To the members of the Isle de Jean Charles Tribe, the continual loss of land and periodic damage from storms has resulted in a loss of life-way and communal support structures as members have moved away from the island seeking safer homes. What was once a land rich with resources for a self-sustaining community has been drastically reduced through a series of environmental transformations. In response to this ongoing land loss and storm damage, the Isle de Jean Charles Tribe has been actively pursuing relocation options with the Lowlander Center.
The most recent planning, and relocation process started in 2010, when the Isle de Jean Charles Tribe utilized their previous work and honed it with green sustainable principles to submit to the Clinton Global Initiative and the Mystic Foundation, neither of which granted funding. The work was further honed by the consortium of experts brought together by Lowlander Center in conjunction with the Tribal leaders to apply for the NOFA, Rockefeller – HUD National Disaster Resilience Competition, a two year effort.  The Tribe and Lowlander scored 5th in the competition to enable the Tribe to reunite in a new low-carbon impact, coastal resilient location 40 miles north by the year 2020. Yet what began as an opportunity to relocate and re-unify the Isle de Jean Charles Tribe now illustrates the fraught politics of relocation in the late-colonial context. $48 million, of a total $92 million awarded to the State of Louisiana from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under the National Disaster Resilience Competition, was allocated to resettle the residents of Isle de Jean Charles to develop “a resettlement model that is scalable, transferrable and supportive of cultural and social networks” (State of Louisiana Office of Community Development, 2016).
Through that partnership, Lowlander has been able to secure other resources such as the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, landscape architecture firm Evans + Lighter, National Academy of Science, Grounded Solutions, EPA, Handy Village Institute and many others. These short term partners have worked collaboratively with Isle de Jean Charles to contribute to proposals and portions of the Tribe’s planning processes (in 2014, 2015, 2016), as well as knowledge-exchange and learning from other indigenous communities facing land loss (in Washington and Newtok, Alaska)  (State of Louisiana Office of Community Development, Lowlander Center, & GCR, 2015).