Introduction
Thomas Dardar is Principal Chief of the United Houma Nation (UHN) based in Houma, Louisiana. The UHN is a tribe of approximately 17,000 people who live within six Louisiana southeastern coastal parishes: Terrebonne, Lafourche, Jefferson, St. Mary, St. Bernard, and Plaquemines. Mr. Dardar was an active participant in the United Nations Climate Change Conference (Conference of the Parties 21 [COP 21]) in Paris and continues his strong advocacy for climate justice as the UHN is increasingly threatened by coastal land loss, sea level rise, and the impacts of strong Gulf hurricanes. The UHN served as a community hub for seafood sampling and managed a UHN health study cohort during the Gulf Coast Health Alliance: Health Risks Related to the Macondo Spill (GC-HARMS) project. Mr. Dardar was interviewed on 17 March 2017 in order to provide him with an opportunity to discuss the impacts of the Deep Water Horizon oil disaster and climate justice issues on the health and land base of the Houma Nation.
INTERVIEWER: What impacts did the Deep Water Horizon well disaster have on your own community and the south Louisiana region?
DARDAR: Any time a disaster like that happens, it happens at the worst time, but our people were getting ready for trawling season in May. They’d just got their boats out of dry dock. Nets had been put on the boat. Fuel was put on the boat, and ice was purchased, and we all hoped for a good year. Then, they were told they wouldn’t be able to go out and fish their grounds. The psychological point was people who normally made a living from fishing and consumed a lot of it were really scared for many, many years. Some now today still, because even if the government says it’s all right, history has proven to the Houma people that you still need to be leery and be careful. So we might think it’s safe because we read the reports. We’ve been to a lot of meetings and the scientists brought in the results. We have all this information which we share with the general populace of the Houma Nation, but they might still say: “OK, good, but we’ll just stay away from it a little while longer.” The spill also impacted the guys [who] work on these rigs and make a living also on the other side of the fisher folks. A lot of them lost their jobs, when the rigs shutdown. The industry is still feeling the downturn. Some of them even quit and moved out of the area. It’s a shame, these bright minds that came through the ranks, that know how to turn a wrench, how to open a valve and do it all safely: a lot of these guys have moved on.
INTERVIEWER: It definitely can be a dangerous industry. Speaking of the Houma region and some of the other environmental things that you’re dealing with, what threats would you see to your community because of climate changing and things associated with that, like sea level rise and land loss?
DARDAR: Exactly. Much of the land loss can be attributed to the oil industry. They came in and they dug these location canals through the marsh and were not forced to close them off when they left. They just threw the mud, the dredge spoil on the site, and these lands rapidly deteriorated. Now, with the climate situation it’s not just south Louisiana; you can find people in trouble all over the Global South. I learned about this because I was able to go to COP 21 in Paris [Conference of the Parties 21—UN climate change conference in 2015]. When you say the Global South, it incorporates native peoples. It seems that many native peoples live in areas where the sea is rising. In Alaska, the natives are losing their land because it’s ice or permafrost and it’s melting. You hear these politicians and scientists argue about whether climate change is real, or just fictitious. Well, I can show you where we farmed when I was a kid. We had cattle; we had horses, pastureland, and trees. Now you can look around these marshes and see these big ghost oak trees—just a skeleton of a tree, really. That was hard land once because oak trees do not grow in the marsh. Now you get cypress and cedar trees because they’ll grow in water. When we see cypress trees and cedar there, we know that land is surrounded by water, and water will eventually eat away at and inundate that land. The land loss here is rapid. We have a tribe of people who are staying on Isle Jean Charles, Jean Charles Island, but they’re being relocated because of the land loss. The island used to be five miles wide; and now it’s only about a half a mile wide.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, I’ve seen it. We went out there after Hurricane Rita. It sure doesn’t look five miles wide.
DARDAR: No, it was five miles when I was a kid. I’m 61, now. When I was a kid, we used to play there. Me and my sister would jump the fence, and we would go run in the pasture out where the cattle grazed. I often had to grab her and run back because the bulls chased us back to the fence. Now, there’s barely any land left behind these homes. There’s a little makeshift levee that surrounds the whole island just to keep out the tide when the wind comes out of the east and the south, so it doesn’t flood the island any more. Every time you had a southeast wind blowing, the island road would flood. So, they built that little ring levee around it to keep it, and they put a little pump station in there. Bad thing is when they have a hurricane and the water comes over the levee, then you got to wait till somebody comes and pumps it out, whereas before, it would come in and then it would go out on its own.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, luckily for Galveston Island, when we got inundated by Ike, it went in and out.
DARDAR: It flows back out, right. We had more of our tribal citizens flooded when Rita passed offshore 280 miles from us. That wind pushed the water in and flooded our communities, affected all the southeastern part of our tribe, toward Isle Jean Charles and Montague, Grand Caillou, Dulac. Our people have to become more resilient as the climate changes. We tell people, back in the day, we retreated from the Europeans, went to the coast. Now we may have to retreat back into the central part of the state as the Gulf—because of climate change—claims more and more of the land. So, that’s why it’s so imperative that we try to get land and try to keep our people in a community so they can keep our Houma identity.
INTERVIEWER: You all are ground zero for this, really, in the United States. I have never seen anything like it in terms of how much you lose every month.
DARDAR: Every month? Say every day we lose the equivalent of many football fields. They say like one field’s worth every forty-five minutes somewhere in south Louisiana. And we say if the rest of the country was being invaded and losing a football field of land by invasion from another country, the whole United States would be at war trying to stop it. But here it is, because it’s human beings—not an endangered species—they just say: oh, they can just relocate. Outsiders don’t realize the ties to land we have in our culture. I tell people, we don’t own the land; the land owns us. And, in turn, we respect the land. We try to maintain it, care for it. Losing the land you feel like you’re losing your identity, losing a part of your family. It’s like you’re experiencing slow death. My uncle, he made a great statement about it. He said—and I used his words when I went on Capitol Hill and testified at one of the Senate committee hearings. He said:
People used to come to us and say we were poor. We looked around and we didn’t know what they were talking about. They brought us trinkets and all that, but when they went to leave, we filled up the back of their car, truck, whatever, with fresh seafood that we caught. That we harvested and plants that we grew. We gave it to them. So, we’d laugh. We’d say they came and saw what they called poverty, but we felt rich in our culture and the land. Our parents and our grandparents and everybody nurtured us with that knowledge.
We didn’t feel like we’re poor because we’re well adapted to our land. But now we feel less that way because the gulf is eating away at our shores, eating away at our doors, eating away at our culture. But we’re trying to hold on to our Houma identity as long as we can and fight for that.
INTERVIEWER: Thanks for sharing that. I’m going to skip now, based on what you just said, over to this idea of coinhabiting the land with so many industrial neighbors. You can’t fight it; you have to coexist or collaborate because you share the same livelihood in many cases. So, what have you done to work with your industrial neighbors on things like reclamation of marshlands, or other projects to slow down land loss and help rebuild the hurricane-dampening effect of the marsh?
DARDAR: You used to have the barrier islands, and now these barrier islands are washing away. There’s been a few oil companies that have come in with reclamation projects. For example, Shell cosponsored one we worked with. We put soil on plastic mats, planted grass on them, and spiked them down along the edge of the marsh to see if it would take root. And it did—this is up in the St. Bernard area. The companies have a vested interest here because if the land goes, so will a lot of their facilities. They’re right along the edge of it all, too, and they realize that the land loss is here and it’s real, and when you talk to them, a few of them are realizing that something has to be done. Not a lot of them, not all of them, but a few of them are starting to realize that they need to give back to the communities down the bayou.
INTERVIEWER: You just said that this was done up in St. Bernard Parish. Now, how many parishes are Houma living in?
DARDAR: Six parishes along the southeast coast of Louisiana, all the way from St. Mary to St. Bernard. You have Terrebonne, Lafourche, Jefferson, Plaquemines. Our tribe’s all along the edge in the six parishes that I just named. And living along the edge. There’s a plan to relocate the island—Isle de Jean Charles—as I mentioned earlier, that they’re trying to do a model program, and we’re trying to be very supportive of that because of what they’re trying to do. If they can succeed in making this work, it may be a model plan to help the rest of the world, really. So, we’re really trying to work with the agency that’s in charge of this and give them support and make sure that they understand we’re not trying to hinder this, that we’re really behind it to make sure it works. Because while they trying to move just one community, we have five other communities in harm’s way as we speak right now. We haven’t had a storm, thank God, in a few years, but it’s only a matter of when the next one comes. And are we going to be ready for it?
INTERVIEWER: You told me earlier about a Community Wellness Center. When did you begin this wellness center?
DARDAR: Our wellness center is in the next room over. You see people sitting in there, talking to other people. Not only are they getting wellness treatments, they’re also able to communicate with each other. That communication is essential because with all our losses, this is like a comfort zone. They look forward to coming here. The tribe put this together, maybe two or three years ago when we finished with our diabetes program. We did this when we realized how many people in our area were affected by diabetes, cancer, respiratory diseases. We went to a benefit, and there were so many people there with lost limbs and just, not doing great, and their health was bad. It really moved my heart, really stirred me. So we got together with Mercy Family Center and now they’re a cosponsor. This center gives us another avenue to nudge our thinking, help us focus, and really communicate.
It all ties back to what’s happening in our communities, what they’re facing now. Like when you tell somebody hey, look, I’m sorry, you may have to move from your lifelong home that’s been in your family for 300 years. So now we’re down to 25 families that live over there on Isle de Jean Charles. When the next storm comes through, how many families will be left? When will they fix the road again? It took them almost three, four years before they fixed the road after Rita.
INTERVIEWER: You talked about land and the connection to the land. How would you relate the environmental justice struggle around stewardship responsibilities for the land and the water and everything else to the Houma Nation spiritual relationship to place and traditional practices? Like subsistence fishing?
DARDAR: That’s a real tough one because it goes back to like you say, when I was a kid. My dad lived on there. He came from there. We visit there all the time. And when you went there, you just knew this was home. This was family. This was where everything happened. People died. They’d wake them in the homes. They keep them in home, and we stayed there all night because you didn’t leave the dead alone. So, you stayed there all night with them. In the morning, you’d get up and you’d go on your boat, because the day before, you got it prepped and you’d go out, you’d fish. Come back in, you’d sell your catch. The next day, that afternoon, you get your boat ready again, you go visit with the family. If one boat caught, everybody, the whole village would eat. The whole tribe would eat. And they would share. If somebody would be a farmer, they would grow, and we traded among each other. And today, you don’t have that. One of the things is that we always said we wanted better for our kids. And I know maybe you said it to your relations and said we want to do better for you. But one day I was sitting down with my grandchildren, and we were sitting there and that thought came back to me. And my parents, I’m the oldest of 11 siblings, so I have one of them that passed away, so we’re 10 of us. And we knew hard work. We knew how to work. We knew what togetherness was. My children, my son, he worked on a boat, caught shrimp, fished for redfish. He did these things. My baby, well, because of my work in the oilfield industry and all that, I sold my boats. I had three of them and I sold them. And I devoted all my time to my profession in the oil field. I’m a blaster painter by trade, but I’m a NACE III inspector now. [NACE is the National Association of Corrosion Engineers. It advances corrosion control and safety in various industries. It offers various training programs and certificates. ed.] That means nothing to a whole lot of people, but it’s an accomplishment for me. I made it to the top in my field of work. So, NACE III tells me I’m a coating inspector. But then I look back at my grandchildren and I asked them. I said we’re going to have to go trawling, go throw a cast net. They all twist their head and look at me because now they play these Game Boys or something like that.
INTERVIEWER: Xbox.
DARDAR: Xbox, thank you. And I watch them play this and man, I thought it was a movie on TV because they were playing it flawlessly. But they don’t know how to catch a fish. They don’t know how to throw a cast net. They’ve never seen a live shrimp because all they’ve ever seen it is fried, shrimp boulette, étouffée, or boiled, something like that. So, they didn’t see it in its natural habitat. Oyster. They don’t know. They see them in the sack. My wife pops them, opens them, and fries them. They see it in the sack, so they don’t know where it actually comes from and its environment that it lives in. That’s how it goes now.
So when I look back over the years and you say the relation to the land and we’re a good steward of the land, how good are we? We’ve got to take some of that responsibility because of the infrastructure and the money. Industry came in and waved the low-hanging fruit. While you’re looking at their left hand with the fruit, the right hand is digging and tearing up our marshes. But your eye is still on this fruit. And they throw you a few dollars because when you’re fisher folk, with one season really good but the next season you go so far behind in debt it’s hard to get out. They’re hanging this fruit in front of you and telling you, man, you come work here, you’re going to get a check every week. And some of our people worked both ends of it. I’ve been in the industry long enough to where I’ve worked both ends of it, too. When the shrimping was good, I was trawling. When the oil field was up and booming, I was working there because maybe then the price on shrimp went down. So, I played both ends.
Now, I just play this industry end because now with the influx of market shrimp that comes in from overseas, driving the price down, it’s just not lucrative to fish. But yet, when I look back at my grandkids and our culture and our way of life, I have to think: did we really make it better for them and the Earth? Or did we just get blinded or too focused on this easier fruit that we really missed what was essential in life? Yes, we wanted them to have a better life, but what is a better life?
Now, I go to the doctor, and he wants to give me medication. And I fight him all the time. I say Doc, I went twelve years through school, and you all told me to stay away from drugs, and now you’re peddling drugs over here with a license. [laughter] So, he looks at me, and he tells me, really, what you talking about? I say there’s natural herbs, natural medicines. And that’s part of what we lost. We lost herbs and the medicine. So that’s why I don’t want to take your medicine. He said well, you got to take this then. I said I’ll try it. But then, I’ll try to get with the traiteurs [native Creole healer or a traditional healer of the French-speaking Houma Tribe] and ask them: OK, what is the natural medicine that I can take that’ll remedy my problem. That’s why we had medicine gardens. When we’d get sick, toothache, headache, whatever, my grandma would go to the garden, sing a little song, pull the leaves, put a pot of water on the stove, boil it, bring it back to you. She’d say: “drink that, child.” That’s going to make you feel better. So simple, but yet, again, I come back to did we actually make it better? And that goes back to your question about respecting the earth. Yes, that’s what we’re really talking about. But can our kids reap and benefit from what the earth has to offer them? Are we leaving it hopefully, in a better way?
INTERVIEWER: I talked to some people in this very area, and they said that they weren’t even allowed to go to school when they were kids.
DARDAR: Exactly. The building that I just got back from helping our students with cleaning and repairing, the Daigleville School, was the first Houma school in Terrebonne Parish for Houma kids to graduate eighth grade. There were some religious mission schools before that, Baptists, Methodists, and others, but after Martin Luther King petitioned to end segregation, it really took until 1969 for it to finally reach down here. Had we been allowed to go to school way back then, things might have been a little bit different. To get an education then, you had to leave the area. When people say why do the Houma live so many different parishes, it’s because some of our people branched out and went to East New Orleans and other places that were already settled. We could blend in, and there was no segregation in schools. Not like in Terrebonne Parish where it was just Black people and White people. Indians didn’t even exist. They didn’t allow Houma kids to go to school. That’s why that building is so important that we preserve it and do the repairs on it is so that we can keep that bit of history alive in Terrebonne Parish. In fact, the building that we have the tribal offices in now, over in Golden Meadow, was one of the Indian schools in Golden Meadow.
INTERVIEWER: I’d like to go back to the project we did for a second. I was really so grateful to get hooked up with some expert fishermen in this area. They told us a lot about the area that they worked, about different weather patterns, how these patterns were changing, and how that affected the water, the fishing and such. We were trying to use this model of citizen science, and really, these citizen-scientist fishermen were actually educating the science people about the art and science of fishing. But we had this one problem of communicating risk to people in a way that they could relate to their lives. Not just a bunch of numbers, like you’ve got a 20% risk of that or 50%. But what does this mean in terms of the diet you have and where you get it, and all the other factors around you in the environment, how that all interacts? What was your impression of the attempt to communicate risk? Wilma Subra [community scientist on the GC-HARMS project] has a knack for straight-talk communication, and we couldn’t have done this at all if it hadn’t been for her. She’s very good at relating scientific numbers to life.
DARDAR: Yeah, Miss Wilma, she’s been in our communities and our areas a lot, so when she comes in, she’s well respected. The people know her. She relates to our citizens well. Our people live dangerous, and they live independent. When I say dangerous, I mean it’s because of the work that they do, out on the water by themselves. And when someone goes out there and tries to tell people like that: if you fish right here, this is not going to be good. So they think: What you know? You come from the city; you don’t know what’s going on over here. They know the land; they know the water; they know the whole area. They know how the climate’s changing, marsh deterioration, more or less salt in the water affects shrimp spawning, and the movement of shrimp, oyster reefs, blue crabs, and such. To communicate with these guys, you need to listen first. Meet them on their own ground—or in this case, water. Wilma grew up in south Louisiana, and she knows these fishers are experts.
INTERVIEWER: What would you recommend to people who do science in situations where you’ve got something that’s happened, it interrupts traditional ways of life or a food supply for a group of people, and science is a slow process of looking, measuring, and trying to connect cause and effect? And yet, you have to get something out to people quickly because they need to know. Because they’re still eating from the food web, or they’re not. And then, if they’re not, they have to find money to buy food. And that’s just as big a problem sometimes. So, what advice would you give to people who are doing the science part of this, and they don’t want to say anything that’s wrong, but they need to get something out there as quickly as possible so people have some guideposts? What would you say?
DARDAR: I would tell them come in but be respectful. Most of all, the thing is be respectful and realize your university education has mostly come out of a book. Our people live here, and they understand the ebb and flow of the water. They watch the trees. They watch the birds come in. They watch everything that happens, and there’s a season for everything, and they know it.
So back to your question about the science. Scientists use a method—proven over time—and it comes through books, through their way of making knowledge. When you talk about local folklore, it’s not really folklore; it’s more like local education—like a science that’s keyed to the area. Scientists can prove a lot of things and it’s great, but it’s very slow moving. But all the medicine that they make right now, I don’t try to take any of it unless I absolutely have to—because the side effects are just not worth it.
So, if you’re going to tell me that these new drugs and therapies made by scientists, and you want me to believe that they’re going to come here and cure and heal all our woes, of course we’re going to raise our eyebrows and think there you go again. Good case in point is the Mr.GO canal [Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO; commonly pronounced “Mister Go”)]. They built that big old seawall and the people in Reserve and La Place, all of them suffered flooding because of that big flood protection wall. They won’t admit to causing that, but those communities never flooded before, and once they built that wall over there, they did flood.
INTERVIEWER: You mean when they were sealing off Mr.GO.
DARDAR: They sealed off Mr.GO after Katrina. So where does the hurricane surge water go now? It takes the path of least resistance into those communities.
INTERVIEWER: And the last time it got Chalmette, before they sealed it off.
DARDAR: So, you see what I’m saying? They don’t seem to realize that when you stop one thing, you need to watch. Maybe they need to talk to people who live in these areas and ask before they do something like that. You need to realize that you need to study and listen to the people who’ve been living with the land and its changes. Then, you need to act, to do your mitigation. Whatever, but you also need to act based on what’s real now, not thirty years ago. Like now it’s a wet bottom but before it was a real marsh.
INTERVIEWER: Just two more things. You’ve got a lot going on right now, new issues, new campaigns, because there’s always something coming up, and the industry is always pushing forward. And now there’s this Bayou Bridge pipeline. By the time this is published, that’ll already be resolved or concluded one way or the other, but it’s not–
DARDAR: Well, I have no problem with it. We sent supplies and support to the Dakotas because we understand how native people feel about this. It’s a delicate balance for us because we want to support the people and their effort there. But now it’s hitting home, and we may need support right here. It’s a delicate balance. As you said, we have our fisher folk; we have our people who are working in the oil industry. I, for one, work in the oil industry, but I plan to get back to fishing. I want to get back to where I come from. That’s a few years down the line. But this industry’s happening here and now and people are fearful. Pipelines do blow up. Or more often, they leak into the soil or into water bodies.
INTERVIEWER: Like in Michigan. In Oklahoma. In Texas, too. People seldom remark on the situation unless there are human casualties or a massive fish-kill.
DARDAR: Well, check it out and you’re going to see. We had one right here in Paradise blew up, killed one man, burnt two people. The industry is very dangerous, even when there’s so much regulation, and the one I’m talking about was probably caused by pipeline fatigue. With that one, these guys were working on it. Probably, they did something that wasn’t quite safe or weren’t monitoring correctly. Either way, a life was lost. The way that America is structured—I guess this is going to sound a little bit of hypocritical—but we’re not ready to give up fossil fuel.
INTERVIEWER: We’re not set up to use anything else, easily. But that’s changing.
DARDAR: Yes sir, right now we’re not set up to do anything else. I went to COP 21, but to get there, I got on a big 747 or whatever and flew over there. And used a lot of jet fuel to do it. This idea of moving away from fossil fuels has a history. Al Gore was the man who brought all this to life, brought it to light, so to speak, and I guess they want to give him credit for that. But a senator over here spoke the same thoughts in the early ’70s: Bennett Johnson [U.S. Senate, D. 1972–1997]. He spoke that truth then, but nobody believed him. People laughed him out. Today, we’re talking about controlling climate change in the same way that he spoke about land loss and the erosion of our land down here. Now, if I lived in Ozark Mountains, I lived in Tennessee or somewhere, sure, climate change doesn’t affect me in the same way—with the same urgency. The only thing I know it’s going warmer; I got to use my air conditioner more now.
INTERVIEWER: They seem to get more tornadoes, stronger tornadoes, too.
DARDAR: Yes, you’ve seen a degree of bad weather that’s hitting the United States right now. It’s attributed to climate change. The climate is getting a lot warmer; there’s severe hurricanes packing big winds, big surges. These things are real, and the pipeline that’s coming through, does it ultimately cause all that? If it ruptures or busts open, it will cause immediate environmental harm. To install this pipeline, they’re going to change the environment, excavating the land, burying the pipe. Hopefully, nothing happens to it in the next twenty years, fifteen years. That’s its life expectancy. But something could fail before its time, or maybe the pipeline wasn’t installed correctly. Catastrophes like this destroy the environment, disrupt people’s lives, and workers get burnt or killed. Then, there’s families that have lost loved ones. Just go back to the Deep Water Horizon disaster: eleven men lost their lives. These things do happen. Regulations are put in, hopefully, to try to prevent capture of that, but still, these refineries and high cancer rates, how are they connected? In our tribe, we lose, on the average of a month or two, three citizens might die of cancer.
INTERVIEWER: I can relate to this real well because the town where I grew up in Pennsylvania is called Oil City. It was ground zero for the oil industry. Some of the first refineries were there. Pennzoil, Quaker State, Wolf’s Head, Sinclair. I’m old enough that I remember when there was no EPA. When I was in high school, there still was no EPA. And we would have two or three kids in our little high school in every grade that had a blood or bone marrow cancer. The place smelled like the inside of a tank farm. Because there were no industry regulations informed by public health and dangerous exposure levels for dangerous chemicals like benzene hadn’t been developed. It didn’t matter. You did whatever you did. And petrochemicals were the only major game in town. Yeah, this industry is a hard fact to coexist with. It’s interesting how the Houma are doing that.
DARDAR: The thing is we learned to be advocates for our Houma citizens, but in the same vein, when you’re speaking out for them and their health, you realize that they work in this industry. So, can we educate them out of the industry? But if we do that, where do they go to work? Again, it’s a delicate balance, and you watch them as they go out on the rigs, watch them grow old so quickly. Whereas on the boat, around saltwater and fresh air, they stay young. But you get guys that work in the industry, out there every day working through the heat, the cold weather, welding, spraying, fumes, and all that. You see that wear on their life from their livelihood.
INTERVIEWER: You are now beginning to branch out, as a tribe, into designing and doing your own research. What made you want to do that? It opens up a lot, but it’s also a lot of work.
DARDAR: I guess when you get people who come in and they want to put a checkbox and then move on, and we never get the results or never find out what the end results are. A lot of them have done that, so we polled among ourselves and concluded, let’s do it for ourselves. Instead of someone coming here, doing their study, then they go away, and you have to ask them for the information. Now it’s time that we do it ourselves, for ourselves, and then, we retain and use the information for our people. An agency from Washington, DC sent somebody down here right after Katrina. We met at one of our local restaurants, and a government rep asked a lot of questions. What do you think? she says to me. And I asked her, what do you want to know? Because all you’re going to do is check your box. You’re going to leave out of here, and we’re not going to see you again. If we do see someone from your agency, it’s probably going to be somebody different. We’re going to tell that person just what we told you because you’re not going to share the information we gave you. So, we’re going to have to tell them again. So what happens to all that information? So I said what happens is you go back, you check a box. The government in DC, the federal government, says well, we went down there, and we spoke with them. Yeah, well, what was the outcome of the discussion? We never get that. Well, she did send me a response after that, but one more and that was it. Never got another one. So, I mean it’s like if we’re going to participate in something, we deserve enough respect to get the results back so we can decipher it, and then tell our citizens this is what it means. You said it earlier, when the scientists came in, they talked about this level of crude oil in the seafood. They shot a bunch of numbers out there and, if you remember, I asked what’s the baseline before you start measuring? And what was your comment? What was their comment? We have no idea!
INTERVIEWER: No baseline for levels of petrogenic PAH in the Gulf food web. None that we knew of.
DARDAR: Right, no baseline. So, what are you judging your research on? You remember we asked that. We don’t have to answer all that now. But how do you say the level changed from that to this? We may have contamination already in the seafood and not even know it because nobody studied it before then. We understand toxicity because of the oil spill, because they sprayed it with dispersants—and they told us it’s just like Dawn dishwashing liquid. Can we believe that? Why did it take so long to tell us what the dispersant is? It looks like somebody’s hiding something. And the whole thing is that they want to hide so much, and some research was actually purchased by the industry, and it wouldn’t ever be released for public use. So the mistrust, and the need to set our own course, I guess, really prompted us to go out and do that work on our own.
INTERVIEWER: And you can just pick your own projects, too. What you need to know you can actually work on. That’s a good idea.
DARDAR: It’s because of our staff and the people in the tribal council. And we’re looking at what they determine that we need to know to move the tribe forward. Like I was saying, the wellness center became a reality when the diabetes program brought the state of tribal health to light. We decided to move in that area. As we do research and learn more, we can focus on how to best use our findings. But it’s us doing the research and making the decisions on how to use the findings. It’s important to us that we do what’s best for our Houma people. It makes sense to us that we make our own decisions.
