University of Louisiana Researcher preserves memories of Isle de Jean Charles

[NewsCopy]

The ancestral home of members of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation was once a sprawling, thriving island where self-sufficiency was rooted in growing crops, raising livestock, hunting, fishing and trapping.

Coastal erosion and subsidence, however, has all but wiped out Isle de Jean Charles, which sits 90 miles southwest of New Orleans and about 3 miles off the coast of Terrebonne Parish.

Once roughly 32,000-acres, an area about three-quarters the size of Washington, D.C., Isle de Jean Charles has dwindled to about 300 acres. With the island has gone a home to, at its peak, hundreds of Native Americans.

Four families remain, sharing an existence with a string of abandoned, dilapidated houses clinging to a strip of land as narrow as a quarter mile in spots.

More on this story
LOUISIANA.edu

[NewsCopy]

I would like UL to focus on what Cajuns were doing in 1680.

Claiming the ocean as land.

Here now it would be land reclamation.

From * "The Acadians were the first people in North America to establish their settlements by transforming intertidal zones using the innovative aboiteau technology to take advantage of the fertile salt marshes for agriculture."