Transcript by Greta Gerstener

Rachel: South Louisiana. We sit on the edge of the Gulf watching the waters rise, getting hotter, wetter, colder, and drier. In the blink of an eye, our streets flood so badly we can't get to school or work, and we've lost another football field's worth of wetlands. But the exciting news is that everywhere you look, we are adapting. Figuring out how to rise with the water, plan better, and listen to nature.
I'm your host, Rachel Nederveld, and this is No Matter the Water, a series of interviews with neighbors across the region who are figuring out how to live with our unpredictable weather.
Unless you live in a coastal town, it can be hard to grasp that homes, roads, and graveyards are literally disappearing into the Gulf. The residents of these coastal communities, called migrating communities. Are slowly or quickly being forced north because of various changes in nature and some people are keeping one foot on the coast while planting the other foot on higher ground.

Monique: Post Hurricane Katrina, my familyÕs land in St. Bernard was under 11 feet of water when the surge came in. And I think that, I was just like, this is done. We're not gonna be able to be here. I really felt that way, that there was something that died. I really was an advocate for like, okay, friends, let's all buy some land north of I-10. Okay, family. Let's figure out a safe place for us all to go to, we gotta kind of like cut our losses. And the older I get, the more I recognize that we have a right to remain and reclaim. I need to have a foot in the sinking swamp over here. I don't wanna just go because this is home.

My name's Monique Verdin and we are here in St. Landry Parish in Southwest, Louisiana.

Rachel: Monique, a multidisciplinary artist, is from an area a few hours Southeast of where we are now.


Monique: Like everybody in South Louisiana, we're very mixed people. My mom's people have been here since early. You know, they're like came over with Bienville. My father's side is my indigenous side and Houma Creole

Rachel:. And just to be clear, when she talks about her Houma relatives, she's talking about The United Houma Nation, not the town.

Monique: My grandparents migrated to St. Bernard from Terrebonne and Lafourche Parish in the 1940s. They would come over to St. Bernard in the wintertime and worked as trappers, trapping mink and muskrat and otter. And then in the mid forties, my grandmother, she said, all right, you know, we're either staying in St. Bernard or we're going home, I'm not going back and forth anymore. And that's when a small group of relatives migrated to St. Bernard and slowly bought land there. And that was at a time when my Houma relatives were denied the right to an education because they were considered Native and Indian. So that hop across the river, which as a crow flies is not that far, but in the 1940s and 1950s, that move across the river allowed them to find work, buy land, eventually vote.

Rachel: This is where Monique was born, St. Bernard Parish.

Monique: I am from down the road. That is how people in Eastern St. Bernard Parish identify. That means a certain thing, which is like south of Chalmette but historic St. Bernard is this ridge that follows the Bayou Terre aux Boeufs. So if you think of Louisiana as being a boot shaped state, St. Bernard Parish is the big toe. My grandmother, she grew a big garden every year we would have, you know, tons of fresh vegetables.Our land was sandwiched between other properties that other relatives also had. So in addition to our garden, there were relatives who had gardens. So lots of like food being traded back and forth. You never knew who was gonna stop by with a big bundle of fresh green beans and, and abundance. I mean, tons of like wild hog on the stove and ducks and fish and being at my grandmother's kitchen table and her always at the stove or always preparing wild game, just meticulously fileting fish or scaling them or preparing ducks in the winter time. So that's home, original home. Yeah. My mom says I was conceived there after a summer boat blessing and too much warm draft beer, which I don't think she's making that up.

Rachel: I would assume that.

Monique: after the World's Fair ended in 1984, my mom started making a plan for us to make a move to Pensacola, which is right on the Florida, Alabama line. She had some community there and so we relocated to Pensacola and I spent kindergarten through 12th grade there with her. But every holiday, every summer, every chance I had to go back to Louisiana and to be with my grandmother, who I was very close with, my father's mother Armentine Billeaud Verdin. So yeah, they would make fun of me. I always had my, like my bags packed. I was ready to go and I would get in the car with spring breakers who are making their trip back from Fort Walton or my mom worked at a little small airport, so some people would be flying to New Orleans. She'd be like, oh, do you have an extra seat? My stepdad worked offshore, you know, I'd get in the car with him and my aunt would meet me on the side of the highway and you know, it was like, however I could get back to Louisiana, I was in the car and ready to go or plane or whatever. There was just this freedom to do what you want and to like be barefoot for weeks and not have to comb my hair.
I miss that like, rhythm of life. It was so like simple, uncomplicated, no TV really, you know. Turn the air conditioner on only on Sunday and only 'cause we were going to church, which was the reason why I had to comb my hair, which I hated.
I'm sorry, I'm, it's like, um, when Katrina washed in, it really, it just like flipped life upside down. And you know, my grandmother was able to go back to her land and some of the other elders were, but all the elders have passed at this point, pretty much. And I think that like community and, you know, collective survival, the sharing of the labor and like the abundance, it just doesn't exist anymore, in that way.
Saint Bernard is incredibly vulnerable, I can walk to the back of our property and if I could get on a ladder, I can see the Chalmette Loop, which is this massive levy wall that's 19 feet or more in some places. Tall, and that doesn't make me feel very safe, you know.

Rachel: Monique became determined to find land on higher ground, land that could be a refuge for her and her community, and where she could rebuild that lost sense of collective survival. One of Monique's biggest inspirations was a woman named Rosalie Courteau.

Monique: A matriarchal Leader of the Homa Nation who was advised to purchase Swamp Lands, and this was when the swamp acts were happening

Rachel: Before the 1850s swampland in Louisiana was public property, but the Swamp Acts changed that and allowed people to buy swamp land, turning it from public to private.

Monique: And so Rosalie purchased a large track of land on this kind of edge of Terrebonne and Lafourche Parish for her people, is the story that we've always heard.

Rachel: How did she influence you with this, this project?

Monique: Sitting at my grandmother's kitchen table and hearing these stories of Rosalie Courteau, which she did not know personally, but this oral history of this. Strong woman who had the information, right? She had been advised to do this and also had been up against this incredible oppression and being pushed off of the higher grounds and adapting. I think that, that kind of courage at a time when women did not have much power or authority, and yet she carved a path for people to have a place to call home. Yeah, that's incredibly inspiring. Rosalie did what she could do in her lifetime and we've inherited, you know, all of these waves and decisions that many of our relatives had no idea were happening. No idea what the swamp acts really would mean in the long term and yet here we are.

Rachel: Fast forward to 2020, COVID hit, and Monique was still looking for land.

Monique: I had started to help support network of indigenous gardeners in the Gulf South, Okla Hina Ikhish Holo, which means the people of the Sacred Medicine Trail. And we had been talking a lot about wanting land that was out of vulnerable territories that people and plants could retreat to. So I had come up to visit Arnaudville and my dear friend George Marks was there and I said, "George, you know, I'm working with these indigenous gardeners and we're looking for some landÓ and he said, Òget in the car.Ó And he drove me straight here and, and he was like, I think this is it, I think this is it. You've just been looking for like 15 years or so, I think we found it. So I ended up taking out a personal loan to acquire the property.

Rachel: Monique and I are talking in which she calls the little big house. An old one bedroom cottage under renovation. It sits on an opening of a property northeast of Lafayette and St. Landry Parish in an area called Prairie Des Femmes.

Monique: Which means Women's prairie. There are many different stories of this place. One is that this is a place where indigenous women and children were found when Colonial settlers came into the territory and that this was a place of abundant wild foods. And another story is that this is the place where black bears would come to give birth to their young, so yeah,

Rachel: Both cool.

Monique: Yeah. And there was something affirming about that where it was like, oh, right, we're mostly femme gardeners and we're, we're going to the Woman's Prairie, gonna make a home here.

Rachel: Were there important characteristics you were looking for when you were buying land or like looking for the land?

Monique: No. I mean, I was looking for, I was looking for land that was north of I-10. That was far enough away to be out of storm surge and close enough to the coast that people could get home soon, and it felt like we just needed a place to land.

Rachel: When you talk about people having, knowing that this is a safe place to come, who are you talking about?

Monique: I'm talking about my cousins who are in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parish, specifically relatives that are from Point-Aux-Chenes. There's a clan of VerdinÕs, multi-generational cousins, and also some of my cousins who are from the community of Grandbois, which is between Terrebonne and Lafourche Parish. And then I also think about the Gardeners Network and some of those folks who are based out of the city of New Orleans and some of our friends and mutual aid folks that we've been working with.

Rachel: What was the turning point for you in this project? Like this is something that has to happen.

Monique: I think that it really was having courage in the midst of COVID that after the world shut down, and similarly to when a hurricane rolls in, you start thinking about what really matters. Having water and shelter becomes forefronted as opposed to being in the background. And I think the courage of having other individuals who were like, yes, we need this, really put some wind behind the sails and made me have less fear of taking that leap.

Rachel: Monique spends a lot of time on her land in Prairie Des Femmes, but hasn't relocated full time. Like her ancestors, she's back and forth between places.

Monique: I live a lot out of my duffle bag and call many places home, but my home base is in Eastern St. Bernard Parish.

Rachel: On your family's land?

Monique: On my family's land, yes. And I have been spending a lot of time here in Prairie Des Femmes as I'm building out The Little Big House. So I move around a bit, but I'm on the road a lot. And have been adapting to a more migratory lifestyle.

Rachel: It's interesting because you're like, I want one foot in my community and one foot as a migrated person, you know? I would love for you to explain what a migrating community is to you.

Monique: in coastal South Louisiana.
Migrating communities, our communities that are on the move due to conditions in a lot of ways that are way out of our control. And so what I've been seeing in St. Bernard Parish, specifically in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes where I have relationships, is that people who have the resources to make a move or people who are up against the extremes of insurance rates and taxes are making a decision to move to other communities that are on higher grounds that have access to public education or private education. And then in other cases, you have people just moving from outside levy risk reduction. They don't call it levy protection because the Army Corps of Engineers cannot promise protection they can only promise risk reduction. So folks are moving inside the levy because they're able to get cheaper insurance rates by making that hop inside of the risk reduction, whether they're moving two miles up the Bayou or from Houma to Thibodaux or into Mississippi from St. Bernard Parish. This is ongoing and I feel like only increasing, especially as you see more schools and grocery stores and post offices closing at these kind of coastal communities that are, are being left behind.
And I think that my decision to invest in this small little 12 acre plot is maybe in the hopes that others will see that maybe we can retreat and return and maybe we can have relationships in other places. And have community that's north of I-10, and maybe some people will stay and maybe some people will always return home but to know a place where you can evacuate is very different than not knowing where you're gonna go or where you're gonna land, or where you're gonna stop on your way home. And hopefully there are resources like fresh water and electricity that can be provided, even if it's on a really small scale, but that you'll know I can go to Prairie Des Femmes.
I think that as time goes on, the vulnerabilities of rising seas and sinking sediments, of course, will only continue. But I think that the air and water and soil pollution that is invisible and all around us all the time is more of a concern to me now and where my family land in St. Bernard Parishes there has just been an upgrade to a pipeline and knowing that methane leaks from these pipelines all the time and these kind of invisible, yeah, these invisible toxins that are all around us in our air and in our water, and in our soils, that is just as much a concern as the fact that we're losing land at one of the most rapid rates on the planet. I feel like I know how to live on water, I don't know how to live in a toxic environment.

Rachel: As Monique thinks about how to live in our local environment, it brings up a question that comes up a lot down here, and the answer is really personal and different for each of us. Why is it important for you to stay in Louisiana, or why do you stay in Louisiana?

Monique: I don't know. I don't know. I don't see myself being anywhere else, and I don't feel myself. Like, feel like I'm in my body as much as I do here, Louisiana in the rain, I'm like, yeah, that's, this is right, you know? And I really, aside from, you know, my, my brief stay in Pensacola during my early educational years, and the whole time I just longed to like, get back here like deeply in my soul like I just felt this longing for this place. And I don't know, I'm, I'm not sure. I mean, I wish I could be like less connected to it, but I don't know if I have some sort of responsibility, you know, to be here. I've been called to this place at this time for a particular purpose and so much of my life work is trying to understand what this place is and the more I learn about all of these ugly realities. From oil waste pits in my cousin's backyards to, you know, cancer alley. The more I've also been introduced to and up close with this infinite beauty of nature's intelligence that's all around us. And so I think I just wanna honor that kind of whack, but I would rather, I would rather like, I would rather breathe toxic air and be with the people that I love and the place that I love. Then breathe clean air in a perfect place. And I know that maybe that sounds a little mental, but yeah, it's like my family, you know?

Rachel: ?Thank you for listening to this episode of No Matter the Water, which was produced by Rachel Nederveld and Associate Produced by Jillian Godshall.
Production support and story editing by Laine Kaplan Levinson with editing help from Theo Balcomb
Aaron Thomas did the Sound Design & Mix.
Our music is by Richard Revue and Cover Art by MakeMade
Thanks so much to our guest Monique Verdin, and to everyone who has helped make this project possible.
A special shout out to The Current for their support, especially Christiaan Mader and Johanna Divine.
You can learn more about the topics in this episode and hear the rest of the series at nomatterthewater.com
Funding for this project has been provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, South Arts, Acadiana Center for the Arts, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Lafayette Economic Development Authority, the State of Louisiana, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and ArtSpark
No matter the water is a production of Ga De Don and The Current Media.