French on Shifting Ground

Cultural and Coastal Erosion in South Louisiana

Nathalie Dajko

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496830944
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In French on Shifting Ground: Cultural and Coastal Erosion in South Louisiana, Nathalie Dajko introduces readers to the lower Lafourche Basin, Louisiana, where the land, a language, and a way of life are at risk due to climate change, environmental disaster, and coastal erosion. Louisiana French is endangered all around the state, but in the lower Lafourche Basin the shift to English is accompanied by the equally rapid disappearance of the land on which its speakers live. French on Shifting Ground allows both scholars and the general public to get an overview of how rich and diverse the French language in Louisiana is, and serves as a key reminder that Louisiana serves as a prime repository for Native and heritage languages, ranking among the strongest preservation regions in the southern and eastern US. Nathalie Dajko outlines the development of French in the region, highlighting the features that make it unique in the world and including the first published comparison of the way it is spoken by the local American Indian and Cajun populations. She then weaves together evidence from multiple lines of linguistic research, years of extensive participant observation, and personal narratives from the residents themselves to illustrate the ways in which language—in this case French—is as fundamental to the creation of place as is the physical landscape. It is a story at once scholarly and personal: the loss of the land and the concomitant loss of the language have implications for the academic community as well as for the people whose cultures—and identities—are literally at stake.

Chapter 1

SHIFTING LAND, SHIFTING LANGUAGE

“Quand on a vu l’eau monter, on a se dépêché vite, et on a menu à la place de votage [When we saw the water rising, we hurried and came to the voting place],” Toot Naquin began, cigarette in hand. Outside, neighbors and relatives moved what was left of waterlogged possessions, drywall, and bags of insulation to the edges of their yards. Heaps of debris piled up at the roadside, waiting to be removed. As she talked, Toot periodically looked through the window she was sitting next to, keeping an eye on the cleanup. This was only the second time in her seventy-eight years that she had seen the storm surge from a hurricane push its way far enough up Bayou Pointe au Chien to flood her land; the first had been three years earlier, in 2005, when Hurricane Rita had left three inches of water in the house. Upon seeing the fast-rising floodwaters, Toot and her family—her daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter, and two great-grandchildren—had crossed the street to what had once been a dance hall but now functioned as a polling place during elections; it was a few feet higher than the house.

“L’eau a monté vite [The water rose quickly],” added her son-in-law, taking a break from cutting up debris to join the interview.

“Ouais, elle a monté vite,” she agreed. “Eusse m’a emmené icitte dedans un char, et faullait que je monte avec le walker [They brought me here in a car, and I had to use the walker to come inside].” She paused.

“Dans l’eau [In the water],” her son-in-law reminded her.

“Bon pour me noyer! [Enough to drown me!],” she finished, laughing dryly.

SHIFTING LANGUAGE

Toot’s one-story brick house halfway down Highway 665 in the town of Pointe aux Chênes was built on land her father had bought years earlier because it was high above any point on the bayou that had ever flooded.¹ She spoke to us in her native French, a language she had spoken exclusively before beginning school at the age of six and that she still spoke with anyone who also spoke it. Those people, fewer in number and greater in age with every passing year, included her son-in-law, a native of neighboring Lafourche Parish.² The rest of the family had varying degrees of familiarity with the language. I was there that day with my frequent cointerviewer and local resident (from the nearby town of Robinson Canal), Rocky McKeon, to document on video the destruction to lower Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes following two hurricanes that had hit earlier that month. We spoke to Toot in French in part because it was the language we had always spoken with her but also because we wanted to use the video we were making to stress the cultural loss that went hand in hand with the destruction of the land that we were witnessing.

Source: 1990 and 2000 U.S. Censuses; U.S. Census 2013

French has been spoken in Louisiana for three hundred years, but today it is rapidly giving way to English. Table 1.1 shows the US census numbers for 1990 and 2000 and the 2009–13 American Community Survey estimate. The number of (self-declared) francophones dropped by roughly 62,000 over the first ten-year period and by roughly 72,000 over the ensuing decade, for a total decrease of about 50 percent over a twenty-year period. While census counts are problematic and the actual number of francophones can consequently only be approximated, these numbers are comparable to each other (since all of the data reflect the same problems) and provide a good indication of the rate of attrition.³

Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes are among the most francophone in the state today. Figure 1.1 shows the percentage of francophones in Acadiana, the twenty-two-parish cultural region in which most French speakers live. Lafourche is the fourth-most-francophone parish, at 19.2 percent, a rate that surpasses that of Lafayette, often seen as the heart of French Louisiana and the home of the state’s Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), which is tasked with promoting the language in the state. Terrebonne Parish, where Pointe aux Chênes is located, is not quite so heavily francophone but still falls well within the midrange of francophone parishes at 10.66 percent. What overall parish rates cannot show, however, is localized concentrations. The rural areas in Lafourche and especially Terrebonne have rates much higher than the overall parish rate. In the town of Golden Meadow near the southern extreme of Lafourche Parish, for example, the rate is 38.8 percent. Given that most francophones are elderly, this is a dense concentration indeed. Even today, Terrebonne has a handful of monolingual French speakers possessing only receptive competence in English (that is, they understand but do not speak). I interviewed six such people during my initial fieldwork and was aware of several others.

Figure 1.1. Percentage of French speakers per parish. Image created by the author. Data from U.S. Census 2000.

Despite this relative robustness of the French language, most speakers are over the age of sixty, if not seventy. Indeed, I have met only a handful of speakers born after 1970 (generally the children or grandchildren of residents who were particularly dedicated to using French exclusively in the home), though many younger people have receptive competence or, as is most common among the youngest generations, can repeat a few stock phrases and expressions. Even so, the concentration of fluent speakers in Terrebonne-Lafourche—and the lower reaches of the bayous in particular—has one of the best chances of any region in the state of reviving French.

In these parishes, the generations born after World War II have seen a precipitous drop in the use of French, as is true across Louisiana. The decline likely has roots in a number of factors, including the postwar economic boom that favored the use of English as the language of the workplace (Bernard 2003), a 1921 change to the state constitution that required the use of English in the classroom and that compounded the effects of 1916’s mandatory schooling regulation, and the fact that members of the first generation that had been required to learn English at school began to have children in the mid- to late 1940s and had the option not to speak French to their children. (See Bernard 2003 for a full discussion of the factors contributing to the shift to English in the twentieth century.) The majority of those I interviewed had learned English only when they began school at the age of six; for the most part, their parents had been monolingual French speakers. Many residents remember the shame they felt when entering school speaking only French and consequently refused to speak it with their own children, a decision they generally regret today. Their children and grandchildren are often sorry that they have not learned the language fluently and that they thus cannot pass it on to their own children; teenagers seem less concerned, but conversations with young adults, in particular those who are parents, suggest that this may well be an age-graded phenomenon and that regret will set in as they get older. Many people in these younger generations, particularly those only slightly younger than the youngest fluent speakers, are semispeakers, meaning they can manipulate the language to some degree but do so imperfectly and with difficulty. The youngest generations often know a few stock words and phrases. While some non-speakers can understand the language, most cannot.

As a result of the high concentration of elderly speakers, French can still be heard in public places like restaurants and stores when older residents are present. That said, the language is most often heard in private settings, between spouses or friends. When older residents attend informal community gatherings, French is also used despite the presence of younger nonfrancophones. Out of deference to the younger speakers, however, public meetings to discuss important business take place in English; though there are still a handful of French monolinguals, most fluent francophones are fully bilingual. Because English was the only language of instruction in schools and French was rarely taught even as a second language, nearly everyone is illiterate in French (though of course they can read in English), even if they speak it fluently. Several people do remember parents or grandparents who could read in French, however; it was never made clear to me why the ability to read in French had not been passed on, though presumably it is linked to the shame felt by many francophones and the emergence of English as the only language of the workplace, the school, and in many people’s minds the future.

French is still heard in limited public places, however. On one of my first trips to lower Terrebonne Parish, I arrived on the evening that the annual “French mass” (actually the French Rally), was being held at Live Oak Baptist Church in lower Pointe aux Chênes. Lafourche radio station KLRZ (The Rajun’ Cajun), based in Larose and heard in New Orleans, seventy miles away, had a weekly Sunday morning broadcast, hosted by Gloria Fonseca, who speaks French for up to 50 percent of her time on-air. The language is also still used in workplaces dominated by francophones, particularly the community of shrimpers who ply the bayous and lakes in their skiffs. I accompanied several shrimp fishing excursions over the years; in the warmer months, shrimping is done at night, when the temperature drops slightly. Over the rumbling of the diesel engine and the squeaking of the winches and pulleys as the nets are brought in and sent back out was the sound of the shortwave radio, crackling in French as the (mostly male) fishing crew talked to each other through the night. The disappearance of French is not a punctuated event; it is taking place over generations, only recently gaining in speed. At the same time, its speakers sit on land that is undergoing the same process.

SHIFTING LAND

That Louisiana’s coastal marshes are disappearing is a long-established fact. The land has seen such rapid and drastic changes that even people in their twenties and thirties can talk at length about how the landscape has changed since they were children. For several decades, a steady stream of ever-louder warnings has come from official agencies and the press, who generally present the pace of loss in terms of how many football fields of land are lost every year, month, day, or even hour (see, e.g., Kennedy 2017; AJ+ 2015, both of which cite one football field per hour). It has become nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of articles and news reports documenting what has become a dire situation in the coastal marshes that form Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. I found seven such reports in various popular media (print, broadcast, and online) in the first four months of 2017 alone, and their publication continues apace. An article in the January 2017 issue of The Lens, an online investigative news publication based in New Orleans, as part of a series focusing on coastal land loss summarizes the growing alarm. Author Bob Marshall (2017) reports on the newly released Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast issued by the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana, which reveals that the worst-case scenario in the state’s 2012 Master Plan had become the best-case scenario just five years later: tens of thousands of homes in coastal Louisiana, in particular the lower bayous, will need to be bought out or elevated. Meanwhile, Hauer, Evans, and Mishra (2016:693) predict that millions of people in the continental United States will be displaced by rising sea levels over the next century, with Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes among the most severely affected counties in the nation.

On April 18, 2017, Louisiana governor Jon Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency over the disappearing coastline and asked the federal government to do the same (State of Emergency 2017). Both Hauer (2017) and the governor’s declaration of emergency note the national importance of the eroding wetlands. The declaration of emergency cites, among other reasons, the fact that five of the nation’s fifteen major ports are located in Louisiana, that they handle 60 percent of the country’s grain commerce, and that Louisiana’s pipelines handle 90 percent of the country’s offshore energy production. Hauer points out that the influx of people migrating from the coasts will have real effects on the areas they choose to move to, further broadening the consequences of coastal erosion. Louisiana’s disappearing coast is decidedly not simply a local problem.

The destruction of the land is in constant evidence: dead trees, killed by saltwater intrusion into what used to be solid ground, poke out of the open marsh. Even the most casual visitor will notice this indicator, but for those who have spent a lifetime in the area, it is a constant, jarring reminder, as the oldest have memories of a time when the area was thickly forested, and even young people can detail physical changes that they have witnessed. Today, open water has replaced land where cattle grazed and gardens grew. Seawater often covers roadways in the lower reaches of the parishes when the tide is high or a stiff wind blows from the south. In lower Lafourche Parish, telephone poles stand half submerged by seawater, a persistent reminder of the ongoing change. In putting together a documentary video using my footage, I came across a French news report filmed in the late 1960s on the Île à Jean Charles (Failevic 1969).⁴ A house flanked by trees appears on the screen; Rocky, my fieldwork partner, recognized it as a house we had passed many times on the Island. Now abandoned (the residents moved to a newer house next door and simply left the old one to fall apart), the house sits in on a narrow, treeless ridge only feet from open marshland. In a similar vein, while interviewing an elderly resident of the island I noticed on the shelf behind him a photo of a young woman standing on the porch of a house with thick trees all around. I was stunned to learn that the photo was of his wife, taken decades ago in front of the same house we were sitting in, though it was now fifteen feet above the ground and surrounded by miles of grass and water with only a few scattered trees, many of them dead or dying.

In June 2009, I took a boat tour around modern Leeville to film the state of the marsh. The tour guide was initially reluctant to take my money, saying that it was more important to him that I fully understand what was going on. We sped past half-submerged telephone poles before slowly circling around a small cemetery—or rather, what was left of it: a handful of graves, literally crumbling into the water. I was briefly alarmed when we approached a large patch of grass at full speed, but to my surprise, we sailed right over it: the grass was growing on land that was now fully underwater, and the flat-bottomed boat easily passed over it. As we passed over patch after patch of the same, my guide explained that only a few months earlier, this had all been dry ground. I had seen this before in more abstract form: the shrimp boat I sometimes accompanied on trawling trips navigated with a GPS map that often indicated that we were on land when in fact the boat was in open water. But green pixelated patches on a screen are far less arresting than driving a boat straight into what looks like solid land.

The next day, an excursion to film the eroding bayous likewise provided a graphic illustration of the change the area has undergone. Having heard from multiple interviewees in Pointe aux Chênes that they had grown up miles below the current settlement, I asked a friend, also one of my interviewees, to take me to the old settlement. A member of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe, he had been raised in the town and had begun his shrimping career at the age of thirteen; he was very familiar with the changes affecting the marsh.⁵ On the way down I took video footage of narrow strips of land marked by dead and dying trees.

“I don’t know about this!” my guide said, as he cut the engine upon banking at our destination, and I turned around to see him flailing at the air.

I immediately discovered why as I stood up to get out of the boat: deer-flies—insects with a mean bite that thrive in swampy environments—so thick we couldn’t get out. We pulled the boat out and banked at an alternative spot, and while we were able to walk around a bit there, my camera tells the story of the miserable few minutes it was: shots of our feet, of the ground, and of the air as the camera is flung about as I desperately swat at deerflies. My friend’s attempt to explain where we are is punctuated by the sounds of us slapping and cursing at the flies. We made a side trip on the way back to see Fala and l’Esquine, two tiny settlements—only a few houses each—hidden deep in the marshland, entirely unreachable except by boat and on their way to disappearing. Along the way, my friend talked about how in his youth, forty years earlier, the areas we were passing through had been so thick with trees that it stayed relatively cool even during the hottest summer months; today, though a few trees remained, we sat directly in the hot sun. The area is entirely uninhabitable. The cross that marked the cemetery where the ancestors of the modern indigenous population are interred was a sober reminder of just how much people are giving up when they are forced to abandon an area. The connection to the land is literal: family is buried there. One is leaving behind something more than a symbolic attachment to a place.

In perhaps the most comical but most disturbing scene, following up on an interest some archaeologist friends of mine had expressed in studying the Indian mounds that lie below the current settlements, I took my satellite map down the bayou to ask about the mounds and to see if the community would be interested in an archaeological study. A group of shrimpers attempted to circle the areas on the map where the mounds were located, but the men began arguing because they couldn’t recognize landmarks on the map; it showed land where there should be water.

“This map is w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Shifting Land, Shifting Language
• Chapter 2 The Land and Its People: Description of the Lower Lafourche Basin
• Chapter 3 The History of French in Louisiana
• Chapter 4 French in the Lower Lafourche Basin
• Chapter 5 The Connection of French to Bayou Identity: Perception
• Chapter 6 Oak Point or Dog Point?: The Importance of a Name
• Chapter 7 Language Shift and the Continued Importance of French to Bayou Identity
• Chapter 8 Omens from the Past, Warnings for the Future: Storytelling, Place, and Identity
• Chapter 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited