August 29, 2005 is a day that lives in infamy in the Gulf South. On that day, Hurricane Katrina slammed onto shore at the Mississippi/Louisiana state line as a powerful and massive hurricane. Twenty years later, it remains the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. For both of us, August 29 was the day that changed everything.
The storm forced us to make the heart-wrenching decision to leave our homes, businesses, and families, uncertain if we would return again. Today, that experience shapes the way that we look at and participate in conversations around immigration and the artificiality of borders. We saw in real time what it meant to have the right to remain, to migrate, and to return.
Both of us left New Orleans shortly before the storm made landfall as the city warned us all that they “did not have enough body bags.” We went in two different, but equally uncertain directions. In the last hours before traffic was cut off, Andrei boarded up his windows and left behind his thriving graphic design firm and headed to Atlanta. Faye, who was on the cusp of her sophomore year of college, piled into the car with her immediate and extended family and embarked on what they expected to be a nine-hour car-ride to Dallas, Texas. It turned out to be a 24-hour journey.
After the storm, like everyone else, we saw the gut-wrenching images of a city flooded, people stranded, and infrastructure toppled. Faye watched her own family members wade through the waters in an attempt to make it to safety right before communication was completely cut off. We listened with horror as people who left after Katrina were labelled as “refugees” in their own country and armed blockades prevented some from crossing into a neighboring city. They were criminalized simply for seeking safety and resources. They were labeled looters for taking food, clean water and diapers from the ruins of abandoned stores or shot at on the Danziger Bridge.
When we eventually returned after the storm, we faced the difficulties of picking up the scattered pieces. Andrei’s business was ruined, both physically and financially. Like many others, he did not have flood insurance, so there was no mechanism to recover his loss. Faye’s family home was destroyed and, as renters without rent insurance, they lost pretty much everything. Still, like many others, we tried to put things back together again, as best we could.
We also worked to create the conditions that would allow so many others displaced by the storm return home. Katrina launched a wave of gentrification and “poverty deconcentration” efforts like the emptying and demolition of public housing projects. These initiatives made it effectively impossible for lower-income families—the very heart and soul of New Orleans, some would argue—to return.
We’re now part of Taproot Earth, a frontline climate justice organization that was born in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We work to create the conditions where those of us on the frontlines of the climate crisis can lead with our own knowledge and vision. The wisdom we carry from surviving Katrina created a vision of collective freedom. By centering frontline leadership, we move closer to a place where communities are powerful enough to shape the just future we deserve.
Taproot Earth also believes that the right to remain in your generational and ancestral home, to migrate out of harm’s way, and to return to your home are basic, inalienable, human rights. In our framework, migration is not a climate problem, but a solution. As such, we believe that political borders have no place on a warming planet, and that the abolition of such barriers is critical for ultimate climate justice.
To this day, the migration that took place before and after Katrina remains one of the largest movements of people in American history. It is still the largest diaspora of climate-displaced people in the country, as 40 percent of people have not returned. This is a pattern that did not stop with Katrina. Massive migrations followed Hurricane Maria, the Camp Fire, and the earthquake that ravaged Haiti in 2010.
This summer, the island nation of Tuvalu started the process of evacuating its entire population due to the rising seas. Here in South Louisiana, the United Houma Nation is grappling with similar questions about how to maintain their culture as their land disappears. We live in a world where the seas are going to keep rising, and people will keep moving. We need to make it a world where people can do so with safety and dignity, and with their cultures and traditions intact.
Among a long list of lessons, Katrina taught us that climate migration is not a distant possibility, it’s already here. We were among the first in recent history to be displaced by a storm of its magnitude, but we absolutely will not be the last. As survivors of Katrina, and as organizers today, we carry the lesson that migration must be understood as a fundamental human right. Twenty years later, the grief remains, but so does the will to rebuild, resist, and reimagine.
Teaser image credit: Slidell, LA, October 14, 2005 – Traffic resumes on the newly opened I-10 “Twin-Span” Bridge connecting Slidell with New Orleans after repairs were made on damage made by Hurricane Katrina. This image is a work of a Federal Emergency Management Agency employee, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As works of the U.S. federal government, all FEMA images are in the public domain in the United States.