Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw
Chief Devon Parfait spent his early years in Dulac, a bayou community at the edge of Louisiana. He caught fish from the dock, bounced on his neighbor’s trampoline, and went out on his grandfather’s shrimp boat. But Hurricane Rita destroyed his family’s home in 2005, when he was 8, setting off years of displacement. The extended family migrated inland and eventually settled in the New Orleans suburb of Marrero.
Trauma followed Chief Devon for much of his childhood. Yet even as he struggled in school, the adults in his life believed and invested in him. His predecessor, Elder Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar, tapped him as the tribe’s future leader when he was 12. A mentor, geologist Rónadh Cox, helped prepare him academically until he gained admission to Williams College in Massachusetts. There, studying geosciences, he mapped Louisiana’s traditional Indigenous land and discovered that it was eroding faster than the state’s coastline as a whole.
Chief, Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw
He imagined becoming chief in middle age. But before he graduated, Elder Chief Shirell called him. “I think it’s time,” he recalls her saying. “You are so well equipped to help deal with the issues that we’re facing right now.” He finished his undergraduate degree and was sworn in during a small, Covid-safe ceremony in 2022 at the age of 25.
Then Chief Devon set out to tackle the existential problems facing his tribe, including the literal disappearance of coastal land. Much of this loss stems from human engineering, including the 10,000 miles of canals dug by oil and gas companies. The canals allow saltwater to penetrate inland and kill the vegetation that holds the soil together.
It’s not just land being lost. Over the years, Chief Devon says, “a lot of our culture, our heritage, and our language was taken from us.” Keeping his tribe intact amidst these stresses is his life’s mission, on top of his day job as a coastal resilience analyst with the Environmental Defense Fund.
Despite these ongoing threats, Chief Devon maintains hope. “There’s this narrative—I think it’s very doomerist—where people believe that the entire Gulf Coast is just going to vanish in the next several decades,” he says. Even the most dire modeling by Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, he notes, does not predict total disappearance. “There’s already plenty of great projects and things happening,” he says. “So I think a life on the Gulf Coast is totally possible.”
On being named the future chief:
“We had a conversation when I was 12 years old for hours and hours. I was just yapping at Shirell, asking her all these questions, like, ‘Why are you chief? And what do you do?’
“For her it was her heart. She cared deeply about the family, about doing good in the world, and trying to make some kind of change.
“And I asked why that was necessary. And she started talking to me about the environmental challenges, the societal challenges that the tribes face. She talked about why previous chiefs and her were working on federal acknowledgement and why that was important to be able to access resources from the federal government that might be used to help protect our community.
“I asked her, ‘Well, is there anything I can do? How can I help?’
“And her recollection of the story is that at that moment she felt like the ancestors were with her and she thought, maybe this guy could be the next chief because she had a recognition that being a chief is not about power or money. It’s about love and care and being in service to your people.”
“That I could use my voice to help advocate for my tribe and bring resources back down south, and do some good work…that was the aha moment for me.”
On the future:
“In this moment, where so much is happening and all of these political shifts are crazy, and there’s a lot of direct and indirect violence that’s happening, I still remain really optimistic about the future because I know that the general arc of history is positive. This is only one moment in time. And as humans, oftentimes we can get too caught up in our short life spans that we live. The way that I’m thinking about right now is generationally. This is only one moment in time that we will have to deal with. What comes in the future, I believe, as the pendulum swings, will be so much better and greater than we can ever imagine.
“We’ve seen how much people have evolved over these years. The growth. The positivity. The historic investments in climate and the environment. The recognition that we need to put people and the environment first. I’ve seen that in so many different ways. And even in some of these institutions that people have said will never change, people have been in positions where they’ve actually done some good work.
“I see us in the future recognizing that we need to have a relationship with our planet, not just an extractive one, but one where we recognize the value. I think back to what this place in the United States looked like before colonization even happened. I read stories of European settlers who would walk into forests that looked like parks with paths of berry bushes and fruit trees there. It was because the Indigenous people knew that taking care of the planet came first, because if you didn’t, then it wouldn’t take care of the people. And I am very optimistic that all of the momentum that we’ve experienced as a society moving forward isn’t going to go away just because one guy wants it to.”
From John:
Chief Devon invited us to his home and we did the interview in his family’s garage, where his grandfather had gathered knicknacks and memorabilia. The day after the interview, we drove through the watery landscape around Dulac and Chauvin to see the area where Chief Devon used to live before Hurricane Rita destroyed his family’s home in 2005. Early morning light, vast skies, and a landscape vulnerable to a changing climate.
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
Still Here: Stories from a fragile coast
To listen to our podcast, follow this link or find us on the platform of your choice.
A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout
Credits:
Interview and text: Barry Yeoman
Photos: John Noltner
Editing and production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah
This is a really interesting read that draws me in to hear the rest of the story. The photo of Chief Devon Parfait is compelling.
This was a real therapeutic read