Burial Grounds, Pointe Aux Chenes, Louisiana, 2000

Archival pigment print, first edition, 2 of 14, 12 x 18 in, NFS, Private collection

Houma elder, Armantine Billiot Verdin, took a boat ride down Bayou Pointe aux Chenes (Point of the Oaks), 3 miles past the end of the road and the manmade canal called the “Cutoff”, to visit the place she grew up, where the burial grounds of ancestors sit between skeleton oak trees. Pointe aux Chenes is experiencing some of the most rapid land loss in the world, due to sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion induced by a maze of canals dredged through our territories, delta subsidence, levee infrastructure and natural resource extraction.