Between oil spills, land loss and other consequences of climate change, times haven't been easy for the small, largely Indigenous town of Dulac. The Dulac Community Center has long-helped keep the lower Terrebonne Parish town afloat. It served as a hub for emergency response during disasters and as an important cultural resource for the Native residents of Dulac.
Now, after almost a hundred years, the center is closing its doors.
Coastal reporter Eva Tesfaye went down to Dulac’s Clanton Chapel United Methodist Church – across the street from the now-closed community center – to talk to board member Bette Billiot. They were joined by Clanton Chapel’s pastor, Kirby Verret, and ex officio board member and former tribal chairman of the United Houma Nation. They discussed the center and what closing it means for local community in Dulac.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
EVA TESFAYE: So to start, I want each of you to tell me a little bit about Dulac for people who have never been here. What's special about this place?
BETTE BILLIOT: So for me, I grew up maybe about three, four miles up the road from where we're sitting at right now. And it was to me, a wonderful place to grow up. I'm very thankful for being able to grow up on the bayou, surrounded by my family, and my church family, having cousins. Everybody knew each other.
KIRBY VERRET: Well, I'm from Bayou Dularge, which is west of Dulac, and I can tell you when I was young, a long time ago, we would hear about all the great things happening in Dulac. And it was all because of the Dulac Community Center and the church bringing things that we did not have as Native Americans.
TESFAYE: Yeah, so you're getting at what we're about to talk about, which is how important this community center is. So Bette, can you give an overview of the history of this place and I understand that it has a really interesting beginning.
BILLIOT: So the history of the Dulac Community Center was that we had a hurricane that had hit here in the 1920s that brought a mission group from New York, I believe it was. And what they found was a population of natives that were living down here in poverty. That they had never seen before. And they found out that there was no schooling, there was no education for the Native kids that were here in the community.
TESFAYE: And why was there no schooling?
BILLIOT: Because at that time, it was a time of segregation back in the 20s and the 30s all the way into the sixties, really. So we had white public schools and we had Black public schools and our Native kids just kind of fell in the middle.
And when the Hooper Sisters that was part of the mission group that came down from New York saw that there was this need, they took it upon themselves to start teaching some of these Native youth out of their own home. And then later they were able to get a building and so on. And then that was the birth of the Indian Mission School.
So after years of fighting to be able to get desegregation in Terrebonne Parish - because even after desegregation, they still would not let the Indian kids into a public school - there was a lawsuit that had happened that pretty much forced the hand to allow the Indian children into the schools. Once the public schools became available, the Indian Mission School started doing its transformation into the community center.
VERRET: But the main point was education. People were very happy to leave us in the seafood business trapping and all the things that was hard work, but education was very limited.
TESFAYE: So you've both talked about how a huge part of the mission of this center is providing people education, providing people opportunities. So one person I spoke to, his name was Bruce Duthu. He's the chair of the Native American and Indigenous Studies at Dartmouth College and he told me about how this community center basically changed his life. He said that while working there, that's where he got connected with his mentor who helped him apply to Dartmouth.
DUTHU: The center couldn't handle everything and it didn't try to handle everything, but it was a good first stop for a lot of people to say, “Well, who do I go talk to? Where do I go?”
TESFAYE: So Bette, I was wondering if you could talk about some of the social services the center provided I heard especially it was very helpful when the BP oil spill happened and made things hard for a lot of the fishers and trappers here.
BILLIOT: So of course, as you can tell, driving down here, this is a huge fishing community. It is up and down with boats. But then the BP spill happened, which just shut everything down. It was horrific for our fishing community.
The community center, it became an information hub. I remember meetings that were happening there, signing people up for resources, signing people up for losses that they were suffering, things like that. So we had people there that were trying to help our community that were suffering from the BP oil spill.
TESFAYE: Another person I spoke to, I spoke to a younger member of the United Houma Nation, 25-year-old Mariah Hernandez-Fitch. So she says she remembers the center being where she started to understand her Houma identity, particularly by getting ready for powwows.
HERNANDEZ-FITCH: Learning what are our customs? Like what does fancy dancers mean? What does jingle dancers mean? And so just as I was learning these fundamental dances and traditions. So were other people who were older learning these things alongside me.
TESFAYE: So can one of you talk about what the center provided culturally for the Indigenous folks in Dulac?
BILLIOT: So in the 1990s, my aunt Louise, the current tribal chief that we have now, Lori Ann (Chaisson) and some others had began a Bayou Eagles Native American Dance Group here at the community center, where they took youth from the community and parents of all ages and really was able to teach kids all about regalia, making, singing, dancing, just traditions.
I think there was some language classes in it. When my kids joined, it was teaching French. The French that we speak is not the French that they teach in school. You're not gonna learn our traditional ways in a public setting. A lot of that teaching came from here, just from local community members, from our tribal elders, from Ms. Dena Foret with the moss dolls and (Verret’s) wife Ms. Zo with the palmetto weaving. And wanting to be able to pass down those traditions and make sure you know that it goes on to the next generation.
TESFAYE: I wanna talk about why is this center closing? And when I spoke to you earlier, you had mentioned that Hurricane Ida was really the beginning of the end for it. Could you talk about that?
BILLIOT: Before Ida, mission groups were always coming through the community center. It was the bread and butter of the community center, and it was something that was needed.
TESFAYE: And a lot of that was hurricane recovery too.
BILLIOT: A lot of it was hurricane recovery, but there were periods where we didn't have hurricanes. So mission groups were still coming because there was always a need here in the community.
But when Ida hit, we were hit dead on. The community center took a lot of damage. The old school building, the roof collapsed in. The main building took a lot of damage, so we weren't able to have groups come down and be able to help rebuild. It took years to be able to get, you know, we got a new A/C unit. They was able to finally get the building tore down. But it was too little, too late.
VERRET: And so many of the groups that we were so used to having come down, well, they had their own disasters to deal with. The Houston area, southwest Louisiana, Lake Charles got hit by Harvey, I believe. And then there was California with disasters.
BILLIOT: Fire.
VERRET: All those areas that it came to the point that, as much as people wanted to come, it was impossible for them to do anything, so spreading out your resources can only go so far.
TESFAYE: Yeah, so I actually do have a question about this. I'm gonna talk about climate change. We’re seeing all these billion dollar disasters in places we haven't seen them before, but we're also seeing them in places that we have seen them before, like here in Dulac. Climate change is intensifying hurricanes, and it's also accelerating land loss on the coast. I mean, what do you think the closing of this community center says about how Dulac is changing?
VERRET: We don't wanna give up on Dulac. There's no way. We've had a lot of changes, but we still believe the population will grow back, people will come back, jobs will come back. But it's just that we have to hold on in a very difficult time.
I will tell you sometimes as Native Americans, as Houma Indians, we're people that are very receptive to other people, but we also learned that as Natives, we're the only ones who have to give up our language, our culture, and we were almost destroyed, but we're not.
Our DNA is still Houma. Our DNA, you can't erase. No matter what society tries to do to wipe out who we are, with help from people who appreciated who we are, we can move forward.
BILLIOT: I'm gonna say another thing about the climate issue. Here, Terrebonne Parish has the highest rate of land loss than anywhere else in the lower 48. So right where we are sitting, we are losing land at just crazy rates because we have a trifecta of coastal erosion, subsidence and rising water all at the same time. So the fight that Kirby and them did to have this part of the lower parish included in the Morganza (Levee System), has been able to slow down some of those effects.
Having the community center here to be able to have state officials that have come all the way down – and we had to fight for people to come down because a lot of these meetings happen in New Orleans – so being able to get (them) to come down to where we are, to be included in the decisions that were being made about the folks that live here was very instrumental.
TESFAYE: Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up. So I wanna ask you both, what are you each most worried about losing with this center closing?
BILLIOT: I would say for me it's just that closeness and that connection because whenever the community center was thriving and we were getting together, this was a place that people could come and feel comfortable, where you get to see family.
Nobody was a stranger at the community center, even when we had strangers, because we've had a lot of groups from all over the world come to the community center. And e share food with them, share stories with them.
VERRET: And we would always tell the, the groups that would come in. We'd say, “Vous êtes pas étranger, vous êtes un ami qu’on n’avait pas rencontré.” You were never a stranger, you were just a friend we had not met yet.
TESFAYE: Yeah. Mr. Kirby, what are you most worried about losing with the center closing?
VERRET: The very reality that we had a special place. And as Native people, we're very connected to the land and the water and the air and that's why we feel as the local church, we need to do something to keep that legacy going.
Maybe not in the level that it was, but still some kind of way of still having something that went through so many years of hard work and sharing that we just can’t see that go away.
