Shirell Parfait-Dardar is one of USA TODAY’s Women of the Year, a recognition for women who have made a significant impact in their communities and across the country. The program launched in 2022 as a follow-up to Women of the Century, which commemorated the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. Meet this year’s honorees at womenoftheyear.usatoday.com.
Shirell Parfait-Dardar is an Elder Chief of the Grand Caillou-Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. Her Native American name, Traitor’ de Terre, means Healer of the Earth and it is a task she has taken to heart.
Her tribe’s historic lands include the communities of Grand Caillou, Dulac, Petit Caillou in southern Louisiana, portions of Bourg and Houma, and Chauvin, where Category 4 Hurricane Ida made landfall in 2021.
Parfait-Dardar has led efforts to help her community recover from the effects, mitigate the ongoing effects of climate change, and gain government recognition for her tribe so they have better access to resources such as grants, health care, and education .
Climate change and the effects of a warming planet are being felt right on Louisiana’s south shore, where tribal people are being forced to relocate.
The island disappeared under the feet of its inhabitants.
State, local and federal governments have partnered with local organizations to relocate residents to Schriever in the municipality of Terrebonne. Some of the first residents moved into their new homes in August, but Parfait-Dardar said she was unhappy with the way aspects of the process were being carried out.
For the past 26 years, her tribe has pushed for official US government recognition. About 900 members of the Grand Caillou-Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw live in the commune of Terrebonne, where external factors such as storms are eroding not only the landscape but also the population. About 200 other members of the tribe lived there before Hurricane Ida. Recognition would make the many other causes she has championed much easier. Parfait-Dardar traveled to Washington DC and testified before Congress on behalf of her people.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Shirell Parfait-Dardar is Louisiana’s honoree for USA TODAY’s Women of the Year program
Shirell Parfait-Dardar is Louisiana’s honoree for USA TODAY’s Women of the Year program.
Scott Clause, advertiser for the Lafayette Daily
It was blurry in a way. I remember a few things. We had just lost our own home. And we were lucky enough to be able to stay with my mother in Thibodaux for a bit. But I mean, that’s two hours round trip every day.
And that shortens the time. Also, you need to be at home where you can start the work you need to do to try and pick up the pieces. And on top of that, I had to be with our people. Because we do.
We had people sleeping in cars and kids and they had nowhere to go. I just wanted to do what I could to help.
Most of the time we had no cell phone reception. The electricity was out and the people had no water. Luckily we were able to set up a location here in Chauvin at the American Legion to start getting some supplies and things like that for people in need.
We have been able to help 64 families return to their homes on their own and we continue to work with families today.
In this whole process I definitely realized that my education is nowhere near what it is today. OK? It just isn’t. And you have to understand, my parents weren’t allowed to go past the eighth grade. They had to go through all the breakup and stuff like that. Therefore, they were not allowed to attend a full 12th grade. And we still face many challenges.
It’s been a learning process ever since. We actually had to take classes on how to be case managers to help people who need to navigate through these different application processes.
Everything is digital these days, and we still have a lot of people who are unfamiliar with these types of technologies — especially our elders — so a lot of the problems we found were all these different systems that you have to go through in the able to access the resources you need; However, no one received the training to know how to access them.
And there were many restrictions. They didn’t have access to the internet or electricity, I mean they didn’t even have a home.
Elder Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Terrebonne Parish, LA. Monday, Oct. 24, 2022. SCOTT CLAUSE/USA TODAY Network
We have been in the federal recognition process for over 26 years. And for that we had to do so much research, because you have to document each individual person back to their historical tribe. And not just any documentation. You want hard evidence like deeds, birth certificates, court records, you know, anything that would count as hard evidence that we have, right?
Well, back in 1996, a lot of those things were filed. And we get what’s called a Proposed Finding, but based on the evidence, we haven’t met all the criteria at this point. Nobody ever does. Well we get that, that statement came back in 2008. It took them so long to go through the evidence we submitted. And basically it came back that we met four of the seven criteria.
The only thing we hadn’t fully proven was our connection to the historical tribes we claimed, but we were able to prove one of our ancestors in his family’s historical tribe, the Biloxi. So now we have the evidence that also proves he was a Choctaw too.
Unfortunately, unless we go through the recognition process and receive federal recognition, indigenous peoples cannot directly access federal resources or manage those resources themselves. And we need access to so many resources, from education to health care to economic development and infrastructure. You know, we have to be able to protect and preserve our lands, our waters and our sacred places.
We could sit at a table with them when the Army Corps of Engineers makes decisions about what’s going to happen if they want to do things like build levees.
Absolutely not. Community resettlements must be community led and driven.
They were labeled interest groups, not community residents, which they were. And the fact that they weren’t federally recognized was used against them. Which made it easy for different departments and agencies to say, “Oh, well, you can’t manage this because you’re not federal.”
Elder Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Terrebonne Parish, LA. Monday, Oct. 24, 2022. SCOTT CLAUSE/USA TODAY Network
That’s why we’ve been actively working on canal backfilling for a number of years: basically backfilling the abandoned canals that were left behind. Honestly, we don’t have time to wait. We’re losing land way too fast with him. We lose our ways of life, our mouths and everything.
So we took it upon ourselves to do what we could to try to heal as much of the land as possible. And it was slow. We depend on grant applications. Luckily we were able to get two, which allowed us to do a lot of the planning and go out and map and pick which channels, you know, looked like they were potentially going to be successful.
We are now pursuing funding to actually implement and populate these channels. It’s been a slow process because I mean, look, this is new to us. It’s not like it’s a new concept. It has previously been done very successfully in the Louisiana area. But for us, as we tried to address this and move forward on our own, it was challenging because we are constrained by the types of funding that we can access and how we can access that funding.
Shirell Parfait Dardar
We have been descendants who have had no problem moving forward, but we have not really taken the responsibility of becoming good ancestors by protecting and preserving them. Our resources are finite and if we don’t protect and preserve our future generations, they will have no future.
I think what I learned the most from this is that we weren’t very good ancestors.
Most of us are here, living our experience, doing our day-to-day life. And we’ve got this consumer habit, like this idea that everything is only available when there is no responsibility.
We have been descendants who have progressed without problems, but we have not really taken the responsibility of becoming good ancestors by protecting and preserving them.
Our resources are finite and if we don’t protect and preserve our future generations, they will have no future.
Published March 19, 2023 at 9:24 UTC. Updated March 19, 2023 at 9:24 UTC
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