Water is Life, the Mississippi River is our life force, decisions made up and down and upstream should consider the generations into the future.
Monique Verdin is an interdisciplinary storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana. She is a citizen of the Houma Nation, director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and a member of the Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative, working to envision just economies, vibrant communities, and sustainable ecologies. She is co-producer of the documentary My Louisiana Love and her work has been included in a variety of environmentally inspired projects, including the multiplatform performance Cry You One, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, and the collaborative book Return to Yakni Chitto: Houma Migrations.
In 2019, Monique joined our Humanities Without Walls project to share her work at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. She is in conversation with Bonnie Etherington here.
1. How did you come to emphasize creative work or different forms of storytelling as you grapple with issues of climate change and the traumas of settler colonialism in the Lower Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico? How do you think creative work challenges or expands engagements with the river and its histories?
My work is rooted to a place known as the Yakni Chitto, found between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi River, a place where land is being lost at one of the fastest rates on the planet. Yakni Chitto means Big Country. The understanding of my history and my grappling to understand current conditions were first ignited by these old family photographs from the late 1920s that my Houma grandmother, Armantine Billiot Verdin, used to share with me about this place she knew as La Pointe (Pointe aux Chenes, Point of the Oaks), where she lived all her life until she was a young woman with three children when she made the migration to St. Bernard Parish, just south of the colonial city settlers rebranded as New Orleans. The one image that stands out the most and that I continually share in my presentations and conversations with others, is of my family standing in front of my great grandmother Celestine’s house, a simple cypress board home with a mud and moss chimney and palmetto roof. Celestine stands on one side of the front line and my other great-grandmother Ernestine stands at the other side with the family “treater” medicine keeper, Nonc Oban, and lots of children of all different sizes and other family members. At the time when that image was taken, oil and gas were being discovered in the coastal territories of south Louisiana and a 20th-century land grab swept through, which essentially led to my ancestors losing their land rights. One of the old company names is Humble Oil, an ironic devil-in-disguise kind of name given the shortsighted profits and long-lasting scars their actions and other companies have left in the wake of so-called progress. This image of my great grandmothers has anchored me to the stories of my ancestors and challenged me to think about how they got there and how that has led to here. The image remains a reference of orientation to how in less than one hundred years so much can change and yet the roots of injustices remain the same, exposing the ripple of the side effects that have left behind generational harm.
When I was 18 I learned about this oil waste facility in Grand Bois, Louisiana in the Yakni Chitto, less than 2000 feet from an old Houma settlement where relatives live, just north of Pointe aux Chenes where my grandparents are originally from. Some of my cousins were fighting to stop the dumping of hazardous waste in these football field size pits where the material is “treated.” In the late 1990s, residents were starting to see how the facility was contaminating the community, leaving residents sick with headaches, high levels of lead found in children, and rising cancer rates. Long story short, some of the pits have been closed, but many remain open to this day, receiving oil waste daily. There are also injection wells on-site where they somehow just shoot the waste down into the core of the earth as a way to deal with the oil field waste. Daily, a mountain of material from the “treatment” piles up and is never to be removed. According to the state of Louisiana, it is nonhazardous but has hazardous characteristics. And, remember, Grand Bois is just north of some of the fastest disappearing lands on the planet and just south of the federal manmade Gulf Intracoastal Waterway.
I started taking pictures in the late ’90s of my family, hoping to expose the injustices happening with this naive hope that somehow I could help shut the pits down or find someone or some way to help find solutions, or at the very least way to hold oil and gas accountable. Little did I know that the state of Louisiana is pockmarked with oil waste pits and other toxic petrochemical facilities and how powerful the politics of the OILigarchy of the dirty south is. The more I kept putting a frame around the reality the more I realized that oil waste pits are the least of our problems, given the incredible loss of land and vulnerable future threatening ways of life. I kind of compulsively kept taking pictures, without knowing where it would lead but feeling fueled by a sense of urgency. At some point, a friend loaned me an old home movie camera and I started to play with that too. I spent a lot of time with the kids and our elders, wandering in the forest and taking boat rides at sunrise, and having long porch sits in the afternoon, eating watermelon and hearing stories.
My grandparents moved from the Yakni Chitto to Saint Bernard Parish in the 1940s for “a better life,” my grandmother would say. My grandfather was able to find work as a trapper, their children were able to attend public schools, they were able to buy their land and eventually, they were allowed an opportunity to vote. By leaving Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes in the Yakni Chitto, where there is the largest concentration of Houma people who live near the ends of the bayous, they were able to step out of the oppressive discrimination they experienced as “Indian” people.
I loved the slow country afternoons sitting on the front porch with elders and children in Grand Bois, but there is always a kind of unsettled feeling in the air, perhaps because when the wind blows or when there is no wind at all there is no escaping the assault of the noxious toxic smell of the pits in the air. The more I’ve visited the more I have witnessed more frequent and higher floodwaters, year after year.
I’ve been trying to make sense of how land loss and industry are intertwined. But it wasn’t until living through the cycles of manmade catastrophes, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the BP Drilling disaster of 2010, that I started to connect how the extractive practices of multinational corporations are tied to colonization. It has always been about imports and exports, profit and power, and control for commerce since the colonizers sailed in to claim the territory as their own. Centuries later, the plantation system is very much alive here in the coastal territories of the Mississippi River Delta. Where plantations once sat, petrochemical plants now sit. I tell people that I live in Cancer Alley, just north of the Deadzone. Technically one might argue that Cancer Alley, now known as Death Alley, is found between Bvlbancha (New Orleans) and Istrouma (Baton Rouge) where nearly 200 petrochemical facilities are located along the Mississippi River, but my home is just downriver and I drive by two major oil refineries every day. The community that I live in has some of the worst air quality in the nation, and I would argue that the Alley extends all the way to the mouth of the river where it meets the Gulf of Mexico.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I shared my photography for the first time publicly as an attempt to raise awareness around the layers of conditions present in south Louisiana. And I just kept documenting using still picture making and video to create records and reflections. Some of that work was woven into an intimate multigenerational documentary I made with my collaborators Sharon Linezo Hong and Mark Krasnoff, called My Louisiana Love (2012). A lot of the images recorded between 1998 and 2010 I’m still sharing publicly in art exhibitions and installations, to tell the stories my elders shared with me and what I too have experienced: to raise awareness about what land loss looks like on the frontlines of a rapidly changing climate where seas are rising faster than predicted. I’ve felt this responsibility to create a record and for the work to be a witness to the realities and truths of present and past as we reckon with an uncertain future. The more I learn about the ugly, the devastation, the destruction, the extractive practices, and the looming environmental doom while in real-time learning to navigate the climate crisis, be it hurricanes or extreme rainfall, the more in awe and inspired I am by the natural intelligence of this spinning planet we call the Earth, especially by the water.
Here in the Mississippi River Delta if there was no water flowing south bringing sediments from the northern parts of the watershed there would be no land upon which I now sit. My life’s journey and the documentary and storytelling work I have been engaged in has taught me so much, but I am most grateful that I have been reminded over and over that everything is tied to access to clean water and the Mississippi River, even though she has been in an abusive relationship with those who use her and do not respect the generational right of the river’s life force.
2. What conversations or confluences have you noticed emerging (or long-existing) between Indigenous art and activism in the context of the Mississippi?
Many of the modern Houma living in the territories of the Yakni Chitto trace ancestry back to a “Biloxi Medal Chief,” Toulabay Courteau. What I find interesting is that linguistically the Biloxi of the Gulf Coast speak a Siouan language unique in the southeast, where Muskogee and Chata are the predominant languages, though many languages existed. Bvlbancha, “place of many languages” was what the Chata (Choctaw) called the lower territories of the Mississippi River Delta, now known better as New Orleans because this was a sacred site of trade where many different languages were spoken and where different Indigenous peoples came from upriver and from the coastal territories of the Gulf of Mexico.
Brenda Dardar Robichaux, past principal chief of the United Houma Nation introduced me to Dallas Goldtooth, Dakota & Dine environmental activist and hilarious human, father, and friend, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network and part of the 1491s.[1] It was back in 2015 when he was in Louisiana for the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, just before COP21 in Paris. He and other Indigenous folks, including Clayton Thomas Muller and Cherri Foytlin, had made a trip down to Saint Bernard Parish to visit me. They were there to see this installation I had created for the anniversary as part of a Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange Activation at a place called Crevasse 22, which is at the site of an old plantation where the Mississippi burst through the levee in 1922 and flooded the entire community. We parted that day in August saying, “See you in Paris.”
A colleague of mine, Sharon Linezo Hong, and I were invited to join the Indigenous Environmental Networks media team during COP21, which was a whirlwind of a few weeks. We witnessed the rollout of the Indigenous Women’s Treaty there, a treaty to “protect the territories, sovereignty, and peaceful lifeways of each Indigenous Nation within the Natural Laws and Creative Principles of Mother Earth and Father Sky.” It was during COP21 that I first heard about the concept of the Rights of Nature or the Rights of a River. One of our assignments was to cover a Women’s Environmental Climate Action Network event there were Indigenous women from the Amazon and the Democratic Republic of Congo talking about their challenges, resistance, and undying love for their people, waters, and land. I’m not sure how everything played out that day, but near the end of the day Casey Camp, Ponca elder, and water protector invited me to the stage to speak and I found myself overwhelmed with the thought that if my grandmothers would have been able to stop the oil and gas pipelines how different life in the Delta might be today. I warned the audience that if they needed a really good (bad) example, south Louisiana was the place to look.
Towards the end of COP21, we were invited to gather with Indigenous peoples for a water ceremony under a bridge by the Eiffel Tower. Folks were invited to bring water with us from our territories and they were all added together, some offered to the Seine and the rest distributed amongst all those who had gathered to bring home and to keep on their altars and places of prayer. I think for Indigenous people this showed that it is about more than just art and activism: ceremony is foundational.
On the last day of COP21, we found ourselves in a huge circle with Indigenous peoples from around the world in front of the Notre Dame, a site that is essentially an island in the Seine, when the cops showed up to prohibit the ceremony. We circle danced out and Indigenous women led the way as we marched to the love bridge.
Paris was a whirlwind and when we landed back home I became aware of the fact that as the Obama administration was patting themselves on the back for signing the climate accord, the Gulf of Mexico was on the auction block yet again, going to the highest bidder wanting to double down on fossil fuel extraction into the infinite future. Folks started to organize an art build and a march that walked 300 plus folks down the streets of Bvlbancha (New Orleans) business district and to the Superdome, the site of last resort for climate crisis victims during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where the federal offshore leases were being awarded. Federal lease sales have since all gone online, and they were just reading off the names of the sections and the companies who purchased them with a bunch of guys sitting in the back of the room taking notes of who got what, planning for projects twenty years out. The day before the march we gathered at the Mississippi River and had a water ceremony with Chief Aryol Looking Horse, 19th keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle and ceremonial leader of the Lakota, Nakota, Dakota People. I didn’t know about Chief Looking Horse prior or his work around honoring sacred sites, world peace, and supporting spiritual traditions of Indigenous peoples worldwide. We may have stormed the super dome, but we didn’t stop the sale.
Later that summer, some of the organizers from the No New Leases march came together to have a diverse and intersectional march through the city to connect movements and issues from Cancer Alley to Confederate Monuments to Immigration and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights. Kandi White, originally from Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota who has been actively resisting extraction, specifically fracking in her community, who also is an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network had come down to join us and at the end of the march through the city we finished at the Mississippi River with a water ceremony. The next day, Kandi left for Standing Rock. Standing Rock was a moment that reminded us we are connected by waterways and pipelines and a legacy of genocide and greed that is alive and well continuing to perpetuate the colonial playbook.
Lots of connections were made through solidarity and mutual aid support systems during Standing Rock. For me, it was a time when locally I was able to connect with intertribal and mixed race-Indigenous folks here in Bvlbancha who have since become collaborators and friends. A network of Indigenous women and nonbinary gardeners formed in the summer of 2020 with the support of WECAN. We are growing food and medicine and seeking ways to build sustainable circular economies by activating old trade routes and imagining adaptation, calling ourselves Okla Hina Ikhish Holo (People of the Sacred Medicine Trail). Our existence is our resistance and we recognize that land back in the hands of original peoples is crucial to restoring balance to the natural system.
At present, I am also a part of the Big River Continuum cohort which is supported by the University of Minnesota and is intentionally bringing together Indigenous peoples at the so-called headwaters in Minnesota and Indigenous peoples in the Mississippi River Delta together with scientists and individuals working on climate policy and communication to think and talk and connect around migrations and exchanges up and downstream.
([1] Editor’s note: The 1491s are an Indigenous sketch comedy group based in Minnesota and Oklahoma.)
3. What materials have you found most useful as you navigate your storytelling practices with the river?
I think of myself really as more of a folk artist, using whatever is accessible to tell the story that is most truthful or in a way that shares a sense of dimensionality. I think the work I have grown most from is when there is interaction and conversation and the unexpected experience that can happen outside of a four-walled gallery space. How can you take the outside inside has also led me down unexpected wanderings to find ways to express and educate and orient. My personal story has been centered in the work; it’s been a struggle to wrestle with the personal and the political and sharing how one’s intimate life is affected by multigenerational traumas and systems for survival. After Hurricane Katrina, I collected all these plastic yard signs throughout the devastated landscape and a year and a half later recreated them into these photo-story collage boxes that I called coffin boxes. I mountedthem to the wall and welcomed viewers to open the doors to view details on the inside. All the images used for the construction of the boxes were output at the Walmart kiosk. In 2008, there was a performance called the Loup Garou, a story about a Louisiana werewolf and the oil and gas industry. We hung a shrimp net between live oak trees in the “waiting area” of an abandoned golf course in City Park, and I attached images of info maps and photographs I had gathered for years.
The first time I ever actualized collaborating with art-making and palmettos was during the second line funeral for my beloved friend and collaborator, Mark Krasnoff. Mark was “a Cajun, Choctaw, Jew,” as he would introduce himself, and actor and artist and beautiful creature, who passed a year after Hurricane Katrina. Working with Royal Artist float designers we made a little shopping cart float and decorated it with a cutout of our friend. We dressed it with palmettos and then we used the palmettos in the procession as well. I didn’t know what a Bottomland Hardwood Forest was until David Baker, an Indigenous man, arborist, and biologist pointed out to me that it was the environment I had grown up in my whole life. David has been the land manager for an artist residency program called A Studio in the Woods, which is a program of Tulane University. Palmettos, oaks, hackberries, sweetgum, I’ve since grown to understand, and I appreciate their brilliance and beauty, recognizing their vulnerability in the coastal territories. I am now literally weaving them into the work, creating installations and sculptural pieces, and building activations with the community through the Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange of which I am the director. Willow and palmetto are two favorite materials, but I have also been thinking more about permaculture and seed banking as regenerative and food/medicine sovereignty work that is both beautiful and feeds/promotes wellness for community.
I know that maps are the colonizers’ tool, but I do love the attempt to define and outline space and how information can be transferred visually. A dear friend and collaborator Jakob Rozenswieg’s cartographic work has been a huge asset in helping to communicate realities on the frontlines here in the Delta.
I loved taking pictures when the process was analog and time was spent in the darkroom. The digital world of art-making has been great and can satisfy immediate gratification. In this social media-consuming world we live in…can be a bit ephemeral, I guess? I miss moving at the speed of analog. It’s kind of funny to think about all the different kinds of photo and video equipment I have used over the years and how almost all of the tools were never my own, always on loan. So I am grateful for folks’ generosity who said, “here take this, go make pictures, the story is important.”
4. What drew you to highlight collaborative creative practices in your work? What are some of the challenges and highlights of this collaborative work? How are diverse as well as specific river histories made visible by the collaborative artistic practices and performances that you are involved with?
I think my first deep dive into collaborative work was just before and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, with my dear friend and collaborator, a mixed-race and part Indigenous woman, Sharon Linezo Hong. We had been dreaming about making a documentary on the Houma of south Louisiana and then I met Mark Krasnoff, who was much older, had a background in theatre and film, and was a French speaker. He was totally into Louisiana culture and curious about Houma people and just starting to understand land loss. When my grandmother turned 90, Krasnoff helped film the day with the elders, working as a videographer and interviewing them all in French with them answering in their Houma French language (essentially a 17th century French mixed with a Muskogee sentence structure). When Krasnoff passed, Sharon stepped in to help steward the story which eventually turned into our documentary, My Louisiana Love.
After making My Louisiana Love, I was exhausted and over collaboration and was thinking I would just do solo straightforward documentary work for the rest of my life. HA! And then the two most experimental performance companies in Bvlbancha, ArtSport Productions, and Mondo Bizarro, invited me to join in the production of Cry You One. Eventually I ended up collaborating with a crew of 20 people for that production. I was initially invited in to be a kind of community liaison and part of the design team and in the process became a performance artist and protagonist. Collaboration elevates things to unimaginable levels that are always surprising, even when it is most challenging.
Collaborations over the long term are super important to me. I’ve now been working with Mondo Bizarro and Artspot Productions for almost 15 years. Sharon Linezo Hong and I have been friends for over 20 years, made a documentary together, we’re collaborators of Another Gulf is Possible which is a network across the Gulf South working to build just transitions, economies, and ecologies and we started a nonprofit a few years back called the School House 4 ReImagining Education, knowing that education and conversation and community connections are key to healthy and just futures.
I recognize that being an Indigenous woman from the “sacrifice zone” of south Louisiana can be and has been tokenized in this moment of the climate crisis. I am by no way accusing my collaborators of this, but seeing how the work I have been doing collectively and in conversation with others is now being recognized and invited into spaces where there was no room before… it’s a good thing in intersectional spaces, but it is also a weird road to walk sometimes.
5. What does foregrounding Indigenous knowledge(s) about the river offer for the future as we address the complexities and traumas of climate change? How does this foregrounding challenge how we think about past histories?
Water is Life, the Mississippi River is our life force, decisions made up and down and upstream should consider the generations into the future. Most people don’t even know where their water comes from other than the tap. If we don’t protect the water and work to stop the assaults against her, she can’t restore a sense of balance for the system. We have been disconnected from the river ever since the colonizers sailed in to build the first little levee to protect their plantations. And time and time again the river has reminded us that she is more mighty than we give her credit.
Scientists here in the Delta say we must reconnect the river to the wetlands if we are to triage this loss of land. Some say that we are out of time. I think that it is long overdue that we respect the River’s natural intelligence and, instead of trying to mimic her, allow her to be, but that is a complicated scenario to put on the table when we are talking navigation and international commerce.
I am currently collaborating on the Invisible Rivers project with Mondo Bizarro here in Bvlbancha, meditating on all that is unseen and that which has been invisibilized by the land or by the water and by the silencing of stories. Years back, Another Gulf is Possible seeded the building of the Float Lab, a piece of community infrastructure that can be used both on land or on water as a place for performance or exhibition or deployed as a just recovery support vessel during times of need. It can be powered by solar energy and can experiment with what it might mean to live on and with water.
6. Do you see Lower River and Gulf concerns as connected to concerns upriver?
We are connected by oil pipelines and watersheds. The petrochemical fertilizers that are produced here in the Delta are shipped upstream to Midwest farms. They then runoff into the Mississippi River, making their way to the Gulf of Mexico where we have these huge algae blooms every summer, which essentially takes all oxygen out of the water column. They create the Dead Zone where no life can be found. What is happening with Line 3 in Minnesota of course affects the water quality, but also that pipeline and all the pipelines running from the Gulf of Mexico through Louisiana and processed at refineries also exacerbate climate change, which affects us all.
7. Where are you finding hope?
The River keeps calling me, reminding me that I too am part of her body. I feel super grateful that she keeps connecting me to the nature, to the stories, and to the beings, many of who are my friends and family, who are also part of her.
