by Briana Zhuang
Along the vast Louisiana coastline in the American Deep South, saltwater creeps inland, foot by foot, into territory occupied by indigenous tribes. In recent decades, the ocean has swallowed farmland and stolen hunting areas; for the indigenous tribes that rely on these lands to survive, there have been massive consequences.
The United States is now home to its first group of environmental migrants, with the quickening effects of climate change making certain that there will be more. In the coastal Southern state of Louisiana, climate change is dramatically altering the landscape and territory in which many indigenous groups reside. By 2050, scientists predict that rising sea levels will eradicate a portion of Louisiana’s coastline the size of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland. The impending disaster is destroying indigenous peoples’ special connection to their land, affecting their cultural practices, their means of living, and their community cohesion.
Unlike other marginalized groups in the United States, indigenous peoples have a special connection to their ancestral homeland. “When it comes to indigenous rights, there’s always a direct connection between an indigenous population and the land they claim as their homeland,” Professor Darren Zook, a lecturer in human rights at the University of California, Berkeley, explains, “indigenous identity is actually drawn from the land.”
For generations, indigenous populations have relied on their water and land not only as ties to their ancestors, but also to feed and sustain their people. The website of Louisiana’s United Houma Nation features the following quote: “The United Houma Nation today is composed of a very proud and independent people who have close ties to the water and land of their ancestors.” Therefore, when the effects of climate change begin to alter the land, there are drastic effects on the community and culture as well.
In Louisiana, a coastal state, indigenous groups mainly rely on fishing, hunting, and farming to live. With recent and rapid changes in the landscape, two groups in particular have seen their ways of life disrupted with important consequences for tribal sovereignty and cultural preservation.
The United Houma Nation in particular has maintained a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and economy for generations, relying mainly on fishing, hunting, and farming for subsistence. However, recent threats from the climate have affected each of these practices and more. Due to the changing climate, many species have altered their migration patterns, arriving later and later each year and diminishing the window of time in which the Houma people can hunt. Ocean pollution caused by agricultural runoff and oil drilling has furthermore killed or poisoned marine life in the area, diminishing not only the volume of seafood harvested but also the size and health of the individual fish. Similar sources of pollution have also affected the land, with salt water run-offs killing vegetation and forcing the Houma people to limit their farming to raised garden beds.
Another Louisianan tribe, the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native Americans, or IJC Tribe, also zshow how climate change has affected cultural practices and community cohesion. The IJC Tribe have lost over 98 percent of their ancestral homeland since 1950; what was once a beautiful and rich 22,400-acre island has become a 320-acre strip predicted to be fully submerged by 2050. Like the quandary faced by the Houma tribe, rising sea levels, coastal erosion, and coastal flooding, exacerbated by irresponsible oil and gas extraction practices, have destroyed the landscape of the island.
And as the IJC website proclaims, this environmental destruction also has important implications for the cultural practices of the group.
“For our Island people, it is more than simply a place to live. It is the epicenter of our Tribe and traditions. It is where our ancestors survived after being displaced by Indian Removal Act-era policies and where we cultivated what has become a unique part of Louisiana culture.” The website read.
With the dramatic loss of land and involuntary change of lifestyle, many members of the tribe have chosen to resettle elsewhere, leaving their communities and culture for survival. For the remaining tribe members, this outward migration threatens their tribal sovereignty and their ways of life.
Maureen Lichtveld, a professor in environmental health policy at Tulane University, is currently working with the United Houma Nation to research and address these crucial issues posed by the changing climate. Lichtveld cited movement away to be one of the Nation’s primary concerns. “Some members move and some members don’t, creating a destruction of cohesion,” Lichtveld explained. “To some extent they lose touch with what their cultural heritage is.” As members leave, they take with them intangible aspects of their culture and traditions – as forced resettlement due to climate change continues, the displacement will affect the tribes’ ability to retain their culture.
In conversation, “environmental migrant” and “climate refugee” are commonly used to describe these affected peoples. In fact, many news articles use “climate refugee” as the term to define these peoples’ situations. However, in law, these groups fall into an uncertain category. Though they are recognized as people in need of help, they don’t yet have the same types of legal protections as refugees. In fact, neither “environmental migrant” nor “climate refugee” are legally operative terms to define people that have been displaced due to climate change.
The international legal definition of a refugee, stemming from the 1951 UNHCR Refugee Convention, requires some type of identity-based persecution, such as race or religion, to elicit refugee status. Under international statutes, a person cannot be persecuted by the climate, so a “climate refugee” cannot legally claim refugee status.
“By the letter of the law, there’s no such thing as a climate refugee,” Zook explained, “You’d have to either add an Optional Protocol to the Refugee Convention or write a whole new convention.”
Moreover, indigenous groups themselves do not want to be called climate refugees. “They are against being called climate refugees,” Dr. Lichtveld said, “rather, what they want to focus on is the notion of movement.”
Additionally, as Zook clarified, the nature of climate change as an issue, with its widespread and complex causes and effects, renders it unsuitable for a modern legal framework, which is focused on direct attribution of harm.
“Climate change is a wrong but we can’t attribute it to anyone,” Zook said. “We have a peculiar situation where we have a harm done to people, but there is no direct attribution. You have the harm being done on the land, but you don’t have any way for legal recourse.” The legal infrastructure is simply not in place to protect affected groups. Therefore, indigenous tribes affected by climate change have limited resources available to them.
Experts believe that the complexity and severity of the issues at hand elicit the need for innovative policy solutions – with our current trajectory, climate change and its effects on humans will continue to worsen.
Lichtveld suggests a public health framing to combat the effects of climate change on people. “We need, as a country, to develop policies on climate and its effects with public health as the driver, rather than a specific ecological or environmental issue. I think with public health as the driver and prevention as the goal, we will have climate policy that is science-driven, making science work for communities.” By employing a public health framework to address climate issues, the proposed policy will be preventative rather than reactive – helping communities prepare and prevent rather than retroactively respond or play clean-up.
“We need a proactive strategy in identifying the sources of contamination just like we do with other environmental substances and environmental health contaminants,” Lichtveld explains, “we need to identify the sources and address those sources but also have tools for people to be more resilient.”
These two tribes’ stories offer important instances illustrating the specific and devastating effects that climate change has on indigenous tribes. Their connection with their homeland, the pillar of their social, economic, and cultural practices, is at risk of being completely destroyed. Nothing in the existing legal framework, both national or international, offers protections for groups affected or displaced by climate change.
Facing this massive threat, the IJC Tribe poses an important, impending question to government officials and people in power: “If we can be viewed as a disposable people, with our lands left to perish and our way of life with them, who is next?”
Briana Zhuang is a third-year Political Science major and Human Rights minor. She is interested in exploring the intersection between environmental issues and human rights. Her hobbies include boxing (she’s on the Cal Boxing Team!), tutoring kids in flute, listening to music, and knitting.