Indian Group to Abandon Louisiana Ancestral Home

[Louisiana1976]

NEW ORLEANS (AP)— After 170 years fishing and crabbing in southern Louisiana's swamps and marshes, a group of American Indians repeatedly flooded by hurricanes says it is intent on moving from its ancestral island home.

The band's chief said Tuesday that the group is seeking to start a new life as a community behind levees on higher ground.

A migration inland would symbolize one of the most obvious defeats in South Louisiana's losing battle with land loss and hurricanes. The Mississippi River delta, on which south Louisiana sits, has lost about 2,000 square miles of marsh and swamp since the 1930s.

But a relocation was inevitable, said Albert Naquin, the chief of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. He said the marsh community had been flooded five times in the past six years. About 25 families still call it home.

<snip>

more....http://www.theadvertiser.com/article/20090923/NEWS01/909230339/1002/Indian-group-to-abandon-La.-ancestral-home