of those kinds of things, social. I just wanted to put that out there, that we're with people who are seeing things that most of us have never had to even imagine, and it's happening right now. It's happening right now here in the lower 48. So I sort of want to underscore all the good work that's been done, not only by Albert, but Chief Albert and the various groups working with the administration through the Climate Task Force work that the state and local and tribal governments were involved in. This is the opportunity for us to really look, not as the canary in the mine, but again as the navigators for the 21st century for community. So I just wanted to put that on the table. I think with that, I think we'll open it up for any questions or comments that folks have. Mike McCracken from the Climate District. Is there any coordination or effort by the state to try and do something south of New Orleans? I mean, presumably they're going to try not to withdraw from the New Orleans and move it, but to protect it. And the protection has always been the delta and the mangroves to the south of New Orleans to protect it from the storm surge and the high winds. And so if the people south of New Orleans are having to retreat and relocate and move, what does that mean for New Orleans? And what if anything are they doing to sort of think about preserving some of that, what used to be called the shock absorber for storms south of New Orleans? So the Louisiana's Coastal Protection Restoration Authority, they do have a master plan, a coastal master plan looking ahead to 2050. And if you look at that coastal master plan, basically that is the outline for all of the restoration efforts that'll be taking place in the state, both proposed and ongoing right now. If you look at the maps of that plan, it shows that by 2050, the aisle will be completely gone if there's no restoration activities south of it. And at the current rate of land loss, coastal Louisiana is losing greater amount of land at a rate faster than anywhere else in the world in combination of rising sea levels along with the subsidence. So you have a greatest rate of relative sea level rise worldwide. One and a half football fields an hour is disappearing. So one can, yeah, as we saw in the maps here, you can see even that land loss right from 1940 until today. And so one of the issues you can imagine then that this is going to happen much sooner than 2050. And if you look at that map, there is a distinct red line that shows you where the restoration efforts are going to save and what's not going to be saved. Il de Jean Charles is south of that line. It's one of the only places south of that line. It was originally north of that. It was originally part of that. It was deemed not worth saving. And so it's now south of that line. So there are restoration activities going on. However, when those decisions were made, the CPRA spoke with oil and gas. They spoke with big aquaculture industry. They spoke with big navigation. They did not consult communities. There were public hearings held after the master plan was drafted. So yes, there is an enormous amount of activity going on that is not going to help communities like Il de Jean Charles. So that is one, yeah. So there is some things going on south of there. But Il de Jean Charles is not included in that plan. So Julie or Bob or JR, so because that has been specifically excluded from these restoration plans, what does this state say then in terms of what's the status as far as looking for land relocation possibilities? What's happening on that front? The chief has been looking into different properties and he's got a plan. He's got a plan. He just needs the funding to go along with the plan. Yeah, he's got a master plan to relocate the group, put them all together, bring houses in, do solar panels and all that energy efficiency who wants to do all the houses the same way. But he does have a plan in place. He just needs to help to get it going. And just to add to that one issue, there are options for individual buyouts and relocation. But that's what's been happening, right? Like JR said, other family members have had to relocate individually. What Chief Albert and Il de Jean Charles is about is community. So there is an individual option and what that does is further tear the community apart. And so this is about keeping that community together and bringing back the people who have already been forced to relocate, bringing them back into that cohesive unit to really maintain their cultural sovereignty as they move forward. Well, I was just curious about the interaction in terms of the state with response to this whole plan and everything because as Bob was also saying, as you look at Alaska native villages as well, that there are whole communities that are going to need to relocate. And in terms of looking at this as an exemplar, hopefully what the plans are could be replicated other places in terms of communities being able to together move and to do it all as one. I was just curious then in terms of if you could talk a little bit about interaction among some of these other groups and whether people are really banding together. Actually, I'm glad you raised that because one of the real significant partnerships that has occurred is with Chief Albert and communities in Alaska with folks like the leaders of New Talk in Alaska and Kivalina, Alaska. They've really formed strong alliances and partnerships and working together to uncover lessons learned. These communities have been going through it for a generation themselves and they've come across a lot of obstacles and hiccups along the way and so now what they're looking at is what are the opportunities that we have. Obviously you're working within different local contexts with different local and state governments but there's a greater issue and a lot of similarities to be shared. And Ilda Jean Charles has worked quite closely with local municipality level working on some small projects and so working within with their local government. However, unfortunately it seemed too little too late and so the number one choice for communities is to stay but in this case they've deemed that really the institute adaptation is no longer viable and so to keep that community together that the relocation is the best path forward. And based upon what you all said, time is not our friend here. Carol, excellent question and again thank you for allowing this forum to happen here especially in the capital, especially where the buzzword of resilience and resilient communities and there's funding opportunities and all that. We know scientifically communities, people as a community can be far more resilient than individuals as individual persons. You need those bonds, you need that strong intertie and this coming together. This is an example and what you folks here in our nation's lawmaking center need to do is put a filter in your mind, in your head as you're working and see how do the laws we have make resilience, make sustainability illegal. We need to legalize sustainability, we need to legalize resilience. Our rules, our laws are not really set to do that. We have all sorts of rights for government and all sorts of rights for individuals. Indigenous peoples understand they not only have unalienable rights but they have unalienable responsibilities and that's to their self, their family, their kinship and to their place, to their planet. So here's an opportunity where as you're looking over legislation and whatnot start thinking, does this help communities rather than just provide special opportunities for special individuals? Someone pointed out to us yesterday, we did a little session on the other side of town. They said, you know the Occupy and the 1% and all the consciousness changing? When you look at the planet, human beings, a species, we're the 1% on the planet and we've got the swing vote as to how this is going to turn out for us. So let's not make it more difficult with old mindsets. Let's see if we can't bring a new mindset to the changes and to the opportunities we need to build and help nourish our communities become resilient, legalize sustainability, legalize resilience, don't make it obstacles, find ways through those waters and find ways that we can actually bring some very positive because again, I grew up in New Jersey. We are now at Union Beach building houses that look just like the ones on the bayou. They're up on stilts. People had to do that because the no dunes, that water from Sandy came in and wiped out good chunks of those communities along the sea coast. It's happened in the wealthiest part of our nation. It's happening in the poorest parts of our nation. We're all going to be affected. My dear friend Winona LaDuke says, it doesn't matter what boat you came over on, we're all in the same boat now. So I appreciate that. You know, what they do, the people get together and put it all back. They don't move. They stay there. The kids go to school on the back of a charter boat. The people go to store on the charter boat. The charter boat captains don't make money. And in a little while, everything gets back together again. And it's the same as before. Now, they need the federal government to put the dunes back. And they need the state to rebuild the bridges. But in a little while, the whole community is back the way it was before. And they don't have to move. Now, that's a comment that I'm making. Hello. My name is Denise Pollack. And I am a member of the village of Shishmarath in Alaska. And I just want to thank you all for coming today and presenting. I really appreciate your stories, especially because I understand in many ways what this tribe in Louisiana is going through. And I'm also very appreciative that you brought up what's going on in Alaska because a lot of Alaska native villages are basing this reality. So Shishmarath is an island in the Bering Strait's region. And it's predicted to be gone within the next 10 to 15 years. And the thing you need to understand about Shishmarath is that within my community, more than half of the population relies on subsistence activities for their livelihood. And so the idea of relocating to a city, which is what a lot of agencies would love for us to do because it's the least expensive, would crumble our culture. It would significantly change our identity. And another thing that people need to understand about the realities in Alaska native villages is that our community voted to stay dry, which means we don't allow alcohol in our village. And so you need to understand the sociocultural impacts of relocation. My nieces and nephews, they live in our village. They live in a place where our culture is sacred. And if we move or we relocate individually into cities, it completely changes who we are as a people. So, yeah, I just wanted to bring in my perspective on what's going on in Alaska. And I really appreciate Bob bringing up the fact that we need to empower communities, not individuals. We need to empower communities because all of our strength is in our communities. Thank you. Miigwetch. Any other questions or comments? Go ahead, Mike. Well, let me ask one more. What is happening to the Cajun communities south of New Orleans in the Delta area? What is happening to the Cajun community as well? I mean, they're another community of people in our region. Are they experiencing a similar situation? Yeah, I mean, there's many long-dwelling communities in coastal Louisiana, not just indigenous Cajuns being one. There's the Elenios. It's really a melting pot if you want to talk about a melting pot. And so many communities who have been there for generations and generations. You know, it's interesting what happened before you had, you know, the Cajuns moving down. But then, as JR talked about a bit in the history, and Bob did, the indigenous communities really to survive and not have to go to Oklahoma moved to the most southern deemed uninhabitable parts, right? And so what you actually have now is something indigenous communities looking to now jump back over and moving back up north. And when you talked about earlier kind of this shock zone being gone, so what was once all this land south, the communities like Yildiz and Charles have now become that shock zone. And so it isn't just the tribal communities, they are some of the ones that are the most far south because when you look at some of the socio-historical processes of what pushed them there. But I think I'm guessing you're looking at some of the communities directly south of New Orleans, places like Venice, Boris, you know, that are other fishing communities and are, you know, in places like Grand Isle. And they're also, you know, needing to have these conversations and facing some similar issues. But because of the very unique environment of Yildiz and Charles where it was really surrounded by so much marshland and it had so much infrastructure from the oil and gas companies just be cut right through it, the intensity of the land loss around Yildiz and Charles is so extreme and it is a different intensity even than some other parts of coastal Louisiana. But it is happening across all southeast coastal Louisiana so you go directly south of New Orleans, communities there facing some of the very same issues. And that's why what Yildiz and Charles is proposing can really be used as that exemplar model for what other communities are going to be facing as well. It's not just about Yildiz and Charles, but they are one of the ones with a plan in place right now. Yeah. Well, he's composing maybe another thought. I wanted to just say there's a very interesting coincidence. We didn't plan this, but as I understand it, there will be hearings in two days on federal acknowledgement process. And it's one of those federal actions that the community has been involved in for decades. And I just find it ironic that a group that moved as a group in the 1830s is still moving as a group, but there's somehow we don't recognize them as having been a group for that entire period of time. We need to be able to look at that and find ways to aid all of the communities with whatever opportunities we have, and I know there's a legislatively or administratively and the like. So just a little piece of education, not lobbying. And Bob, do you want to explain why the federal acknowledgement then? And should that not open up other avenues of support in terms of the master plan that Chief Albert has been developing? I would presume that that would be... Right. If you're a federally recognized tribe with a relation, an ongoing relationship with the federal government, you can then start talking about, well, how about a land swap? Would you like our island or what's left of it for a little bit of solid land that you've got in a national park somewhere or some other federal agency that's holding onto it? The opportunities for even to get surplus property become a viable alternative for building a new economy for a tribal community. They're not necessarily looking at the next casino on the water. They're looking for a viable homeland for the next seven generations. So just bear that in mind if that's something that crosses your desk. Thank you. But one thing... I mean, so it does open up opportunities, but until that recognition comes, they can still approach us as a community. Right? And so many of the grants that were shown earlier, while they may not qualify as a federally recognized tribe, they qualify as a community like any other community in the U.S. can do. And so they can approach this as doing this and applying for things as a community. So that's one big approach that they've been taking. And also, in relation to what Bob said a bit, it's also about part of the plan is also working to restore what is left of the island because this is, as Jarrah talked about, this is ancestral land. This is their homeland, it's been their homeland where they were forced to, but it's become their new homeland. Right. And it's also not just because it becomes uninhabitable does not mean it's a place to just go away entirely. And so it's also they are taking actions to try to restore what is left. So it still maintains a place that people could have something to go back to at least for the foreseeable near future and do what they can to restore, especially while people are still living there. Because while many have relocated, there are still some families who are still living there today with a number of children as we saw in the film clip. I want to bring up something involving what I said before. The people that I'm talking about in North Carolina, they're different than the Indians. The Indians were indigenous. The North Carolinian people, they were pirates. That's where in North Carolina the coastal people came from as pirates. What they did was they went out and trapped boats and captured the boats and stole all the stuff off the boats. And those are the people that make up, you know, the fishermen now. They're tough people, the ones that are left. And so when the storm hits, first of all, there's a lot more money down there because it's a lot of resources. And those people, they don't move. They build. And I'm not saying it's any different than your people, but that's the way it is. That's the way it is. Just bring that up. Piracy is an economic development strategy. I kind of like that. It worked for a long time, right? And I think, as you mentioned, that there's a lot of state and federal help that has gone into that. So, okay, there was a question or comment over here. Hi, my name is Sean Nevins. I'm a journalist. And this one's for Bob. You proposed a question to us and you said, how do laws make sustainability illegal? And I think you have something specific in mind. And I wonder if you could just let us know what you are thinking specifically. Thank you. Yeah, most of it are local laws, building codes, and all sorts of things. But FEMA, as an example of an agency example, has some very well-crafted and understood regulation about rebuilding in flood zones and things like that. And we've got to be mindful of those issues. But at the same time, aid that would come to a community that's already had their properties devalued and devastated, and then you get a fraction of what it's worth if you're able to trade it out in some form or other really handicap a community trying to relocate and doing something like that. We've run into it with, we're looking at straw bale buildings in the Great Plains, and a lot of insurance companies aren't quite sure how you handle that. They don't have codes, a lot of building codes for things like that. And you talk about it as simply insulation, and you're able to move forward. But we find a lot of what we've done in the past, we've reified into law and code, and then it gets in the way of innovation towards the future. So I may be happy to talk to you offline on other kinds of examples. But wastewater, what we handle with wastewater, every time you flush, you pollute and make a whole lot of freshwater blackwater with every flush. And then you have to treat all of that blackwater at a very large expense, versus if you could find ways of just focusing that into gray and moving that separately. It's going to cost us in our infrastructure, in our systems, because we've designed it in a period of abundance. We've designed it in a period of great volumes of water, especially in the Great Plains. We are now moving historically into what's likely to be maybe up to a century of drought, and that's under natural variation. We don't even talk about climate change. We look at the drought in the West. We see these century and a half cycles, wet with little dry spots, little droughts, then long, dry periods of little wet spots. The entire settlement of the Great Plains where their water comes from, Mississippi and over the Missouri, that water comes from those headwaters. That water for the last century and a half has been relatively abundant, wet. But we know the last 2,000 years, you go back, we've had century and a half of drought. We've lived the last century and a half all of the Euro-American settlement of the Northern Great Plains happened during the wet period. That's what we conceive of as normal. We will get back to normal. We legislate around that. We build codes around that understanding of normal, and any 5, 6 generation rancher will tell you, it's tough, we get droughts, but we come back to normal. We're heading to the other half of the big normal. And we're not ready for that. We're not ready for that at all. And California is the canary in the mine on that question for water. So we're seeing this all over the country. It's not just in Louisiana. But you look, 7,000 rivers in the heartland of this country end up going through New Orleans. And not depositing any land in the Delta. No soil in the Delta. That's going right on out. So we've really got to be looking and thinking about the practices we've been engaged in and how we might adjust our sights for this coming century. Hi, thank you all for your great presentations. I was just wondering, I had an understanding that some of the oil and gas operations in the marshlands outside of the Isle de Jean Charles were part of what caused rising seas to really deteriorate and erode the land of the island. And I was wondering if there has been any attempt to seek reparations from these oil and gas companies for the land loss that they in part maybe contributed to. So in a little bit broader sense for Coastal Louisiana, I don't know if you've seen for East New Orleans Parish initiated a suit, the Levy Board, against 97 oil and gas companies that has essentially been deemed, it's stuck in the court system now. But essentially, Governor Jindal and others have declared that you cannot sue an oil and gas company in the state of Louisiana. And so communities like Isle de Jean Charles and others in other coastal parishes, it's really caught up in litigation and hard to say what'll come of it. But yeah, I'll leave it at that. Great. I wanted to ask just one final one, although you may have kind of answered it in certain ways, was in terms of telling your story in different venues, what you are in the process of doing, what are the things that you want, that if you're wildly successful, what do you want people to do? What are the action points say for the rest of us? What do you want us to do? What do you want to leave us with in terms of what we should do? Support our effort. That's number one. And whoever you can talk to to help us out, that'd be great. Let me say this. We don't want to move. And we don't have any plans on moving, but we have a plan if we have to move, but right now, people don't want to go. That's their home. I mean, they're not pirates, they're Native Americans, and they want to stay where they are. They want to keep what they have. And they work hard. Their commercial fishing town is where they are. Thanks. And I also want to point out, I know folks saw when they were coming in, there is a brochure as well as a two-page front and back plan. The Lijian Trials Relocation Plan. And if you look at this plan, you can look at some of the different components. Nathan has them for you to pick up as well. You'll see the different components of the vision and development of this plan. And I know many folks here work for representatives who sit on committees who work with different agencies. And each of those agencies in your committees, you have a mission of what you need to accomplish in that year, in that five-year period, what have you. And so you can actually look at some of these components and see that they fit in to some of the committees, to certain agencies, and you see what's slotted and where. And one of the things about this is really because there has been so much effort, we showed in our last slide all of the partnerships of so many academics, of agency representatives, of NGOs, of activists coming together to create this plan that, as Bob talked about some of the examples before, a lot of this is ready to go with support. And so it's looking at who you're working with, what committees they're on, what agencies they work for, and which components you could support and partner in. But also looking, this is to gain on your end as well because this is also, as we talked about, a teaching model for what can be done for other opportunities. So this is a process that you can become involved in and learn how it works. So while supporting the community, it's also supportive to the agencies back in return to see what works, what can we do more effectively, efficiently, how can we work with communities in this capacity and how we can move forward to all the other communities that are going to be facing this issue as well. So please take the message back to your committees and agencies when you leave this room. So that essentially we all have homework to look at what's appropriate in terms of different places that can all then help contribute to the plan which can also be a model for all sorts of other communities that are having to grapple with these really fundamental challenges. So I want to thank you all for coming and Julie, JR, Bob, thank you so, so much for helping us lead us through this whole discussion. Incredible, incredible story. And I also want to say thank you very much to Rebecca. And do you want to just tell us about if people are interested in seeing the whole film, how does one go about that? We are under review to, we're being considered for a PBS broadcast so that we'll know probably in the next couple of months. But we will have DVDs actually in about a month. It's can'tstopthewater.com for more information. Thank you. Okay, great. Thank you very, very much. So thank you. I just want to add just as part of that homework assignment. We hope that everyone here signed in and please before you leave this room come talk to us and let us know the different components that you think that you'd be interested in that you could support on and that you'd want to be part of. So if you already have those in your mind please don't run out of the room and come see us before you leave. That sounds like also think about everything through a sustainability and a resilience lens so that we ask ourselves the questions before anything, before we sort of do anything legislatively so that we solve problems rather than create new ones, right? And Carol, I want to thank you for the selection of this room. I just started looking at the photographs on the wall and they're from the Curtis era. Yes. It was documenting the vanishing Americans. Well, they haven't vanished. They've gotten stronger and they've become more resilient and they plan on being here for a long time. Let's follow their lead. Thank you. And go ahead, Jair. I want to thank you all for coming and listening to the story. Thank you. Thank you. Well, and there's a lot more. And please do tell Chief Albert how sorry we are that he was not able to join us today but hopefully another time and I just hope that his family is okay. He'll definitely hear about it. All right. Thank you. Terrific. Thank you all very, very much. Thank you.