07/06/2026
Isle de Jean Charles sits in Terrebonne Parish, about eighty miles southwest of New Orleans, at the southern edge of the Louisiana coast. Or it did. The island that existed in 1955 — roughly five miles long and a quarter mile wide, home to a community of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw people who had lived there for generations — has lost more than ninety percent of its land to coastal erosion, subsidence, and rising water since that decade. What remains is a thin strip of vulnerable ground accessible by a single road that floods in almost any significant storm. The people who built their lives there have been watching their homeland dissolve for sixty years.
The community of Isle de Jean Charles is one of the oldest continuously inhabited Indigenous communities in Louisiana. Their ancestors retreated to the island in the nineteenth century specifically to preserve their way of life and their identity under increasing pressure from the expanding American state. The isolation that once protected them became, over the following century, the condition of their vulnerability. As the wetlands around them eroded — accelerated by oil and gas canal dredging, river management that cut off the sediment replenishment the coast depended on, and the compounding effects of climate change — the water came closer every decade.
In 2016, the community of Isle de Jean Charles received a federal grant of forty-eight million dollars to relocate — the first federally funded climate relocation in American history. The designation drew enormous media attention, and the phrase climate refugees entered wide circulation in coverage of the island. What the coverage often missed was that the community was not unified about leaving. For many residents, particularly elders, the land was not simply a place to live. It was the specific ground that held their identity, their dead, their memory of who they were. Relocation, however necessary, was understood as a continuation of dispossession, not a rescue from it.
Louisiana's coastline is disappearing at one of the fastest rates of land loss on the planet — roughly a football field of land every hour, by some estimates. Isle de Jean Charles is the most visible human story within that catastrophe, but it is not the only one. Communities across Terrebonne, Plaquemines, and St. Bernard parishes live with the same calculus: how long, how much, and what does it mean to leave the only ground your family has ever known.
If your family has roots in Terrebonne Parish, the Isle de Jean Charles community, or the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Nation, your history is one of the most important and least heard in Louisiana. Share your family name or your parish below — this community deserves to be known. 🌿 ⚜️
