Isle de Jean Charles

In 1955 Isle de Jean Charles was over 22,000 acres. In 2026 it is roughly 320 acres. The island has lost ninety-eight percent of itself in seventy years — not to a single storm but to the compound slow disaster of the American oil economy: the Houma Navigation Canal cut through in 1962 and brought saltwater into freshwater wetlands. Ten thousand miles of pipeline across south Louisiana subsided the soil. Levees upriver starved the delta of the sediment that had been building this land for a thousand years. Then Katrina. Rita. Gustav. Ida.

The people here are Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. Their ancestors settled this island in the 1830s, removed from the mainland under Jackson's Indian Removal Act, building a French-speaking fishing community in the bayous no one else wanted. In 2016 the federal government awarded $48 million to resettle the remaining twenty-six families to Schriever, forty miles north. Most have moved. A few have stayed. The island, which was the mainland when their great-grandparents arrived, will be open water within a generation.

Louisiana has done this before, faster, and barely down the coast. Last Island lay in this same parish — Terrebonne — a short run to the southwest. The Gulf took it in a single afternoon in 1856: the resort gone, nearly two hundred people dead by nightfall. Isle de Jean Charles is that same story slowed down until you can watch it happen — not one wave but a tide line moving in over a lifetime, close enough that the people losing the ground can name the year each piece went under. The ending is the same. The slowness is the only mercy, and it is not much of one.