Means to an End

GRAND ISLE, LA. There are many ways people on this barrier island are coping with the oil spill and its impact on their lives. One of these was a friendship dance, held on a sandy levee behind the local marina.

The dancers stood above the ocean in soft pink twilight. Chanting and drumming played over loudspeakers as the crowd began to move, shuffling in a circle on the sand. Members of the Houma tribe, several dressed in colorful feathered and tasseled costumes, were joined by more than fifty others from Grand Isle and beyond.

It was the closing ceremony of the candlelight vigil organized by a group of Houma youth, called Bayou Healers, to commemorate the 100th day since the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

Several community members and I showed up late to the ceremony, and missed the lighting of the luminaries. We had been down the road at a public meeting with the local BP representative, which was scheduled earlier the same evening. People had gathered to petition the oil industry authority for relief. One after another they voiced their anger and their fear under the fluorescent lights of the cold room.

Many said they wished they could be at the candelight vigil instead, but they stayed because they wanted someone at BP to hear them.

Later, at the dance on the dune behind Buggie Vegas’ Bridge Side Marina, people were laughing and holding hands in the warm sea air. Children were playing timeless games: skidding in and out of the circle and digging holes in the sand. The sky grew dark, and after the dancing stopped three clear plastic balloons were released, each biodegradable and containing the seed of a tree of life, a different kind of petitioning to a different kind of higher authority.

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