United Houma Nation Launches Climate Mitigation Plan in Southern Louisiana - The Margin

Following The Margin's in-depth reporting on the United Houma Nation's decades-long fight for federal recognition and how that status gap heightened its climate exposure, the U.S. Dept. of Commerce and NOAA awarded a $56.5 million grant to implement a multi-phase disaster and resilience plan. Now, that plan is underway. The funding will assist six hurricane-prone parishes in South Louisiana, including Lafourche Parish, home to the United Houma Nation.     

When Sherry Parfait, a Tribal citizen of the United Houma Nation, heard her Tribe had been awarded a $56.5 million federal grant in July 2024 to help the Nation adapt to climate change, she could not believe it. “My jaw dropped,” she remembers. “I didn’t think it was possible.” 

The 2024 multi-million dollar federal grant represented a long-awaited acknowledgment from the federal government and a new chance for Parfait and others to protect their land and their Tribe from climate disasters. 

“Today marks a really historical occasion for all of us,” said Houma Principal Chief, Lora Ann Chaisson, at the press conference organized to announce the grant. “This funding represents not just a financial boost, but an enormous step towards empowering our people, uplifting our communities and securing a brighter future for generations to come.”

The Margin’s in-depth reporting in 2022 spotlighted how the lack of federal recognition heightened the United Houma Nation’s exposure to climate disasters like Hurricane Ida, which hit Louisiana in August 2021. The storm left 26 dead, 14,000 displaced, and 75% of the buildings damaged or destroyed in Lafourche Parish, one of the hardest-hit areas and one of the parishes with the highest number of Tribal citizens. 

In the hours after the storm, Parfait, a media professional and president of the New Orleans Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, volunteered her services, drafting a press release to inform the public of the devastation her Tribe was facing. In the following days and weeks, she counted over seventy articles published in national and international media — an impressive number, considering that Tribal Nations often go underreported — and, when the news cycle moved on, The Margin uncovered the long-lasting impact of Hurricane Ida and detailed the decades-long fight for federal recognition. 

“That kind of journalism is key to telling the story of the place,” Parfait says. She explains that deep narrative journalism can help people get a comprehensive understanding of the toll coastal erosion is taking on Tribal communities like the one she grew up in, where hurricanes and climate change have forced dozens of Tribal members to leave. “It looks like the place is barely hanging on,” she says.

The grant was funded through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), under the Climate Resilience Regional Challenge, a $575 million program to make coastal communities more resilient to climate change and other environmental hazards. Funding for the program was made possible through the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. While the second Trump administration cracked down on the initiative, canceling over 350 environmental justice grants, so far, the Tribe’s funding has not been affected by the cuts. 

As part of this program, the Tribe hired a team of local environmental experts to train the community on climate mitigation practices as well as disaster preparedness and recovery. While the grant focuses on protecting Tribal land and culture, the final phase of the plan aims to develop community-led migration strategies. Chief Chaisson hopes this will help Houma citizens facing ongoing land loss find options to remain close to their ancestral land. “Resilience should not automatically mean relocating people from the places that define who they are,” she wrote in an email to The Margin. “It should mean carefully planning for the future while protecting cultural connections, family ties, traditional knowledge, and a sense of community.”

Thanks to the funding, the Houma headquarters, damaged during Hurricane Ida, is also being renovated and is now set to become the community’s primary emergency shelter and distribution center, supporting both Tribal and non-Tribal members. 

The Tribe is also repurposing local buildings into so-called “resilience satellite hubs,” service centers providing disaster assistance after a storm and preparation training throughout the year. “Our citizens are spread across six parishes,” Chief Chaisson wrote. “These hubs can help us bring services, communication, planning, and community engagement closer to where our people live.”

Some of the buildings involved in the project hold profound historical value for the Tribe. The Daigleville School in Houma, for example, was the only public high school in the area that allowed Native Americans in the 1960s. “Restoring those spaces as satellite hubs is not simply about renovating buildings,” Chief Chaisson wrote. “It is about bringing life back to places that already hold deep meaning for our people and using them again to serve future generations.”

Michael Dardar, a Tribal historian, believes the program’s aim to combine historical preservation with climate preparedness is “very exciting.”

“[It] is a step towards Native sovereignty,” says Dardar. “And towards self-sufficiency.” 

Others remain skeptical about the grant’s long-term impact. 

According to 2018 data, nearly 17% of Tribal citizens live in poverty, and 18% are uninsured. Those who strive to make ends meet often struggle to see how grant funding benefits their everyday lives. “We have citizens who can’t afford electricity or medicine,” says Adam Crappel, a Tribal citizen and former Tribal council member who’s running for Principal Chief in the runoff election against incumbent Chief Chaisson, which will be held on 5 September. “It’s a one-time grant,” Crappel adds. “How are we going to support [our members] if we don’t get federally recognized?”

Chief Chaisson acknowledges that the program’s impact might not be immediately visible. “The greatest challenge is that the environmental changes are happening extremely fast, while large programs and government processes often move much more slowly,” she wrote, adding that a grant of this size entails significant administrative, financial, technical, and reporting responsibilities. “We have to build the internal capacity needed to manage these responsibilities,” she explained.

August “Cocoa” Creppel, who served as Principal Chief during the Covid-19 pandemic and Hurricane Ida, says that receiving such an important federal grant exposed, once again, the inconsistency of the federal government’s treatment of the United Houma Nation. “You recognize us as a Tribe to give us federal funds, but you don’t recognize us to get federal recognition,” he says.

Since The Margin published its investigation in 2022, Clay Higgins, the Republican representative for Louisiana’s 3^rd Congressional District, introduced a new bill, the “United Houma Recognition Act 2024,” to give the Tribe federal acknowledgment. While this bill hasn’t moved forward in over two years, the $56.5 million grant renewed some Tribal members’ faith in the process. “We are closer than we’ve ever been,” Chief Chaisson wrote.

Parfait says this financial acknowledgment was particularly significant to the elders, who survived segregation in Southern Louisiana and fought for federal recognition for nearly fifty years. “They endured more than we ever have in my generation,” Parfait says. Like others, she also believes the grant brought the Nation one step closer to federal recognition.

“To receive that after being ignored and having the door slammed on us for decades,” she adds, “it's made us more hopeful."

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