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Full Interview with Sassafras LA
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Sassafras LA
Olivia Bourgeois, Ronnie Collins
Alex Naquin, and Caroline Guidry
Galliano, Louisiana
February 16, 2012
OB: I’m Olivia Bourgeois. I’m 17 years old. I live in Cut Off Louisiana and I was born in 1994. I was 16 [at the time of the oil spill].
AN: I’m Alex Naquin. Larose, Louisiana. I was born July 29, 1994 and I was 15 at the time of the oil spill.
CG: My name is Caroline Guidry. I’m from Galliano, Louisiana. I was born in 1995. At the time of the oil spill, I was 15.
RC: I’m Ronnie Collins. I live in Galliano. And I was born in 1994 and I was 16 at the time of the oil spill.
Yeah, I’m a fifth generation oysterman. My grandpa’s Collins’ Oysters, in Golden Meadow. I had kind of gotten out of it, a little. I would go with my dad when I was younger oyster-fishing, but after Katrina my dad had went with my mom and my other grandpa into the oil fields. He drove tugs and carrying the barges and stuff. So I wasn’t really in touch with him as much as I was when I was younger. But I know just from him saying, we were this close to being out. I don’t know if we’re still in business, but I know we’re getting some because we’re family.
We lost our good oyster lease on Grand Isle, which is where we get our best oysters, our salty oysters from. And another thing that really affected was the freshwater diversion killed a lot of the baby oysters from the nursery where we’d get the oysters when they were small. You’d bring them to Grand Isle and you could actually see on the oyster the rapid growth. Maybe a few months later we’d harvest them.
It was the Davis Pond (freshwater diversion) that was opened up and the freshwater pushed the brackish/saltwater water out.
AN: They pushed the water, because the oil was creeping. So the best way was to sort of increase the freshwater coming down to push the oil out.
RC: And the dispersants, the dispersants. That was bad because that made the oil sink.
AN: The combination of those two. It wasn’t the actual oil on top of the water that everybody saw.
CG: The dispersants affected the crab because crabs are bottom feeders -
RC: Same as oysters -
CG: Crabs are hard to get now. Oysters, the oyster industry –
RC: We’re coming back, actually. We came back this year. We [gestures to AN] actually had the pleasure of eating some two nights ago.
AN: We went over and played some paintball and the incentive was to eat some raw oysters right after we were done. So we had some before and after. So it was fun.
CG: Yeah, the crabs are still hard to get, but like Ronnie said, the oyster industry’s coming back -
RC: The crabs are coming back also –
AN: It’s staggered.
CG: Yeah, everything’s coming back but the general consensus is that things are still slow, everything’s kind of still slow. Work’s slow for some people. It was really slow when it happened.
OB: My dad, he works 14 and 14, two weeks on an offshore oil rig and then two weeks at home. And he’s a shrimper. He’s a tool pusher, so he has like the big bosses and then him and there’s a few and then they have a big old crew underneath them. His entire crew, one went to North Dakota, one went to Africa, they were spread all over. It was just him and the other tool pushers and they couldn’t go offshore anymore and they would stay in the yard. It’s just like New Iberia area, and they would go there and they’re doing work on some rigs or I think they worked on his boss’s house a little bit too. They’re just pretty much sitting there doing whatever they can, they’re preparing the rigs to go out but they can’t get permits.
They say, “Okay the moratorium’s open, whatever, you all can go drill,” but they’re not allowing any permits to allow them to drill. So that was rough. And we were so worried that he’d have to go far away. We had to start saying well, we have to watch what we buy, we have to watch what we spend, just in case because he may get laid off. We didn’t know. And then the two weeks he’d be home, his favorite thing to do is shrimp. So it’s not for money, it’s for pleasure, more. So that, I guess he was almost like heartbroken, because that got hard to do.
AN: A lot of people, it wasn’t that you lost the source of income, but it was the scare that you could, you didn’t know where it would go. Or also, his life completely changed [gestures to OB], their whole lives, the whole family, he couldn’t do what he wanted to do offshore, a lot of it –
CG: Whether for money or for pleasure. My dad pushes in-shore petroleum products, so he wasn’t that affected because that’s all off-shore stuff. But our summer destination was taken away, Fourchon. The Fourchon beach is still closed. The Grand Isle beach opened when?
AN: Last summer, right before summer.
CG: Yeah, so our whole summer was wiped out.
AN: I’m not really tied, through my mother or father, to the oil industry. My dad used to be in the boat industry and my whole family for years has worked in the oil fields but they kind of got out and my dad went into agriculture and my mother owns en embroidery business, actually, employs Olivia’s mother. And so, the aspect of the economy didn’t happen right at that exact moment. It was basically our way of life. We come back at the end of February we start wake boarding and that had to stop because a lot of the waterways were closed. Fishing stopped.
RC: Well, it didn’t necessarily stop.
AN: Well, a lot of the areas closed.
RC: It was the year I had come of age that my parents would finally let me take the boat out on my own and I went and I had a chart and I mapped out the water zones and I had to run sixty miles just me and a couple buddies just to catch our limit of red snapper.
AN: So it wasn’t as easy, if you wanted to do more inshore, you couldn’t.
Down here, it’s a lot of leisure activities you can do. A whole paradise kind of went. We didn’t know what to do. And that’s how we all kind of got started up, our whole organization, just seeing everything in kind of dismay and stuff and not knowing what to do. We felt like they weren’t doing enough, our whole community, communities felt that they weren’t doing enough. So that’s where we were kind of spurred to action, just to do something.
CG: And besides all the effects you could see, there was just kind of this feeling in the air. I know my family was, thanking God we were some of the lucky ones. My dad pushes in-shore products and my mom’s a school teacher and we could just look left and right and we’d have neighbors who were shrimpers and we’d have friends who were affected, whether their parents’ business were shut down or whether their parents were helping to clean up. It was a weird feeling. Because like Alex said, it was our way of life. It’s not just about jobs or anything, you know, this is who we are.
I know we all kind of felt like we weren’t getting help and we felt innocent. Because for a state that contributes so much to the U.S. economy, we felt like we deserved more, more help, more response, quicker response.
AN: And actually Lafourche Parish started an energy council, and Caroline and I serve on behalf of student council at South Lafourche but also Sassafras, to mediate those issues if it does happen again. It was all because we felt we could have done a lot more, we could have gone out there. We couldn’t do any kind of response until the oil hit our shores, which was weeks later. And we could have been there the first. We’re the closest. We could have been out there, and we couldn’t.
RC: My birthday was May 7, which was not long after the oil spill. My 16th birthday, I requested two overnight tuna fishing trips. And we got about thirty miles out and the oil was supposed to have not even come close to us and I think we had just hit blue water (with the river we have the different color water as we go out and we just hit blue water) and we looked and we seen some supply boats working, you know, but we could tell they weren’t working for a rig, they were doing something out of the usual. And we were like, “Ah, man, that can’t be.” And we kept going and kept going and we looked down, and the water had an orange sheen over it and we ran for about ten miles before we got out of it and continued our trip. I mean we still caught plenty of fish, but that’s what sucked. We went out, we went out and caught 55 blackfin tuna, 2 yellowfin tuna, our limit of amberjack, a few other fish. We got a good taste, the fish was going to be good this year. Get back home, start planning to make another fishing trip and that closure zone just shut us out.
But as for like the offshore fish and all, I fish very often, sportsman mainly offshore and I don’t think it affected the offshore fish. If anything they’re a lot bigger because they’ve been really cutting down on our fishing because they say the oil killed a bunch of them, but as for the offshore fish, they moved away, they’re smart. With all the fishing closures, the fish were able to move out of the way of the oil and it actually helped the fishing population. This year when we went fishing, we hammered, I mean we caught plenty of fish. A couple of state records were broken, I actually was privileged to break a state record on a fish, a yellow-edged grouper.
I was reading up on the internet, the red snapper season, they said that the poundage of their quota, the recreational fishermen caught over because the fish have increased in size due to not fishing. And the amberjack population, too. We go to these rigs where we used to go and catch 30-pound amberjack. The problem, we having trouble dragging these fish out of the rigs because they’re coming up 70 pounds now.
AN: And at the same time it kind of worries me. I worry maybe that say the dispersants or other things used kind of inflicted. Here we’re fishing all of the ones that survived, but what happens to maybe their offspring? Or the other things that we can’t see under the water? I mean, it’s great now, but I’m worried to see what will happen. Not just with the fishing, with the industries, but also a lot of people were getting sick and they think it’s because of the dispersants, so the health issues and those issues, you never now. People can say, “Well, there’s nothing that’s going to happen,” but you won’t know until it happens.
CG: The dispersants and all, that’s, that’s still on the bottom of the Gulf, that’s still there. That’s sketchy business. Scientists can say what they want. Because we know it’s still there, nobody can fool us. And, like I said, really nobody knows the effects, nobody knows what it’s going to happen in 20 years.
AN: Let’s hope it’s all good.
CG: It’s still a sticky situation. Literally.
RC: I think they caught some shrimp that were, had no eyes.
AN: There were some deformities.
RC: There’s the coral growth on the rigs. I was watching a video, I think, the fifteen feet or thirty feet of coral growth was dead, but it was at a perfect line. They were saying that was from the oil.
CG: I kind of think that there are still some things that we will see for a while because nobody knew how to approach this. So the steps that were taken, who knows if they were effective, if they were safe.
AN: And that’s one thing, when I was going to be traveling to Alaska. It all started off, the Prince William Sound Science Center has an oil spill awareness-type training, and Caroline and I both applied for it the past two years. Last year I was able to go to the Wetlands Expedition, but I was preparing myself and everybody was telling me it wasthe same exact thing as the Exxon Valdez. It’s not. Completely different and I’m still working on a project to explain what I learned and compare the two. I don’t know when it’s going to come out, but eventually it will. We have different climate, we have different bacteria, you know, Alaska’s a lot colder, down here we have the sun and the warmth to break up things, it’s totally different. Also the land formations, rocks and a lot of those things where we have a lot of sediment, easier to penetrate. That’s one thing we’re making sure people know, we’re completely different. Yes, they may be treated in some ways the same. Eventually we need to rewrite the laws and the rules on how to engage in say a situation like this to save not only the earth and the ground and also the youth and adults how to deal with all those things.
OB: And I remember, it was in June, me and Noelle, went to Key West, Florida on vacation, I went with her family. We’re flying over and you say, “Okay, look down.” I It was the oil line, and it was horrible. You could see it from the plane. Then when we went to Alabama later in the summer, for like the Fourth of July, we couldn’t go in the water, but you could play in the sand. And they just had the little tar balls all over in the sand and it was just not cool.
CG: I remember last summer though, we went to Grand Isle beach for his [Points to Jack] birthday. The higher-ups were kind of saying, “No there’s not that much oil left.” It was over a year later. I got out of the water and on my ankle there was a yellow spot that I had gotten still a little tar ball, over a year later, on my ankle. It wouldn’t come off either, you know, I kept scrubbing and scrubbing, and it wouldn’t come off.
RC: There always has been tar balls on the beach, just because naturally there is a flow of oil. And there is a bacteria down here in the warm water, I don’t think they have it in Alaska because the water’s too cold, it actually eats the oil. But the dispersant doesn’t allow the oil to eat it.
AN: And for me, I would go to visit friends a lot, to Grand Isle during the summer, and I planned on spending most of the summer there, but then it all changed because they started renting out camps to BP and all the workers and they wouldn’t actually let us, some of our parents.
CG: BP was hiring criminals to volunteer to clean-up, a few on America’s Most Wanted list.
AN: And that’s an issue that we hope for future things, that they don’t even look to that, because that’s dangerous, you know. You didn’t know who was down there. You couldn’t go, it was exile.
CG: It was like that on the Bayou for a while.
AN: We had to be cautious everywhere because they would come to Walmart, right here. And they’d just bring busses and stuff and you just had to be careful. Normally, it’s very quiet, you know, we’re just home. It’s a small town, everybody knows everybody’s business. Usually, you didn’t have to worry at all. It was a higher alert of just of being cautious on everything: spending or whether just going out to the public.
CG: One thing I just remember, I hated seeing the oil boom, that, that orange boom that was used to contain it, because it was just another reminder of what was lost and what was going to be lost. I hate, I still, I hate seeing that boom. I just hate seeing it, I just hate it.
AN: A few months ago, I don’t know if they still have it or not, in New Orleans in one of the public venues, they stored all of the boom. Over the summer, they were still piles and piles and piles. BP just left them. I don’t know whether it was the Coast Guard too. I don’t know what happened to them. I believe they may still be there. But it seems like, don’t just pile them, keep them. They should be ready for next time.
AN: We were in world geography, that’s how I found out
OB: We [Alex, Caroline, and Olivia] were all in that class.
AN: Like every day it kind of came up, the news.
CG: We’d watch the live feed of the oil spill. Everybody was calling it an oil spill for the longest time, but Alex and I coined the term, it was an oil spew.
AN: It wasn’t stopping.
CG: It was just spewing and spewing.
AN: Whereas the Exxon Valdez was actually they had an amount, a number. Where here, you didn’t know.
CG: It was just spewing. Yeah, we didn’t know. And that was another scary point of it. We never knew when it would stop.
AN: So we would watch it. And then that’s how it kind of kept going, but then we found out more, our friends’ families getting laid off, couldn’t do the stuff. Well, I think the schools, they did have counselors and stuff, but for us, we made, we did it ourselves.
CG: I know there could have been more.
RC: A good majority of it was summer, though, because by the end of the summer the oil spill had declined because I can remember fishing red snapper. Red snapper season normally closed, because of the oil spill had pretty much been shut down by the time school started up again, so.
AN: But I think, for, there wasn’t enough, like Caroline said.
CG: There wasn’t enough. Yeah, there was some, some things done, not collectively, you know, not from the state, not from the school board. Our teacher took it upon herself to educate us, as did some teachers.
AN: And then we did it ourselves. All the [fishing] rodeos and stuff were cancelled, all the different camps you have all over were just ruined. I’d gone to a camp going from my 8th grade to my 9th grade year, it was LEAD Camp at Louisiana University Marine Consortium and they had to cancel the camp because a lot of the scientists were using the facility to do research and stuff. I was able to go to student council, which in Natchitoches, LA and a lot of that is they prep you, what to do and how to stand out in your school, but a lot of times it preps you for the community also. And the big theme was what to do for the oil spill. And it was there that we started taking notes and realizing that something had to be done. And when I came back, and it kind of evolved into what we are doing now, just eventually came to this.
CG: We did it ourselves mostly, and so if anything, we want to fight for more education on those things. And that’s a large reason why we exist.
AN: Yeah.
CG: The thing is, we called a lot of people, we said, “Can we volunteer?” at the time of the oil spill. “Can we volunteer for beach clean-ups? Can we do this? Can we do that?”
AN: They were like “No.”
CG: Every response was, “No, sorry, you’re not of age, yada, yada, yada.”
AN: We had a lot of students that could have gone out. They said, “No. You 18?” We asked not to be Grand Isle, but closer here.
CG: We volunteered to do anything and we were shut down every time.
AN: And they said, “No, we don’t want you.” I think it should be rewritten, that certain things, say if you have parent consent and you’re working with like a school or organization, it should be allowed. Because we could have done a lot of things. A lot of the claims things weren’t going fast enough, we could have helped file, do something simple.
CG: I think what allowed us to step up and do something was that we were not going to be told no.
AN: We’re tte dure [hard-headed/stubborn].
CG: We’re hardheaded. Our ways of life are being threatened and we weren’t going to let people that weren’t even from here tell us that we couldn’t save our futures.
AN: We could see the way it was headed. We could all see it wasn’t good. So we knew that we had to shape our future. We had to take control.
CG: So Alex and I were sitting in that world geography class, watching the oil spewing from the well. We were angry, we knew we had to do something so we just kind of put our heads together and came up with Sassafras. We met at the library. We came up with a mission: bringing the youth together in the restoration and preservation of Louisiana.
And Sassafras, the name kind of comes from the fact that sassafras is the tree which file comes from. File is a Cajun Creole spice. We use it in gumbo, and like gumbo brings food together, we wanted to bring the youth together. So it just all kind of made sense to us.
We were just kind of building the groundwork for this organization. And we recruited Olivia, Ronnie, and Aaron later because they all had special ties to Louisiana specifically and we just all fit really well together.
CG: And a big theme in Sassafras is that we were born here, we grew up here, and we plan to grow old here. And so the oil spill just opened our eyes to the fact that Louisiana isn’t in good shape. Our coast is disappearing. And that oil spill impacted that a lot. It sped up the rate of erosion and stuff. And the fact of the matter is that kids do have a voice. And if something is bothering you, if something is an injustice, you do need to speak up. And we all kind of felt like that. And it was just, it was just a common thing that we shared allowed us to come together.
AN: Don’t think you can’t, do not think you are a nobody. The youth has a voice. And we learned, the people in charge and the people all around listen to the youth a lot better than someone of older age. We have a power that no one else has. We hope to spread the message and our main thing is to be educated. Educate yourselves on the issues at hand and to know what you’re talking about before you go out and make a fool of yourself. And so just to learn about and then go to the right people. Contact us and we’ll do what we can to help you.
CG: And I don’t want this to come out terribly, but I’m so thankful that I did get to come together with this group of people because we’ve done some amazing things already and we’re going to continue to do amazing things and we’re going to continue to fight for Louisiana’s future.
AN: And we want to inspire. If there’s something you love. It’s not easy, we’ll be honest with you. A lot of the reason we had to wait so long to add these others is because we wanted to make sure we had everything taken care of. And we still don’t have everything taken care of. We’re working on that now. But just don’t give up. Take your time. We realized we had to rush, and we did what we could do at the time and we can keep on growing. But school and everything, you have to have the drive. But if you’re inspired, it makes it so much easier. It’s what we love. I mean, through this whole thing we’ve had so many opportunities and experiences that we could have not gotten any other way.
CG: And too, we know that there are a lot of kids our age that aren’t so willing to share their stories. So we felt like we could speak for them. And everybody’s been really good about that. A lot of people support us. A lot of kids. A lot of adults. And they give us their ideas and we just speak out on them.
AN: I was pushing, like Ronnie, you’ve got to. The fish. And, with Ronnie, one of the reasons is that he’s really good outdoors, and Aaron, those two --
RC: We’re the environmental specialists.
AN: Those two have a lot of ties to the community and we knew that through their families and stuff and just knowing all the stories they’d told, we just had to bring them in. Makes it interesting.
RC: You show me a picture of a fish in the Gulf and I’ll tell you exactly what it is, the name, maybe not the scientific name, but I could give you it’s name. I’m probably going to minor in marine biology.
OB: And me and Alex have been friends since preschool. So. We used to go eat McDonald’s every Monday. And we were just always friends, so.
AN: And her and I actually started talking at the same time about doing something too. Olivia was with us since the beginning more than anything.
OB: They do all the really hard stuff. I just help. With the Eighth Grade Science Ambassadors they called them, and we would plant marsh grass on the beach and stuff. And then I went to a Louisiana Girls Leadership Conference at Nichols [State University]. The whole point was we had like twelve hours to create this presentation and we had to present it in front like of all these important people about, like, recycling and energy conservation and land conservation and stuff like that. I think we came in second, and then through that it got me really interested.
AN: She came and we were talking about the experience and then she was saying how they did a lot of stuff with the oil spill, talking about a lot of the issues. And so she came on. And the thing is, the main thing that brings us all together is the bond that we have into our community and to everything we do. It’s just, none of us could be taken out of the situation and be the same people we are. It’s because of where we live and because of what we do, our culture and everything –
CG: And because of what happened.
AN: And what happened. Yes, we’ve all been shaped --
CG: As an organization and as people --
AN: As individuals and as families. We’ve always been friends. If you have friends with you, people that love it too, it makes it fun. I’ll be honest, we have a lot of fun. I mean sometimes it’s hard, yeah, but we like to have fun too, and it all helps.
OB: And with Ronnie Joe it’s not hard to have fun.
CG: [My favorite thing] is the food, I’m not going to lie. I travel everywhere in the United States, and it’s just, it’s always bland compared to what you eat down here. I’m, I’m all about that food man, and, and the people, the, the soul, the just general feeling you get from living down here. We’ve always said that people here are connected to this way, connected to the land in a different way than if I’d just be living in Oklahoma, you know what I mean, it’s a great place to live, a place like no other.
OB: Other than the food, because the food’s always the best part, you know, you go to your grandma’s house saying I don’t want to, I don’t feel like picking up McDonald’s or Burger King, “Hey grandma, you want to see what you’ve got in that refrigerator.” “Oh, mon cher, I’ve got some gumbo.” You know. All of the above.
RC: Some sauce piquante.
OB: Some sauce piquante. Some fricasse.
AN: Or in Ronnie’s case, some oysters.
OB: But, there’s no other place, that I know of, that you can just go, and be like, “Hey guys, what’s up today? You know, how are you all? Oh, you want to come over?” And then you’ve got like forty people at a house in one afternoon because it’s your best friends.
CG: Tell them what you call that. You call that making the veille. Making the veille.
OB: Making the veille. And you just hanging out. And just, “Oh let’s go make the veille.”
AN: And you always eating, too.
CG: You always eating and you always making the veille.
OB: Yeah. You always eat. But when, like especially when something bad will happen or something good will happen, you’ll have people from the community, your close friends and your family but just people in the community itself will just support everybody, and you can’t find that other places, I mean, other than little towns. And then “Oh, what you all want to do this Saturday?” “Oh, we could go to the movies or we could go hydrosliding or wakeboarding or riding the boat –“
RC: Or fishing [laughs].
OB: You know, it’s different. It’s homey and everybody’s together and it’s nice. You can’t really get lost on our 3 roads.
CG: No, and what we always tease about is, we don’t really have directions it’s kind of –
AN: Up the bayou --
CG: Up the bayou, down the bayou, or –
OB: Across the bayou –
CG: Or by this bridge, across the bayou –
AN: And we shorten it to UTB and DTB for expert –
CG: DTB, yeah.
AN: For down the bayou, or UTB: up the bayou. And actually, I’ll kind of close off. They stole all of mine. But, just to sum up, it’s just the way of life, the culture. When I went to Alaska, I thought wouldn’t, I’d starve, but I was actually surprised, they actually fed us really well. They lacked some seasoning, so I brought some Tony Chachere’s and some Louisiana Hot Sauce and stuff, but just the food first of all, we love to get a vent [used to mean a big stomach], youknow, a stomach, from eating and stuff, and the culture, the people, it’s just, it’s like no other. I know a lot of people say they live in amazing places, but we will have to have a contest one day to see just how amazing –
CG: We know we’d win.
AN: And people come down, we want to, we don’t want to keep it to ourselves. We love visitors, we love to show them, you know, so if they are thinking of a trip, definitely come down, contact and we’ll help anyway we can.
RC: I mean, there’s always something to do. I mean, there’s fishing, hunting, frogging, hunting alligator, bullfrogs [lots of laughter] --
OB: Okay, it may not be the, the normal stuff to do.
RC: Hydrosliding, water –
AN: We’re very creative –
RC: There’s mud riding, I mean.
OB: Yeah, because we don’t have like a movie theater or anything like that –
CG: No.
OB: So we have fun the good old Cajun way.
AN: The best part that I see, that we live on the water. Let me explain it: I live right next to the corner of a levee, so I can walk you know about maybe a tenth of a mile across the canal, over the levee, I’m in the marsh. It’s not many places you can do that. And another thing is, we’re very vulnerable, I should say. It’s a love-hate relationship, that’s how someone explained it to me, kind of like how she said, but we love our environment, we couldn’t live any other way, with the levees, but we also, it, you know, we have to worry about in any great, I mean, the way it works is, with the estuary, we have all these, we flourish things, we have these risks too, we deal with the hurricanes because we know that if we move away, then what would, where would we be. There’s all these rewards but there’s also, you know, these costs added, but we couldn’t live, I know I couldn’t live where there’s tornadoes and stuff. Here we can prepare and take them. We hope we don’t flood, basically, we have to worry about that, but that’s just, we live with it.
OB: That’s why we have levees.
AN: Exactly. And a lot of times, those levees, they do scare you, you know because, when the hurricane come in you’re this little piece of land and the water’s right here and it wants to come over –
CG: All around you.
AN: Yeah, so it’s you have to have a tough gut to live here, you know.
CG: I like that, you know, the girls aren’t afraid to get –
OB: Dirty. We’re not, like we’re girly, but we’re not –
CG: My favorite childhood memory is checking the crab traps, pulling up the rope in the murky water, getting the mud, what do you call the mud?
AN: The boo-poo-dee.
CG: Yeah, the boo-poo-dee all over your hand.
AN: The stinky mud.
RC: Or as the narrator from “Swamp People” says, the “boo-poo-dee.” [with dramatic emphasis]
CG: The “boo-poo-dee” all over our hands. We just, we have a good relationship with the land and water.
AN: And we’re not afraid to go out in public looking as whatever you want to call it –
CG: We don’t really walk around in our shrimp boots –
RC: I do –
CG: Well, Ronnie, but --
RC: I’ve got mine in my truck, actually.
AN: I actually had an argument because – I had an argument because, in my video in Alaska, they were, y’all’s are brown, you know, and ours are white. –
RC: Mine’s spray painted green --
AN: And I was coined several times saying, how, well, we use a lot of white ones, different kinds, but I was saying how our shrimp boots are a lot sexier than the Xtra Tuffs. And there was a big argument between the Alaska people and on and on.
It’s just, we go in camouflage. Actually my dad told me this story of this gentleman that came down as a contractor for John Deere and was doing some training and he says, “I want to thank you guys,” he was in a class a few days ago, “for not wearing camouflage today to work.” “Why?” “Just because everywhere I’ve been down here, for like the past month, everywhere I go I see camouflage in every setting I’m in. This is the first place that I’ve been in with at least more than twenty people that, you know, doesn’t have camouflage.” That’s just the way it, like, I love camouflage, it matches with anything you want to wear, it matches.
RC: This is my dress attire: winter, it’s camouflage, summer it’s khaki shorts and a fishing shirt. And in between it’s the camouflage pants with a fishing shirt. That’s the in between one. The bow-fishing months is a combination of the two, converting, from season to season.
OB: And then down here, we talk with our hands. It’s really hard to get things, like, I love it when like somebody will talk with their hands and mom will like point them out, or something, or they do this to me all the time: I’ll start talking and my hands go crazy and then they’re like, “Olivia, sit on your hands,” and then I set on my hands and then you stop talking because it’s impossible.
CG: It’s hard to get your point across down here without using your hands.
RC: The best is when you’re talking on the phone and you [gestures with hands].
AN: You can tell somebody’s conversation, and the accent is the best part. I like the accent. Because there’s people, you know, north, a few miles north --
CG: There’s people fifteen minutes north of us who do not speak like us.
RC: Above the Intracoastal Canal.
CG: I don’t know that happened. How did it happen that people five minutes up the road do not have Cajun accents? I don’t know.
AN: It’s kind of an interesting idea for a project.
OB: I’d like to hear what I sound like compared to other people because I don’t think I have an accent, but everybody else thinks I have an accent.
AN: I’ve learned to cover up mine with the traveling I do, and different things, I want to sound professional –
OB: I don’t want to cover up mine.
AN: So, I’ll slowly, people are like “well, talk in your accent,” so if you get me in a conversation –
CG: When you get us together, it’s coming out. That’s it.
AN: Or if I’m talking with my buddies, it’ll come out.
CG: I feel it, I hear it, too.
RC: But, my girlfriends’ brother was working for my dad this summer and they live in Houma, and my dad goes, says something and he calls him a Northerner, and he says, “What’s your definition of a Northerner?” And he’s like, “Well, above the Intracoastal [canal].” [Laughs]
OB: Or if you get some of the older people here, they don’t say the “t-h” sound and it’s like “Sout Lafourche” and “da” instead of “the.”
CG: But --
AN: So we get coached by her mom the English teacher all the time.
CG: But, just to clear that up, just we say “dat” and “dere” because the “t-h” sound does not exist in the French language. Just to clear that up. We’re not stupid or ignorant. That sound does not exist.
OB: But when they learned to talk, it was, they had no “t-h” sound so when they were taught English, they couldn’t say the “t-h” sound so they kind of carried down a little.
RC: I know, we hung out with a guy in Mississippi and he always rags on us and we kept say other, well “udder”
CG: Udder. [Laughs]
RC: “That udder one over dere.” “Shot dat goose ova dere.” He’s like, “it’s OVER and it’s not udder, an udder is on a cow. It’s other.”
AN: And people get me for “zink.” You know, like, wash your hands. They always tease me because I think it sounds the same, to me, I’m saying “sink, sink” as in, wash your hands. Actually, this summer I was with them fishing and they had some zinc annodes you put on the bottom of the boat. Well, they was saying, “We’ve got to install this zinc.” The whole time, for like the week, I was like, “Why do you need a zink on the boat?” And I come up to Ronnie on the side and I was like, “Ronnie, why do you need to install a sinks, zinks, or sinks?” And he was like, “What?” And of course, he couldn’t keep it on the DL, Ronnie’s like, “Listen to Naquin what he’s saying, he says.” [Laughs]. And I was like, “Thanks Ronnie.” So then, I finally came to find out that I say it very similar, there’s a lot of things that I get teased about, but I’m proud of it.
CG: A few people say “zink” on the bayou though.
AN: I say, “I’m going to go wash my hands in the zink” in chemistry last semester, they thought I was talking about the stuff –
CG: The zinc.
AN: I was like, “No, in the lab, the zink” [makes hand washing gesture]. They were like, “We don’t have any zinc.” I was like [throws hands in air]. Just certain things like that, you know.
RC: It showed me how much in life I’d miss it if I didn’t get to go fishing. Because that one summer, I was about to cry I wanted to go fishing so bad. It showed me, my life doesn’t consist of much but fishing. If I’m not hunting or fishing, I’m on a couch playing a video game or something and I don’t like to do that.
AN: I think it strengthened it. I mean, I think we knew what we had but we took it for granted. And when it was threatened in those situations, you realize how important it is, I always took for granted. Then I started seeing that I could do this thing. When I realized that, and that strengthened my love for it, to do something, and just spurred to action.
RC: Hunting and fishing, that’s the way I roll. Scuba diving too.
CG: And oil always had a love-hate relationship with us because of some of the canals that oil companies cut, erosion is happening more quickly. So we’ve always kind of dealt with oil in that aspect. But it’s also really good for our economy. So as much as it hurt us, it still does so much good for us.
AN: We used to just be a fishing community and stuff and with the advance of oil we had a lot of people getting a lot more income and improving. Without the oil field we wouldn’t have a lot of the things we have now, nothing.
CG: I just think it over all strengthened our relationship, just to mirror what everybody already said. We love where we live. We genuinely love it or else we wouldn’t be doing this. And to see it threatened, it really kind of put things into perspective, so.
AN: Because you knew it could wash away. And so that’s when we evolved into coastal erosion also. Because the oil spill happened, you know, and we still work with it to help. That’s why we’re on these different councils, to help and spread our message. But at the same time, it’s really not threatening us as much. It’s the erosion. The good part about it, if anything came out of the oil spill, it was money, first of all, and also awareness. I think it scared us, but we’re coming back.
RC: It scared us, but.
AN: We’re secure in it.
RC: I don’t know, I had a feeling we’d triumph.
CG: We all knew.
AN: We’ve been through a lot of things, our culture has been through a lot a lot of things, and what the thing is that all these things we’ve gone through, we’ve always come back, we’ve always come out stronger and better. And we knew we would come over it, it’s just a matter of time or what kind of. Like Ronnie said, we’ve triumphed over everything.
CG: We’ve always been a resilient people, you know, the Cajuns.
RC: We’re not going to put our tail between our legs and hide at the first sign of trouble.
AN: No. We’re going to get in your face and tell you.
RC: We’re going to come head butt you.
CG: The Cajuns were exiled from Nova Scotia, you know, we came here, we fell in love with this land, we lived through it, it was just another thing to us that we were going to make it through. Yeah, it was scary, it was –
AN: And a lot of times it gave us the freesons [goose bumps] you know, you have this bad feeling. Fifteen minutes north they call them the goose pimples. All these arguments between schools. But it’s not, it’s the freesons. The goose bumps.
CG: The goose bumps. The freesons.
AN: Yeah, it’s those, that feeling, we didn’t know what to do. And we’ve triumphed again.
CG: Yeah. I think we all knew. Even, we could be as scared as we want, we knew, if anything was compromised, if our way of life was compromised, we were going to adapt, we were going to make it through, we were going to make it work.
AN: I guess, in my opinion, what you all are doing is great because we need to prepare for the next time. You never know when there’s going to be another disaster. But to focus on the youth and to have specified treatment I guess you would say on, you know, the fisheries, or the environment, but also on the people, the youth, and make sure you keep the culture, and all those different issues, those key points, and bring it all together, because if we have one link missing, it’s gone.
OB: Thank you all very much for this opportunity. And for everything that you all are doing, because it’s awesome.
AN: Thank you all again.
Interviewer: Thank you so much.