Monique Verdin’s Louisiana Love: An Interview

Abstract:“Monique Verdin’s Louisiana Love: An Interview” provides insights into the aesthetic choices and activism of Houma photographer and documentarian Monique Michelle Verdin. The interview begins with a discussion of Houma kinship relations with both land and water, considering the ecological devastation that corporate colonialism and climate change have wreaked on south Louisiana. This line of questioning leads to a discussion of her 2012 documentary, My Louisiana Love, of which she is both a producer and the central figure. She explains that she was trying to tell the story of her tribe, which inevitably led to documentation of how the gas and oil industry has ravaged south Louisiana’s wetlands through both pollution and pipeline construction. We also discuss how the personal losses in the film, resulting from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (2005) and BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, make her own pain a focus that ultimately demonstrates intergenerational trauma. The interview then moves on to the ways in which her artistic work led to her activism, particularly by recording the damage sustained by the Gulf of Mexico and the coast due to the BP oil spill. The conversation describes how she has since created alliances with diverse Native peoples as the Gulf Coast representative for the Indigenous Environmental Network and through national and international activism, including at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP 21). The interview concludes with Verdin’s thoughts on environmental issues concerning south Louisiana today, including the proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline and the impending resettlement of the Isle de Jean Charles tribe of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw due to rising sea levels.