Community-Driven Relocation: Recommendations for the U.S. Gulf Coast Region and Beyond (2024)

4

Understanding the Gulf Region: Historical Context

INTRODUCTION

To appreciate what lies ahead for the Gulf region, it is necessary to understand not only the climate- and environment-related hazards that have already begun to impact the area but also the historical circumstances of the place and its people. This chapter provides a brief overview of the rich and complicated past of the Gulf region and illuminates historical legacies anchored in this history that have implications on present-day communities as they navigate climate change. The committee has identified such legacies as particularly important to attend to in the development of hazard responses, particularly community-driven relocation efforts, that best meet the needs of the people who will be affected.

The committee came to understand the Gulf region as a complex and dynamic system in which diverse human populations have adapted (or not) to environmental and social changes over millennia. Movements to, from, and within the Gulf region have been driven by factors including the knowledge and expertise of Indigenous and place-based communities; colonization and settlement by European groups; environmental fluctuations; changing socioeconomic and political realities; and the consequences of industrial activity such as oil and gas extraction. The vibrant social ecologies that sustain this region have been consistently harmed through systemic injustices including, but not limited to, forced migration and slavery, legalized segregation and the systemic preservation of other inequities, and political disenfranchisement. The committee is keenly aware that these realities have substantially heightened the vulnerability of the region and its communities to climate, environmental, and human-made hazards but also understands that these realities are not unique to the Gulf and reflect the environmental, political, and socioeconomic history of the United States as a whole.

The committee wants particularly to highlight that Indigenous and placed-based knowledge is a critical part of the region’s history and will be essential to developing climate adaptation strategies. The committee defines place-based knowledge as knowledge developed by a community in a particular location that incorporates cultural heritage as well as adaptations to the landscape and ecosystem. Throughout the report, the importance of place-based knowledge is well illustrated by many of the testimonials of individuals who made time to talk with the committee during information-gathering sessions; this topic is covered more fully in Chapters 7 and 8, which address its impact in the present day. Here, the testimonial excerpt in Box 4-1 is offered as an example and makes a direct connection between place-based knowledge and the history of human life in this region.

The first section of this chapter examines the history of adaptation and movement in the Gulf region, with an emphasis on how people’s livelihoods and practices have been affected by the interplay between ecosystems and human-made infrastructure and political systems. The second section summarizes historical legacies of the region that are relevant to the challenges faced by those who have lived there. The committee particularly focuses on the legacy of profound injustices that have shaped a region that is now on the front lines of climate threats, and also highlights the strengths that Gulf Coast communities have built. The legacies highlighted here are foundational for the development of equitable, community-based, and efficacious plans in response to climate threats—work discussed in the rest of the report. This historical overview, which is by necessity abbreviated, is based on information-gathering sessions and a review of scholarship in

history, geography, anthropology, and related social sciences and humanities disciplines.

ADAPTATION AND MOVEMENT

Evidence suggests that perhaps as early as 30,000 years ago, humans settled and migrated throughout the Gulf region (Callaway, 2021; Dartnell, 2020; Raff, 2022). Migration has been a dynamic process, linking places to one another through streams and counter-streams and, over time, turning yesterday’s receiving communities into today’s originating communities (Ravenstein, 1885, 1889). The committee’s examination of adaptation and movement in the Gulf region begins with a brief overview of the peoples who occupied the region for thousands of years before European conquest in the 16th century. This centers on Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the land and the effects of the arrival of Europeans. The committee then examines the history of enslavement in the region, with a focus on its implications for people’s attachment to place. We also consider later migrations to and from the region. A visual timeline of this history generated by the committee can be found in Appendix E.

Indigenous Peoples of the Region and European Contact

The Gulf of Mexico—its coastal habitats, islands, and tributary river valleys—has long been the home to a rich and diverse set of small and large Indigenous groups who migrated to the region prior to the first European contact. Early inhabitants found the Gulf ecologies productive and relied on their abundance to support cultural and demographic growth (Davis, 2017). These groups lived in nature-society relationships from the Yucatan peninsula to the Florida Keys and across the northern Gulf Coast, often establishing relatively stable chiefdoms. They engaged in extensive trade networks and seasonal migrations along coastal shorelines and barrier islands both to follow marine resources and to expand their communication networks. Connections among the peoples who occupied sites in the Gulf region, such as the Hopewell and Mississippian cultures, with more distant groups are evidenced by artifacts, such as large marine shells recovered from mounds as far away as the upper Midwest (Krupnik, 2022). Trading networks connected people from the Pacific coasts through the Mississippi and other rivers leading to the Gulf of Mexico and southward through the Yucatan into the Caribbean Sea.

These complex systems fostered the exchange of languages, cultures, technologies, and people (Mann, 2011). The northern Gulf Coast was among the most ethno-linguistically diverse regions in aboriginal North America (Fogelson et al., 2004; Goddard & Sturtevant, 1996). Successive migrations of people in the Mississippian Period converged with those of other Indigenous peoples who were going to lands where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf (Butler-Ulloa, 2022; Krupnick, 2022). “This place of convergence, where the great waters drain into the Gulf of Mexico, was near New Orleans, or (in Hitchiti) Bulbancha, the place of many languages” (Ethridge & Shuck-Hall, 2009; Klopotek, 2011; Osburn, 2014, as cited in Butler-Ulloa, 2022, p. 68). Sophisticated earthworks were a predominant feature of these peoples’ settlements. It has been suggested by anthropologists as early as the 1890s that these earthworks were adaptive solutions for stabilizing coastlines against strong tides, hurricanes, and storm surge (Cushing, 1896). Prehistoric mound sites are found throughout the U.S. Gulf Coast Region, especially in the greater Mississippi Delta and the Florida Panhandle, and near the Gulf region in northern Alabama. Middens are common to riverine and coastal areas and provide evidence of the changing Gulf coastline (Helmer et al., 2023). Settlement areas were inundated as seas rose during the Last Glacial Maximum (between 19,000 and 29,000 years ago; Dobson et al., 2020; Garrison & Cook Hale, 2020; Hale et al., 2023). These ancient mounds are evidence of deep place-based knowledge developed over time by the multiple groups who lived in this region and are evidence of information exchange. Models predict that as sea level rise accelerates, Gulf waters will again move northward and ancient

mound sites, originally constructed on dry land, will be endangered (Mehta & Skipton, 2019).

The lives of the Indigenous peoples of the Gulf region were profoundly affected by the arrival of Europeans, whose arrival caused widespread disruptions to communities in the region. This began in the early 16th century, with the violence and exploitation brought by the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto, whose army marched through territory in present-day Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi searching for riches (Hudson, 1997; Knight, 2009; McKee & Schlenker, 1980). These disruptions throughout the region were varied and complex. The communities encountered by the Spaniards and other Europeans endured multiple disruptions and forced relocations and, with them, the loss of stable lifeways, village complexes, and their cultivated fields and farms. An example of profound loss is that of the Calusa people, or “Shell Indians.” Prior to the 1500s, thousands of Indigenous Calusa people lived on Florida’s Gulf Coast. They were a seafaring people with wide-reaching communication and trade networks that alerted them to the arrival of Spanish explorers in the Caribbean long before Spanish ships reached Florida in the 1630s. By the 1700s, after fighting European diseases and raids from non-Calusa people seeking to capture and profit from slavery, the Calusa disappeared as a distinct tribe (Granberry, 2011).

It has been suggested that these disruptions, more than actual colonization, were the pronounced legacy of the Spanish presence (Hoffman, 2002). For example, the Choctaw and Chickasaw groups, who were induced to fight as surrogates for warring European powers, suffered massive losses because of their involvement (Keller Reeves, 1985; Phelps, 1957). Many groups sought refuge from Europeans by retreating to swamps, wetlands, and bayous. The Acolapissa, another group that disappeared as a distinct tribe, moved to escape capture but was then decimated by European diseases (Kniffen et al., 1994, pp. 50–51). Other tribes, such as the Chitimacha, were directly attacked by European armies. In the case of the Chitimacha, this did not result in disappearance, but it did present an existential threat. Today, the Chitimacha Tribe maintains a small reservation and fosters the preservation of language, traditional cultural hunting, fishing, and foraging in local ecologies (Kniffen et al., 1994, pp. 55–56; Lee, 2022); it is one of the few federally recognized tribes in Louisiana.¹

Following the U.S. war for independence (1775–1783), there was intense pressure from wealthy merchants, bankers, exporters, and plantation owners to transfer ownership of traditional tribal lands to settlers pushing into the southeastern coastal territories. The newly formed U.S. government

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¹ A list of other federally recognized tribes is available at https://www.bia.gov/service/tribal-leaders-directory/federally-recognized-tribes

recruited European immigrants to settle on the frontier to deter resistance from Indigenous tribes, to defend against incursions from Spanish Mexico, and also to support the establishment of plantation economies. The ongoing effort to systematically displace once-stable tribal groups was official government policy, as in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and from its earliest inception as a nation, the U.S. government showed itself willing to use overwhelming and relentless violence to achieve the goal of controlling land of the Indigenous groups (Ostler, 2015). One notorious example is a series of forced removals that are now described together as the “Trail of Tears.” These were a direct application of the Indian Removal Act; begun in the 1830s, the policy resulted in a genocide and massive displacement in which thousands of Indigenous peoples were brutally forced to migrate from their homes in the southeast (Ostler, 2015). Among those displaced were approximately 5,000 Choctaw from present-day Mississippi territories to present-day Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kansas (McKee & Schlenker, 1980, pp. 5–7, 14–15, 32–37, 76). By the mid-19th century, the Indigenous population of the U.S. Gulf Coast Region had been decimated. However, groups of Indigenous peoples—including Seminole people in Florida, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw in Mississippi, and the Houma people and other small tribes in Louisiana—remained in areas near the coast. This series of forced removals that comprise the “Trail of Tears” is seen by tribal communities as evidence that federal government-initiated resettlement may not serve the tribe’s best interests.

Other groups have been affected by forced migration to the Gulf region. For example, the Acadians, a group of French immigrants to Nova Scotia in present-day Canada, were forcefully expelled from that region by British colonizers and, with offers of assistance from the Spanish government, ultimately settled in south Louisiana, where they established rural settlements in the Atchafalaya swamp and its basin, in the coastal wetlands, and in the coastal prairies in southwest Louisiana. The Spanish settlers envisioned Acadian settlements as buffers against British intrusions from upstream on the Mississippi River. The Acadian immigrants brought with them hunting and trapping skills and adapted their farming techniques to the different ecologies of semi-tropical Louisiana. Unable to raise wheat on drained fields, as they had in Acadia, they pursued small-scale agriculture on the natural levee of the Mississippi River and intermarried with Indigenous peoples (MacLeod, 2016, p. 124). They incorporated Indigenous and African foods, plants, music, languages, musical instruments, and modes of transport (pirogues) into what became one of Louisiana’s most distinctive cultural and linguistic groups (Ancelet et al., 1991). This group’s survival partly illustrates the power of traditional “social institutions and agricultural practices [to promote] economic self-sufficiency and group solidarity” (Brasseaux, 1992, p. 21; Faragher, 2005).

The Isleños comprise another group that has retained its identity despite forced migration. Isleños are conscripts into the Spanish army from the Spanish Canary Islands, who arrived in the late 1700s and were the most numerous Spanish speakers who arrived during the colonial period. Together, Acadian and Isleño immigrants added several thousand settlers to the population in the lower Mississippi River valley (Brasseaux, 1987; Din, 1988) and remain prominent ethnic communities. The enduring memory of forced displacements from Nova Scotia and the Spanish Canary Islands to Louisiana contributes to deeply rooted skepticism toward government-initiated resettlement discussions.

The specific fates of different groups have had effects that are evident today. One area of difference is tribal status. Federal tribal recognition can be a divisive and politically contested process. Though the U.S. government began to formally recognize tribal groups via the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, many communities encountered political and judicial resistance to obtaining that recognition. For example, the Seminole people living in what is now Florida were able to resist the U.S. government’s efforts to control their land, undertaken between 1817 and 1858. They sustained substantial losses but never surrendered or ceded lands to the United States (Perdue, 2012; Weisman, 2014). The small surviving population subsequently intermarried with other Gulf residents, and consequently, fewer individuals were officially recognized as members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida by the federal government in 1957.² Which is to say, because the Seminole people never surrendered or ceded lands to the United States and because hundreds of Seminole people are African-Indigenous, they are not listed in the U.S. Census as Seminole and so are not considered Seminole by the U.S. government, regardless of how their status is defined by the Seminole government.

This history of land loss—of displacement and forced relocation—is the basis for powerful cultural memories that are retained by residents throughout the Gulf region and influences responses to the climatic and environmental changes occurring on the Gulf Coast.

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² The Seminole Tribe is a confederation of several tribal groups and was officially classified as “mixed race” by the U.S. government before being targeted by removal in three wars—the First Seminole War in 1816, the Second Seminole War in 1835, and the Third Seminole War in 1855—spurred by Andrew Jackson in 1816 (Kai, 2015). The “Dawes Rolls” determined who was eligible for tribal membership (National Archives, n.d.). Tribal rolls did not exist until the federal government instituted the recognition requirement acknowledging sovereignty status. More information is available at https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/dawes/tutorial/intro.html

ENSLAVEMENT

Millions of people were enslaved in the Gulf region before abolition in 1865. The institution of chattel slavery in the United States (1776–1865), the system in which people were classified and treated as legal property, transformed the region’s social, economic, racial, and cultural legacy. In many Indigenous groups throughout the southeastern United States, the enslavement of war captives was customary both before and after European contact. Defeated warriors were often executed, but the young and old men were used as laborers, while women and young children were sold or traded to other tribes (Reséndez, 2016).

Unlike the enslavement of Indigenous peoples as a part of war, the enslavement of Africans was rooted in the broader economic exploitation that fueled colonization. European traders began forcibly shipping African people to the U.S. Gulf Coast Region in the 1500s, a practice that grew out of already-existing contact between European and African people: the crews of Christopher Columbus included African men, both free and enslaved (Clark, 2017). By the 1700s, French traders were bringing sizable numbers of African people to the lower Mississippi River valley (Hall, 1992).

Slavery was central to the colonization efforts of Spain, Britain, and France; each of these countries relied on the forced labor of enslaved Indigenous and African persons in the Gulf region. The most significant numbers of enslaved Africans along the Gulf Coast during the Spanish colonial era were in Louisiana (1763–1803 in Louisiana), where laborers cultivated the heavy delta soils (Hall, 1992). The French Company of the Indies brought nearly 6,000 enslaved individuals to Louisiana, relying on the knowledge of people from the Senegambia region of rice cultivation and processing techniques (Hall, 1992; Morris, 2012). Plantation slavery was essential to the success of rice, sugar, and cotton plantation economies in the areas that became Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, as well as the economies of the ports that ringed the Gulf Coast.

The populations of enslaved persons grew rapidly, despite their harsh working conditions and often brutal treatment. Enslaved Africans soon outnumbered the non-enslaved population in many areas. For example, by 1763, there were 3,654 free people and 4,598 slaves in lower Louisiana, and the 1800 Census reported that the population included 19,852 free people and 24,264 enslaved people (Hall, 1992).³ By the time of the Civil War, the numbers were substantial; see Table 4-1.

Slavery had complex effects on the people who were enslaved and those who sought to escape it; it also had countless other effects on life

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³ Categories enumerated by the U.S. Census have changed regularly since the first one was carried out in 1790. “Slave” was a category from that year until the 1860 Census; see https://www.pewresearch.org/interactives/what-census-calls-us/

TABLE 4-1 Enslaved Populations in Gulf States, 1860

SOURCE: Mitchell, S. A. (1861). Map of the United States, and territories [Map]. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/99447041/

in the region more generally. Along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, centuries of exploration, colonization, and slavery by the Europeans created a new form of clandestine migration called maroonage, in which self-liberated African and Indigenous slaves called maroons fled plantations and found temporary, transitional, and semi-permanent refuge in the bayous, swamps, and forests (Diouf, 2014; Sayers, 2015).⁴ More direct revolts against slavery also had lasting effects. The brutal Code Noir of Louisiana was developed in response to violent uprisings throughout the Gulf Coast (DeDecker, 2015; Din, 1980; Dormon, 1977; Lachance, 1994; Schwartz, 2015).⁵ The code outlined punishments for enslaved persons who rebelled, including branding, amputation, or death, as well as restriction of communication (e.g., drums were banned) and limitations on travel, assemblage, and other forms of movement and gathering. The Code Noir also called for punitive isolation of communities and surveillance of men, women, and children. After emancipation (1865), these codes were adapted by so-called Sundown towns—all-White municipalities or neighborhoods that codified racial segregation, exclusion, and criminalization of non-White people (Loewen, 2005).

MIGRATION

Though forced displacement and slavery uprooted countless individuals and communities across a period of several hundred years, other kinds of migration have also affected the Gulf region. Following emancipation in 1865, Black citizens began migrating away from the southeastern United

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⁴ Wolf (1982, p. 156) points out how the English term “maroon” comes from the Spanish word “cimarrón,” initially applied to escaped feral livestock, then to runaway Indigenous slaves, and finally to fugitive African slaves.

⁵ More information about the Code Noir is available at https://lasc.libguides.com/c.php?g=254608&p=1697981

States, first moving toward urban centers within the region and then moving farther north in stages (Tolnay, 2003). Those who moved sought social and economic opportunities, but they were also responding to the physical, ecological, and economic devastation brought by the Civil War and to fading hopes for Reconstruction.

Similarly, the Great Migration (1910–1970) saw Black people move to northern, midwestern, and western states in order to pursue economic and educational opportunities; but the urge to move was also fueled by the urge to escape escalating racial violence and oppression in the post-Reconstruction era, the institution of Jim Crow laws, and the segregation of most aspects of daily life (Gregory, 2005; Tolnay, 2003). In the wake of Reconstruction’s failure, White people quickly regained political power and imposed restrictions to prevent Black Americans from voting. Though the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870) granted Black men voting rights, efforts to exercise this right were met with literacy tests, poll taxes, or land ownership requirements.⁶ Many voters who were able to meet “requirements” were threatened with loss of employment, violence to family, rape, castration, church burnings, and death (e.g., the Millican Massacre in Texas, 1868).⁷ Lynching was a common tool used by White citizens to repress Black citizens’ exercise of constitutional rights, including voting, in both northern and southern states. The Equal Justice Initiative (2017) report states, “During the period between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized Black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials” (p. 3). The Tuskegee Institute reported that 960 lynchings occurred in the Gulf Coast states between 1900 and 1931—years that fall within the Great Migration (American Map Company, 1931; cf. Tolnay & Beck, 1995). The failure of Reconstruction, persistent racialized violence, and the racial caste system of Jim Crow all fueled the Great Migration.

Another driver in post-Reconstruction migration was the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, one of the largest human, environmental, and ecological disasters in the history of the United States. Responses to this flood amplified the harsh political, economic, and social realities of racism in the affected region. The flood submerged an estimated 27,000 square miles of land, and an estimated 335,000 people were displaced into Red Cross camps and subsequently to areas outside of the affected area (Barry, 1998). While the flood affected states up and down the river, the most extensive

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⁶ More information about requirements after Reconstruction is available at https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/articles-and-essays/voting-rights/

⁷ More information about the Millican Massacre is available at https://today.tamu.edu/2022/02/23/remembering-the-millican-massacre/

damage occurred in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Altogether, the volume of this migration substantially altered both the cities outside the Gulf region to which people moved and the communities they left behind.

Apart from the Great Migration, it is also important to note the many groups of people moved into the Gulf region voluntarily to seek opportunity and flee disruption in their own home countries. These have included Haitian refugees fleeing both the French and Haitian revolutions in the late 1700s and early 1800s, as well as recent refugees from economic and political turmoil in Haiti. Many others have come from Central and Latin American countries. Various phases of immigration reform and restriction have influenced the immigration of Mexicans to Texas and other destinations. Following the overthrow of the Batista regime in 1959, groups from Cuba settled in south Florida and established communities (Wasem, 2009). Additionally, the banana trade, along with periodic political strife, economic turmoil, and tropical cyclones, prompted migration from Honduras. By 1990, New Orleans had the fourth largest number of self-identified Hondurans in the United States, and the Honduran community remains a distinctive enclave of the city (Sluyter et al., 2015).

The fall of the South Vietnam regime and withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1975 prompted a massive outmigration of Vietnamese citizens fearing reprisal from the North Vietnamese. This migration led to the re-formation of Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian communities throughout the Gulf Coast that have continued to grow. Over the past 50 years, Southeast Asians have become established in the region, remaining connected to original settlement locations such that concentration has enabled economic stability and mobility (Airriess & Clawson, 1991; Bankston & Zhou, 2021). As with other immigrant populations in the Gulf region, Southeast Asian culture and foodways have added to the distinctive character of the Gulf Coast. This stability has not been without challenge, however. Vietnamese communities and individuals often became targets of threats and racial violence and were wrongly accused of poaching (see community spotlight on Bayou La Batre in Chapter 5).

While the Great Migration impacted the demographics of the South and other regions where Black migrants settled, since the 1970s there has been a net in-migration of Blacks returning to the South. Dissatisfaction with urban life in the North, and improved racial, political, and economic opportunities provided motivation for this return flow, as did persistent cultural ties to the region (Leibbrand et al., 2019).

Despite this long history of violent removal and injustice, Indigenous, Black, Acadian, Hispanic, Latino, Caribbean, and Asian communities have established themselves in the U.S. Gulf Coast Region and engaged in economic activity rooted in the resources of its waterways. Although these communities are vibrant and have contributed in countless ways to the

culture and economy of the Gulf region, many have also faced profound challenges in the present, such as those fleeing from Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the Deepwater Horizon disasters (2010), among others.

In this section, the committee has only been able to touch on a few key developments of the Gulf region’s rich and complex history. An understanding of the unique history of each group will support successful planning for relocation and other climate mitigation efforts and the preservation of traditional and cultural practices, an issue the committee discusses further in Chapters 5, 6, and 7.

HISTORICAL LEGACIES

The history above is necessarily brief; for the purposes of this report, the committee wishes to highlight several enduring legacies that play important roles in the present. These specific historical legacies have implications today for communities that in many cases are already bearing the brunt of climate change effects: political disenfranchisement, economic injustice, and the role of place. While the focus below is on impacts within the Gulf states, the committee stresses that these legacies have occurred in their own ways in other parts of the United States.

As discussed above, the Gulf region has experienced invasion and colonization as well as the exploitation and commoditization of human beings through enslavement and land-use practices. The region’s communities of Indigenous, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Latino, and Caribbean people have been underresourced and subject to discrimination, violence, forced relocation, and other injustices. This history has resulted in degraded social and ecological resources and has rendered Gulf residents vulnerable to environmental changes and, in many cases, compromised their political power when decisions were being made. These issues are an important backdrop for the remainder of the report, which discusses strategies for devising optimal relocation efforts.

Political Disenfranchisement

The starkest cause of political disenfranchisement was institutionalized slavery, a system under which enslaved people were not granted citizenship. Additionally, restriction of voting rights denied Black citizens the ability to participate in civic affairs and government decision making, which has had direct implications for their capacity to contribute to deliberations about management of land and resources and responses to environmental challenges (see above for the discussion of strategies used to keep Black people from voting). Historically, and up to the present day, state legislatures continue to pass voting laws that can limit the political representation of

minority groups (Okonta, 2018).⁸ With the completion of the 2020 Census, new battles have developed over the redrawing of district boundaries that decrease the number of congressional seats in Black majority districts in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.⁹

Economic Injustice

There has been significant poverty and economic disadvantage in the U.S. Gulf Coast Region for centuries. A thorough exploration of its economic history is beyond the scope of this report, but without a doubt, the enslavement of Indigenous and African peoples was a primary factor in the economic disadvantages that have persisted to the present day in many parts of the United States. In strictly economic terms, the people who were enslaved for over 400 years were not compensated and did not have the opportunity to accumulate wealth across generations (this is further discussed in the section below on Geographic Vulnerability), resulting in high poverty rates across the Gulf Coast states. As of 2021, the estimated percentage of the population in poverty is 16 percent in Alabama, 13 percent in Florida, 20 percent in Louisiana, 19 percent in Mississippi, and 14 percent in Texas.¹⁰

In the Gulf region, as elsewhere in the South, employment opportunities open to Black Americans after emancipation were menial and poorly paid. Those who labored as sharecroppers found it nearly impossible to escape the economic bondage of that system (Aiken, 2003). Lack of access to jobs paying a living wage, credit from financial institutions, and opportunities to own real estate and other wealth that could be passed on perpetuated poverty. Inadequate education in substandard schools denied Black students opportunities and benefits of citizenship.

This legacy of disadvantage has environmental implications. For example, a 2006 study mapped social vulnerability to multiple hazards across most of the Gulf Coast (Cutter & Emrich, 2006). The scores were particularly high along the western coast of Florida and the full breadth of the Louisiana and Texas coasts.

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⁸ More information is available at https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-june-2023

⁹ More information is available at “Congressional district maps implemented after the 2020 census”: https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_district_maps_implemented_after_the_2020_census

¹⁰ More information, including the number of children in poverty in 2021, is available at https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17826

Geographic Isolation and the Preservation of Culture

As our brief review of the history of migration demonstrates, individuals and communities have been forced to relocate for varied reasons almost as long as humans have lived in the Gulf Region. But whether a group moved long ago or more recently, whether it left or remained in place, many distinct cultural groups—especially economically disadvantaged ones—became geographically isolated and faced discrimination. Geographic isolation has generally made many communities more vulnerable to climate-related challenges; at the same time, it has often also allowed many groups to preserve their cultural heritage and resist assimilation.

Some Indigenous communities are among the most isolated and underresourced groups in the Gulf Region. Many Indigenous communities retreated into the coastal marshes during the colonial and federal removal periods to escape warfare, disease, and enslavement. While formal recognition via the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act provides autonomy over important decisions such as those about the protection and use of land and other resources, as well as access to federal services and resources, obtaining recognition was often difficult if not impossible for myriad reasons.¹¹ The territory that many Indigenous groups occupy is composed of coastal wetlands that have been threatened by land loss. In Louisiana, this includes Indigenous groups such as the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, the United Houma Nation, the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe, and the Grand Bayou community. The Isle de Jean Charles, a narrow island that is disappearing into the coastal marshes of Louisiana, has been home to members of several of these tribes and is currently undergoing a relocation project (see Chapter 3). Additionally, many tribal groups have also faced the desecration and destruction of sacred sites and graveyards by academic institutions, commercial development, and infrastructure projects.¹²

In general, cultural insularity increases group identification, even as it tends to diminish residents’ political influence and constrain their participation in deliberations about the places they live (Arreola, 2002; Leong et al., 2007). The committee considers it important to emphasize the benefits that often come with the establishment of distinct communities that have a geographic home. These benefits include not only increased group identification but also the preservation of language, customs, foodways, and economic practices that interact with the ecosystem, such as the utilization of marine

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¹¹ Although the National Congress of American Indians has advocated for a speedier process, the process of obtaining federal recognition as a tribe can take many years and requires groups to meet complex criteria.

¹² More information is available in the article “The Nation’s Top Universities and Museums Still Have the Remains of Thousands of Native Americans”: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/museums-and-universities-native-americans

resources. Other groups have historically been forced into cultural enclaves in remote places; for example, as discussed above, Acadian immigrants and their descendants adapted their housing, foodways, livelihoods, and methods of agriculture to the local Indigenous ecologies of southern Louisiana (Comeaux, 1978). Alongside this adaptation, however, the Acadian community’s isolation from other European groups was critical for retaining the French language and Catholicism in a region increasingly populated by English-speaking Protestants after 1812. Although persecuted for speaking French in Louisiana’s public schools during the early 20th century, Acadian communities have retained cultural traits, foodways and lifeways, and self-identify as a distinct population. Similarly, the Vietnamese fishing families who migrated to this area in the wake of the Vietnam War have established ethnic enclaves in coastal communities from Texas to Florida, where they live among others who speak their language and share their cultural traditions (see community spotlight on Bayou La Batre in Chapter 5).

Minority and ethnic groups have also often experienced cultural isolation in urban areas, which, as above, has led to a stronger sense of group identity and has also rendered them vulnerable to discrimination. As Black families moved from rural areas into cities, Jim Crow laws and redlining (systematic denial of financial resources or housing access based on race) limited access to financial markets and housing. Such discriminatory lending practices that were sanctioned by the federal government further entrenched segregation even after the earlier practices were deemed illegal by court decisions (Delaney, 1998; Zhu et al., 2022). Black residents established their own communities (Ueland & Warf, 2006). These communities often became hubs for Black entrepreneurship, churches, social institutions, and schools (Inwood, 2011). Yet, policies and lending practices in many cities contributed to a lack of public investment in Black neighborhoods (Zhu et al., 2022). Official designation of the urban territories available for Black residences and deed covenants reinforced the limitations imposed by individual developers (Colten, 2005). White flight from urban centers to suburbs in the latter half of the 20th century reinforced the residential segregation across the region. Although residential segregation is highest in metropolitan areas outside of the South (e.g., Melish, 1998; Ross, 2018), the persistence of segregation and its implications for Southern communities and their residents must be acknowledged. Within-place segregation has diminished in the United States since the 1990s (and in the South since the 1970s) while the expansion of between-place segregation has increased, thereby preserving racial segregation at a larger scale (Hwang & McDaniel, 2022; Iceland et al., 2013; Lichter et al., 2015).

Other groups, including immigrants from Cuba, Mexico, and Honduras, also established urban communities in such cities as Tampa, Miami, New Orleans, Corpus Christi, and Houston. As in Black communities, these

enclaves provided a space where traditional cultures thrived but generally had poor quality housing, infrastructure, and educational facilities. These ethnic enclaves have contributed to both a psychological and institutional barrier to full participation in deliberations about relocation, even as (and because) this relative isolation has allowed for a larger degree of cultural preservation (see Chapter 7).

A community testimonial the committee heard in Houma, Louisiana, expresses the idea that benefits of cultural isolation are associated with the establishment of communities that have a stable geographic home; see Box 4-2.

Geographic Vulnerability

This history of forced migration has given rise to major social and economic injustices that have long characterized much of the Gulf region. One significant consequence is a stark disparity in the safety and security of the places people live, in terms of both environment and quality of housing. As noted above, many groups, beginning with those Indigenous to the region, have been forced to move, often to areas that were distant from traditional hunting and fishing grounds, sacred sites, foraging and gathering sites, and water or forest landscapes that would have been utilized for cultural and subsistence resources. This rendered these groups vulnerable to the loss of cultural knowledge, practices, and, ultimately, identity. Furthermore, such

relocation has often lessened physical safety. The safest real estate in settled areas, including small towns and large cities located in better-drained areas or on higher ground, has typically been acquired by White residents (Ueland & Warf, 2006), who could more easily secure clear legal title to the property. Especially in larger urban areas, the discriminatory practices described above (including deed covenants and redlining practices) led not only to geographic isolation and racially segregated neighborhoods but also to housing vulnerability. Often relegated to low-lying, flood-prone sections of Gulf-region cities, Black and other minority residents faced higher flood risks and other environmental challenges. Such policies and practices excluded Black residents from buying in safer locations until the late 20th century (Colten, 2005; Delaney, 1998). Furthermore, the lower value of houses in these segregated neighborhoods has impeded the ability of minority homeowners to assemble adequate equity to relocate inland if desired (Morris & Diaz, 2020; Van Zandt et al., 2012).

Public utilities and flood protection have excluded minority groups; for example, the Louisiana Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast has excluded some Indigenous communities (Dalbom et al., 2014) and the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project threatens the livelihoods of ethnic oyster farmers and shrimp and crab fishermen (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2022). This vulnerability is magnified by recent adjustments in the National Flood Insurance Program through the new Risk Rating 2.0 methodology (see Chapter 10) that will increase the cost of flood insurance premiums for some properties¹³ and may make selling houses in high-risk locations more difficult, thereby reducing the value of homeowners’ property. Housing in many flood-prone areas is of poor quality, and many communities have insufficient resources for evacuation when storms arrive or to rebuild after a disaster (Bullard & Wright, 2009).

One housing and community concern mentioned frequently by workshop participants is the threat of “climate gentrification”—the displacement of low-income residents and people of color for the construction of high-priced housing for wealthy families. This phenomenon, which has its roots in historical legacies and is not unique to the Gulf region (Best et al., 2023), occurred in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina (Aune et al., 2020) and is evident in coastal Louisiana and other areas of the Gulf where modest homes are replaced by expensive “camps” used by affluent sportsmen.¹⁴ The barrier islands across the Gulf Coast are subject to displacement of

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¹³ More information is available at https://www.fema.gov/flood-insurance/risk-rating

¹⁴ Comments made to the committee on June 26 and 28, 2022, during public information-gathering sessions in Louisiana. More information is available at https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/managed-retreat-in-the-us-gulf-coast-region#sectionPastEvents

service workers and fishing families for condominiums and high-priced residences (Anguelovski et al., 2019).

SUMMARY

The Gulf region comprises varied landscapes and ecosystems that have been occupied for millennia by peoples who have moved, both willingly and through forced relocation. These peoples have continually adapted to changing environmental circumstances, despite enduring profound injustices and brutality. They have established deep and lasting relationships with the places they occupy, making livings and refining their understanding of changing climatic and environmental conditions. Legacies of economic and political injustice have increased the vulnerability of coastal communities and sapped their confidence in government motives and assistance. The committee’s conclusions about the subjects covered in this chapter are below.

CONCLUSIONS

Conclusion 4-1: After European conquest and the extermination and enslavement of Africans and Indigenous peoples in the Gulf region, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 began an institutionalized process of displacement and forced migration of Indigenous peoples from their homelands. Other groups in the region have histories of forced migrations and displacement (e.g., people from Acadia, Vietnam, Cuba). Descendants of these groups that currently face the prospects of relocation report that historical injustices influence their response to current climatic and environmental changes on the Gulf Coast.

Conclusion 4-2: In Gulf communities, many of which are often poor, racial power imbalances do not reflect constituent populations and therefore undermine community agency. The long-term, historical dynamics of disenfranchisement and disengagement are at the core of discussions about relocation.