American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Tears come before words as Tunica-Biloxi tribal member Elisabeth Pierite struggles to express her experiences with Hurricane Katrina. She sits in the living room of her family’s new home in Marksville, Louisiana, two years after Katrina forced them to abandon their home in New Orleans East. It is fitting to start with tears. Really, it is the only proper way to begin the story, to convey what Hurricane Katrina and its human-made aftermath meant for her, for so many of us. Hurricane Katrina traumatized the city of New Orleans and the Gulf South. It filled most Americans and global citizens with grief and rage in the late summer of 2005. As the world watched, feeling powerless to help the many thousands of suffering people, at first stunned and then furious over the ineptitude of government response to this long-predicted disaster, the Tunica-Biloxi Tribal Nation tended to the needs of thousands of evacuees on its small reservation three hours northwest of New Orleans directly along a designated hurricane evacuation route.