My latest: “We’re the placemarkers”

Dear friends,

At the beginning of my interview with Elder Rosina Philippe, I told her something that journalists are not supposed to say: “We were coming off of Highway 23 and pulled onto the levee road, and it just felt like homecoming.”

As a journalism student in the 1970s and ’80s, I was trained to be objective. We were not supposed to show “partiality” toward the people we cover. I still believe this to be true, say, for daily reporters covering government policy debates.

But after 15 years of visits to Louisiana’s Grand Bayou Indian Village, where Rosina and other members of the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha Tribe live, those old rules feel unrealistic and counterproductive. If you are a human being and spend time with good people—sharing meals, sitting in their homes, visiting their churches, petting their dogs, listening to their stories—you build trust and even familial affection.

I have no inherent right to tell anyone’s story. I must earn it by listening deeply, representing myself honestly, and reporting the truth consistently. That I’ve earned the trust of Grand Bayou’s residents is a source of happiness and pride.

“All of the tribes love you,” Rosina said during the interview. “But we claim you as ours.”

https://apeaceofmymind.org/2025/09/18/rosina-philippe/

Grand Bayou is both a scenic place and a struggling one. It is based entirely in water. The homes and church can only be reached by boat. This was not always the case. “We had solid ground beneath our feet,” Rosina recalls. “We had garden spaces. We had fruit trees. We had lots of land where you can walk for miles.”

The Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha are a subsistence tribe, and have long relied on the bounty of the land and water: harvesting seafood, foraging for persimmons and wild celery, growing vegetables, and hunting deer, ducks, and rabbits. Always, they’ve been guided by an ethos of taking only what they needed.

They are still a subsistence tribe. But with much of the land gone, some of their traditional foodways have become difficult or even impossible to maintain. Disappearing wetlands also mean less protection from storms. Most tribal members have moved away, returning to Grand Bayou with their families for holidays.

But Rosina remains, along with about a dozen other households. “I say that we're placemarkers,” she told me. “A table is here and it's set and we're like a place card holding the place for others to come. I stay because of my love for my life, my life choices, my lifeway, for the ways of being with this place. I stay because I believe that the Creator in his infinite wisdom has placed my people where we belong. This is our place. This is where we were supposed to be.”

My interview with Rosina is Week 5 of “Still Here,” a series about the people who are working to preserve wetlands and traditions along the fragile Louisiana coast. It’s a collaboration with photographer John Noltner and his non-profit, A Peace of My Mind, which uses art and storytelling to bridge divides. You’ll find links to all the episodes here.

Each episode has text, photography, and audio. Some, including this one, have video too. I hope you’ll listen to the audio, because Rosina is a powerful storyteller. You can listen on the web page or download the podcast.

Plus, what I’ve been reading:

• Ahmed Jallow on a former police officer in North Carolina who was known for his talent at interdicting drugs. Then he became a trafficker.

• Hannah Dreier on a private firefighter who was denied benefits when, at 24, he developed a blood cancer linked to benzene in wildfire smoke.

• Stephen Robert Miller on a South Dakota county that would have gotten $1 million in annual taxes from a solar array project on private land. But residents shut it down after President Trump called renewable energy the “Green New Scam.”

Who’s been interviewing me:

I had a lively conversation with Madeleine Wahl for her new podcast “Stuttering as Art.” We covered a lot of ground: stuttering and intimacy; stuttering and trauma; stuttering as an antidote to industrial capitalism; the beauty of stuttered words; the parallels (and historic conflicts) between the LGBTQ+ and stuttering communities; why my disfluency makes me a better journalist; why I always read my work aloud; why I quit speech therapy; why I still fondly remember a conversation about the fall of the Berlin Wall more than 30 years later; why some days are still hard; and how I've come to trust that the world is full of more possibilities than I once believed.

You can listen at https://madelinehwahl.podbean.com/e/barryyeoman/.

And music I’ve been listening to:

Last Sunday, I attended the North Carolina Folk Festival, a weekend-long event in Greensboro that somehow remains free. The headliner was the Steep Canyon Rangers, an Asheville-area bluegrass band. The whole set crackled, but there’s one moment I’ll remember forever.

One of the Steep Canyon Rangers’ albums, North Carolina Songbook, includes a cover of “Shake Sugaree,” Elizabeth Cotten’s song about pawning everything she owns. Cotten, a folk-and-blues guitar virtuoso born in Carrboro, N.C., co-wrote the song with her family and recorded it in the 1960s. She played guitar on the track and her 12-year-old great-granddaughter, Brenda Evans, sang the many verses.

More than a half-century later, Evans heard the Rangers’ version and contacted the band. They invited her to perform it together, which they did last weekend on the Greensboro stage—a joyful coming-together across generational lines. It was, for me, the North Carolina-est of moments.

There’s no video online, to my knowledge. But I found this one from Lexington, Virginia, recorded a few weeks earlier. 

Next week, on “Still Here,” we’ll feature two women who, in different settings, are helping rebuild healthy wetlands. See you Sept. 25.

All best,
Barry Yeoman