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Katrina, Rita and the Houma: ‘We Lost Everything’

By Mary Hudetz and Victor Merina | Multimedia by Steven A. Chin

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RACELAND, La.—After losing his home to Hurricane Katrina, Michael Dardar, vice principal chief of the United Houma Nation, spent weeks wading through flooded streets or driving through devastated neighborhoods, delivering food and supplies to other tribal members devastated by Katrina and then Hurricane Rita.

More than 2-1/2 years later, Dardar still makes the long journey three times a week to work and to visit tribal members in the Lower Plaquemines Parish communities that he represents on the tribal council. But he does so from his new home 100 miles away.

Today, Dardar lives with his wife, Daisy, and two grandchildren in the town of Raceland in a doublewide mobile home once considered a temporary shelter but now their permanent home.

"There's progress here and there," Dardar said about picking up the pieces of a hurricane-shattered life for himself and other Houma. "But overall, it's still a slow process."

In his old hometown of Venice-Boothville in Lower Plaquemines Parish at the southeastern tip of Louisiana is a vacant lot where the Dardar home once stood. It is a reminder of how dramatically life has changed in those turbulent days since August 2005 when Katrina swept through the region with its howling winds and giant gulf surge, leaving virtually everything in its path flattened or underwater and mostly uninhabitable.

"We lost everything, so there isn't a thing to rebuild," said the 46-year-old Dardar. "I don't think I'll ever get over it."

Like others in the afflicted areas, Dardar received assistance to help in the recovery, but with grandchildren enrolled in school and amid other changes, he has found a new life in a new neighborhood. He is more fortunate than some Houma who still await financial aid or other help from state and federal authorities and others whose wrecked homes and lives rely on volunteer relief workers or the Houma Nation and tribal leaders like Dardar to help them.

Katrina displaced about 4,000 Houma Indians, according to the tribe, and Rita left an equal number homeless several weeks later. In all, nearly half of the Houma Nation's 17,000 members lost homes or businesses or suffered severe damage in the storms.

Lower Plaquemines Parish is the most remote of the Houma communities, and it, St. Bernard and Jefferson parishes have the smallest concentration of tribal members. But those Houma suffered the most extensive damages from Katrina's 150 mph winds as the nation's third most intense hurricane touched land in eastern Louisiana and brought floodwaters.

The Flooded Landscape

Like most everyone in the storm's path, Dardar fled with his family before Katrina hit. When he returned more than two weeks later, he viewed his devastated community and his submerged home from a small airplane above the flooded landscape.

In Dulac, where surging water swept away many Houma homes, he wore knee-high fisherman's boots to take food and supplies to tribal members. Months later, he was finally allowed back in his own neighborhood after the water had subsided and the worst debris had been cleared. Now, years later, he continues to deal with tribal members recovering from the hurricanes.

"It's really a slow rebuilding process," Dardar said.

Herman DeMoll is among tribal members Dardar visits in Lower Plaquemines Parish. Only recently did DeMoll receive money from the state that would allow him to move his family, which includes his wife, Neta, and their two grandchildren, into a large mobile home. Previously, DeMoll had lived in a tent for a while and then a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer parked with others in a relative's lot.

"It took everything away," DeMoll said of the hurricane.

Neta DeMoll agreed and lamented losing their home of 35 years that once was located in a settlement called "The Village," which no longer exists. "Knowing that it was home," she began before dissolving into tears. Her voice trailed off. "And now we don't have it."

Besides losing his home, DeMoll lost all but 16 of 600 crab traps that he used for more than a decade to earn a living. Although he replaced some of those from a tribal fund aimed at helping fishermen like him, he remained wary of the future.

"My grandfather, my dad, all my uncles, all my people, that's all they've ever done was fish," he said.

While Katrina devastated the Houma in DeMoll's parish, those who lived to the west in lower bayou communities found their homes flooded by Hurricane Rita, which followed in late September 2005. About 13,000 Houma, or 80 percent of the tribe, live in this portion of the Gulf Coast that includes St. Mary's, Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes.

"In Terrebonne Parish, you had three to five feet of water, six feet of water, and so it was easier to recover your home," said Brenda Dardar Robichaux, principal chief of the Houma Nation.

But repairing and restoring a home has become arduous and costly. "It's going to be an ongoing process," Dardar Robichaux said. "It's going to take quite some time."

Help From Volunteers

To help the Houma, volunteers from church groups, faith-based organizations, colleges and other Native American tribes have visited Louisiana to rebuild houses and provide other assistance over the last 2-1/2 years. The hundreds of volunteers from dozens of tribes include Lumbees from North Carolina, Cherokees from Oklahoma and Senecas from New York.

The National Congress of American Indians became one of the first groups to donate to Houma relief efforts after representatives joined tribal leaders on that early plane ride above Lower Plaquemines Parish.

Karen Basedow of South Orange, N.J., will be returning to Louisiana this weekend with her family and about 30 other members of her Methodist church in Maplewood, N.J. It will be her third visit to assist the Houma since the hurricanes struck.

Even with all the restructured homes and rebuilt lives, Basedow said the work that needs to be done in the community is still substantial. "Other groups have gone down there, but I’m not sure that a whole lot has changed," she said of the persistent struggles facing the Houma.

"The hurricanes brought a lot of attention to the area," Basedow added. "It’s a good start, but there’s still a lot to be done."

Church World Services, a nondenominational charity group, established a $100,000 fund in early 2006 for tribal members needing home repairs.

More recently, at the end of January on the eve of this year's Mardi Gras celebrations, officials from the Blue Moon Fund, a Virginia-based philanthropic foundation, met with Dardar Robichaux to explore ways that the Houma could develop long-range strategies to preserve their community. She described the effort as part of an ambitious plan to aid three Louisiana communities hard hit by the hurricanes: the Ninth Ward of New Orleans with its largely African American population, the racially mixed Carrollton/Hollygrove area of the city and the bayous of the Houma Nation.

Meanwhile, The Road Home, a state housing recovery program designed to help Louisiana residents afflicted by the hurricanes, has helped some Houma. Money from the Louisiana Recovery Authority and the Houma Nation's general recovery fund have also enabled the tribe to provide $1,000 grants to Houma fishermen, whose damaged boats and tattered nets prevented them from returning to their jobs or working as much as they would like in the fishing, crabbing and shrimping professions.

"The difference with us compared to other state programs is we encourage them to continue their traditional work," said Louise Billiot, a counselor who works for the tribe's vocational rehabilitation services and helps to administer the fishing grants program.

While the grant is not likely to cover all of one fisherman's needs, it will help those who want to return to work, she added.

'Yep, Almost Ready to Go'

Ivy Pierre, a Houma fisherman, applied for such funds. As he stood on the muddy banks of the Bayou Dulac, which runs near his house, he gazed at the boat he has owned for more than 25 years and was damaged by the hurricanes.

"Yep, almost ready to go," he said with a nod and a voice that carries the accent of the Houma French language that he and many fellow tribal members speak.

At 80 years old, the vigorous Pierre has been in the shrimp business for more than six decades. But damage from Katrina's fierce winds and Rita's floods had kept him from fishing on the 48-foot boat he calls "Twin Cities."

Pierre lives with his wife, Lillian, 76, on Shrimper's Row, a community that is home to a large number of Houma, and he can readily identify scars left by the storms. He pointed to a faded line on an outside wall of his white, single-story home. He walked over and stretched his arm upward beyond the six-foot mark to show the water's peak and to touch the spot water had reached when the relentless surge came from the flooded bayou.

In Dulac and other bayou communities, many homeowners have raised their houses on wooden supports and beams to combat future floods. But others cannot look that far ahead and are merely trying to cope day to day.

"We struggled, lost everything," said Ernest Dion, a Houma who lives along Shrimper's Row and was left with only a few hundred dollars to repair the $10,000 in damages to his boat. Without his own vessel, he eventually found work on a tugboat to make ends meet.

Some Houma are only now restoring their houses or still waiting for assistance.

In February, out-of-state volunteers from Methodist churches in Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Arkansas were busy repairing the house of Antoine Francis, whose home had been gutted and left without a protective roof. His daughter, Relta, said her 84-year-old father's face shone when he saw the new roof put in place.

"When he saw the workers on it, he was so excited," she said.

A few houses away, Michael Parfait, 48, sat in the house that he has lived in since birth and is now damaged by widespread mold, warped walls, torn ceilings and a ripped kitchen roof that causes flooding during each rain. Parfait, who has a new refrigerator and stove donated by a relief agency sitting in his kitchen, said he cannot plug them in because of the dangerous conditions. He awaits word on whether he will receive financial assistance after long-standing applications.

"It's hard to live this way," he said, "and I've been living this way since the hurricane."

'Frustration With the Bureaucracy'

Paige Ashby, director of the governor's Office of Indian Affairs, said she sympathizes with people like Parfait who may be waiting for help from state and federal sources. Without commenting on his specific case, she said the overall process has been slowed by necessary paperwork and by officials trying to make sure that applicants were making legitimate claims.

"I recognize the frustration," said Ashby in her Baton Rouge office. "I understand the frustration with the bureaucracy."

For Michael Dardar, who chose to stay in his transplanted neighborhood, frustration lingers as does regret about not returning to his old community in Lower Plaquemines Parish where he had lived for more than 40 years. But when he drives there thrice weekly to his job as a diesel mechanic and visits as a tribal council member, he sees family and other Houma who have resettled. He drives along the peninsula that stretches into the Gulf of Mexico and passes the empty lot where his mobile home stood.

Save for a tall cypress tree that Dardar's father had planted, the lot is vacant. Gone are local businesses like the popular pizza restaurant and grocery store. Still present are offices with boarded windows and the shells of abandoned homes.

Dardar finds hope in the lingering recovery.

Over the latest Mardi Gras weekend, he sat in the trailer that he now calls home and spoke of the stories of survival and perseverance among the Houma and relief workers — Indians and non-Indians alike — who came to help.

"As terrible as the hurricane experience was to us, a lot of these stories followed," Dardar said. "A lot of opportunities, a lot of new friends, a lot of positive things have come about since the storm that we're thankful for."

Mary Hudetz, Crow, is a journalism graduate student at the University of Montana in Missoula. She is a graduate of the Freedom Forum’s 2006 American Indian Journalism Institute. Last summer, she interned as a reporter at the Star Tribune newspaper in Minneapolis, under the Freedom Forum’s Chips Quinn Scholars Program.

Victor Merina is reznet's special projects editor and reporter. A former Los Angeles Times staff writer, he also is a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. Merina is a visiting faculty member at The Poynter Institute, where he leads seminars on cross-cultural reporting and writing about race.

Steven A. Chin is reznet's managing editor. A former new media specialist at the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and former reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, Chin is principal of MKmedia, a web development consulting firm.