Full Interview with Sassafras LA - 4

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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 8^th grade to my 9^th 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.