Letter: SLT’s path

To the editor:

The Journal-World recently put an aerial photo of the South Lawrence Trafficway in progress on the front page. I’ve spent a lot of time on Google Earth recently looking at Dulac, Golden Meadow, Montegut, and Isle Du Jean St. Charles in Louisiana. The Houma Nation and Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Confederacy call what’s left of this area their home.

Euro-American manipulation of the land there for oil and flood control purposes have threatened this land along with global warming and sea level rising that will cause some of these people to become global warming refugees looking for higher lands that the settlers ran them off of in the early 19th century.

In Lawrence I look at a path that’s destroyed an area where indigenous students were treated like indentured servants by BIA Christian overseers in the early 20th century at Haskell. I see a populace and politicians in historical denial. The students of early Haskell were driven to the wetlands by Christian overseers, and the Louisiana Indians were driven to the end of land wetlands by greed and racism and denial.

The descendants of both peoples now contend with canals and roadways destroying their surroundings and a populace without conscience. Whose history matters?