Reshaping Louisiana’s Coastal Frontier: Managed Retreat as Colonial Decontextualization

This article describes social encounters produced through climate adaptation policy experimentation focused on managed retreat—a framework increasingly used by academics and planning professionals to describe various kinds of planned relocations from areas exposed to environmental hazards. Building on scholarship that examines the political ecology of resettlement and adaptation (Shearer, 2012; Maldonado, 2014; Marino 2015; Whyte et al. 2019), I draw on five years of ethnographic work conducted alongside Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders as their longstanding Tribal resettlement planning was transformed by government investment. I found that Louisiana’s Office of Community Development relied on Tribal-led planning to garner federal funds, used those funds to transform the resettlement, and used planning process and documentation to erase the rationales behind and aims of Indigenous-led planning—a process I liken to Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019)’s notion of decontextualization as a colonial strategy of erasure. I contend that state decontextualization of the resettlement from a struggle for cultural survival to managed retreat policy experimentation reproduced a frontier dynamic whereby colonial and capitalist coastal futures are rested upon the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their lifeways, institutions, and self-determination. Constructions of risk and community and timelines published in planning documentation were particularly important state tools used for decontextualization. Ethnographic accounts of such processes can inform future resistance to eco-colonial schemes within climate adaptation.