Katrina, Rita and the Houma: A Nation in Recovery

By: Victor Merina

HOUMA, La.—Up the bayou. Down the bayou. Across the bayou.

For a visitor to this stretch of Louisiana, those are the directions you quickly learn while traveling the waterways and roadways of this southeastern region of this Southern state.
For those at home in the bayou, no weathervane is needed to guide you. No compass readings are required. There is the water's landmark, the signpost of the bayou to tell you which way to drive, which way to travel.

Louisiana may be best known as the home of Mardi Gras and the football Saints, as a stirring pot of jazz and blues and zesty cuisine. Thanks to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it may forever be the memory stick for disaster, for images of broken levees and a stifling Superdome, and for tales of heroism and despair in now-familiar places like the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

But it is also Indian Country, land of the mostly forgotten. It is home to the United Houma Nation, nearly half of whose members were displaced up and down the bayou, their homes battered by hurricane winds or flooded by avalanches of water.

"Our people suffered a lot, and many people don't know that," said Brenda Dardar Robichaux, principal chief of the Houma Nation. "We're still recovering, and it's been a slow process."

With 17,000 enrolled members, the Houma constitute the largest tribe in Louisiana. Over the centuries, they have found themselves moving farther down the bayou, historically pressed by the encroachment of European and American newcomers whose appetite for land pushed them on their southward migration and whose later discoveries of oil and gas made the Natives vulnerable to land grabs.

There's more here: http://www.reznetnews.org/article/feature-article/katrina%2C-rita-and-houma%3A-nation-recovery