21st Century Indigenous Review: 20 Years of Gulf Coast Tribal Successes

With projects like Nanih Bvlbancha on the Lafitte Greenway and the Cabildo’s exhibition Botanica: Gardens, Landscapes, and Plant Medicines in South Louisiana, years of Indigenous community organizing are becoming visible. We can fully celebrate the success of these projects by exploring the rich history and context of contemporary Indigenous identity and vibrant cultural participation in the Gulf South.

As part of Native American Heritage Month, Hali Dardar will weave together a brief history of and give context to the Indigenous Gulf South by highlighting some of the people, projects, and successes of the community within the past 20 years. The two-hour event will feature a 25-minute presentation by Hali Dardar as well as a panel discussion with Indigenous activists John DePriest, Scierra LeGarde, and Monique Verdin.

About the Speakers:

Hali Dardar has spent the last decade working with Indigenous language reclamation within Louisiana. She is the co-founder of the Houma Language Project, and Bvlbancha Public Access. From Louisiana, she is a tribal member of the United Houma Nation. She has previously led collaborative project management and design for Language Vitality Initiatives at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Shift Collaborative, and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. She holds a BA in print journalism from Louisiana State University and an MA in Arts, Culture, and Media from the University of Groningen.

John DePriest is an Instructor in the English for Academic and Professional Purposes Program through the Center for Global Education at Tulane University, where he has taught since 2016. His areas of focus include applied linguistics for ESL, phonetics of spoken English, language in the brain, spoken language performance, and language/music interactions. He is also the past president of Louisiana Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (LaTESOL). Dr. DePriest is also a musician and songwriter and an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Scierra LeGarde is a member of the Bayou Lacombe Band of Choctaw located in St. Tammany and Washington Parish, Louisiana, and is a resident of Bvlbancha, commonly known as New Orleans. She is a member of Okla Hina Ikhish Hullo (People of the Sacred Medicine Trail) which is a network of femme/non-binary Indigenous gardeners working urgently to develop the continuation of sacred long-standing cultural practices connected to food, medicine, and land. In her spare time, she volunteers at schools, museums, and other venues across the state of Louisiana. Her passion as an educator is to challenge the way many non-Indigenous people learn about Native history and culture by including contemporary issues from Indigenous perspectives. Scierra is a jingle dress dancer and is in her fifth year learning Bayou Lacombe Choctaw style of basket weaving from Mr. Tom Colvin. She is thankful to her family and friends who have supported her throughout the years and looks forward to continuing this journey with them.

Monique Verdin is a transdisciplinary artist and storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana. She is a citizen of the Houma Nation, director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and is supporting the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo (People of the Sacred Medicine Trail), a network of Indigenous gardeners, as the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network’s Gulf South food and medicine sovereignty program manager. Monique is co-producer of the documentary My Louisiana Love and her work has been included in a variety of environmentally inspired projects, including Cry You One the multiplatform performance, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, and the collaborative book Return to Yakni Chitto: Houma Migrations.