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A black swoosh of mascara and a curve of eyeliner. Juliette Brunet (Choctaw) pouts at herself in the mirror; her amber hair is dyed black as midnight. More contouring and a few fluffs of powder, then she twirls, snaps some selfies, and posts them to Instagram. In 30 minutes, Juliette has gone from Louisiana bayou kid to teen schoolgirl to glam diva.
Juliette Brunet, 16, and her brother Howard, 18, star in an award-winning documentary called Lowland Kids. They live with their uncle, Chris Brunet (Choctaw), on a green sliver of land called Isle de Jean Charles, which lies half-drowned in the fragile marshlands of southern Louisiana.
Ordinary teen. Extraordinary life.
As long as Juliette can remember, photographers have come to Isle de Jean Charles to capture the slow flooding of her island home: houses tilting, sagging, toppling into the bayous, the island eroded by the rising waters of climate change and the ravages of the oil companies.
Now, Juliette is taking photographs herself — she is telling her own island story.
“You always have that one place that’s home, and that’s the island for me,” Juliette says. “You’re not going to find a place like the island again. It’s beautiful, peaceful. The special thing about the island is it’s yours.”
The Louisiana wetlands are among the fastest disappearing lands on Earth. The verdant coastland and marshes teem with wildlife and fish, but every 100 minutes, land roughly the size of a football field vanishes under water. The ragged sole of the Louisiana boot is nearly gone.
Once the size of Manhattan, Isle de Jean Charles has frayed into a fragment two miles long and a quarter of a mile wide. A single road tethers the island to the world, so thin and broken that when great storms surge, the road drowns underwater, sometimes for years, leaving the people marooned. With the next big hurricane, residents tell me, the island could go, its name washed from the map forever.
Isle de Jean Charles captures in miniature a global future of mass displacement. Scientists predict that rising oceans could displace hundreds of millions of people over the coming 30 years. The inhabitants of Isle de Jean Charles, mostly Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, have been called the first federally funded “climate refugees” in the U.S. In 2016 the state of Louisiana won a $48 million federal grant to relocate them to a suburban settlement further inland. So the world is watching how they do it. But after talking with Chris Brunet, Chief Albert Naquin (Choctaw), and other tribal members, I found a more troubling story.
Juliette and her neighbors are caught in a paradox: wanting to stay on their beloved island, but facing the rising waters of climate calamity every day. The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw are described as climate refugees, while not federally recognized as an official tribe. And because they are not federally recognized, they cannot apply for more federal money. Their proposed settlement is a suburban sugar cane farm — a ghost of the colonial system that ravaged Native cultures in the first place.
A further irony arises. Juliette’s forebears fled the brutal land theft of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, a colonial cataclysm during which thousands of Native people were driven off their lands east of the Mississippi to territories in the west. A Choctaw chief called the mass suffering that followed “a trail of tears and death.” But the Trail of Tears enacted a double violence both against Native people and enslaved Africans. Native lands were emptied to make way for colonial sugar and cotton plantations, a system of organized cruelty that created vast fortunes for plantation barons and was so brutal that the most abused and overworked enslaved Africans on Louisiana sugar plantations died in as little as seven years.
Some Choctaw, like Juliette’s ancestors, fled the great removals and settled in the remote southern marshes and bayous of Louisiana. Bayou is a Choctaw word for “slow-moving water.” The Choctaw found refuge in wetlands so abundant they sustained themselves — alongside Chitimacha, Biloxi, and Houma — in peaceful solitude for nearly a century.
Then in the 1920s, the oil companies arrived.
Now Juliette and her neighbors are being driven from their homes by the same economic rapacity that drove their ancestors off their lands. Companies drilling for oil have sliced the vast wetlands into ribbons. They suck oil out the marshes and the marshes sink. Canals draw salt water into the marshes and the vast forests die, bleached into skeletal ghost trees. Rising waters are floating Juliette’s island away.
I first saw Juliette in an online photograph holding a dead rabbit. Many white Americans think Native Americans have tragically vanished, or live in teepees on reservations. But when I meet Juliette and her uncle Chris sitting under their raised-island home, laughing and teasing each other, Juliette is drinking Dr Pepper and checking her iPhone every few minutes.
I ask her if she actually shoots rabbits. “No,” she says, with a laugh. “My brother shoots them. I just go get them with my phone light.” She points to a thicket of shrubs. Going into them, she would say to herself: “Don’t look up! Don’t look down! Just look straight and keep walking!” Up is spiders, down is snakes and rats. Fetching dead rabbits by the light of a smartphone is what this island girl does.
Juliette was born in 2003 in a hospital north of Isle de Jean Charles. She lost her mother, Angel May Gibbs, when she was three months old. When she was four, she also lost her father, Howard Brunet, Chris’s brother. Juliette and her brother chose to live with Chris — for the freedom, the bayou, and for Chris’s love. Chris has spent his whole life on the island in a wheelchair. But he says, “By the time I got them, I knew what it was to give of yourself to something.”
Their electric elevator was only installed in 2008, so I ask how they got upstairs before then. “Imagine,” says Juliette. Chris would fold his wheelchair and put it on his back with one arm, Juliette clinging to his neck. Carrying Howard under his other arm, Chris would make his way up two flights upstairs and downstairs on bent legs five times a day.
“A determined man,” says Juliette.
Chris taught them to read and count. He taught them colors, sitting them on the kitchen table with a family-size bag of M&Ms. He would pick an M&M. If it was blue and they said blue, “we got to eat it. If we didn’t, he ate it and would laugh at us.” At six, he taught Juliette to cook shrimp in a FryDaddy deep fryer. At seven, she was hauling drum, redfish, and alligator gar out of the bayou. At eight, she could hit bottles and crabs with a slingshot. Chris was teaching them to survive in a drowning world. Her favorite book is The Titanic.
By six, it was Howard who carried his sister upstairs. “Come here, baby sister,” Juliette remembers him calling. And the little boy would carry her on his back upstairs. “I would do anything for my brother,” she says. “He’s always there if I need him.”
While I talk with them in the glowing island light, Howard arrives to say hi. They laugh and tease each other constantly. Howard is going shrimping in the Gulf. “Later, knucklehead,” he says to Juliette. “Bye. Love you, fool,” she banters. Chris warns: “Be careful. Good luck out on that boat.” They keep saying goodbye. Their teasing is testimony of their love. The ocean is dangerous, and returning is not a given.
Chris is keeper of the island memories. As the sun goes down, I ask him about the old days.
Imagine a vast, green island. Hundreds of people living peacefully in log-and-clay houses under palmetto-thatched roofs. Gardens lush with watermelons, cantaloupe, and cucumbers, fruit trees with figs, peaches, pecans and persimmons. All of it now gone. Chickens and pigs wandering the gardens. Fat cattle grazing the water lands. Meadows of marigold and matrimony vine. Gone. In spring, the marshes loud with blue-winged teal and snow geese, the bayous teeming with shrimp and oysters, beavers and muskrat — gone. Chris's grandmother, Regina, showed him where herbs used to grow. All that is left is their names, and the names are now vanishing too.
Chris remembers immense oak trees shrouded with moss. The islanders dried moss to stuff mattresses and furniture. They cooked seafood in huge iron pots. Healers known as “traiteurs” treated fevers and wounds with herbs and brews. Each week, the islanders gathered for dancing. And when the hurricanes came, they tied boats between trees with long ropes, and rode the surging waves up and down. “I never heard in our history of people who didn’t know how to deal with their environment,” says Chris.
“They had everything they needed in their backyard,” says Juliette.
Now the islanders shop at Walmart.
In losing Isle de Jean Charles, the world is not just losing an island with an irreplaceable community. We are losing a lifeway. An Indigenous ethic of intimate relations between people, and between people and land; an ethic of being beholden — of holding others and knowing one will, in turn, be held.
“Families never forget loyalty,” Juliette insists. “Never forget each other. If you need something, I’m there. That’s how we are.” Chris agrees. “I was blessed by people that when they knew I was in trouble they’d go, ‘Don’t worry, we got you.’”
In November, I invite Juliette and Chris to New York. An international film festival is screening Lowland Kids. Juliette puts on her makeup. She is studying cosmetology, and tells me that for her generation, makeup has become a creative art form, a way of experimenting with identities and expressing emotions. Juliette has lived a life of anticipatory loss. Makeup and photographs help her choose who she wants to be and how to place herself in a displaced world.
Last year was the tipping-point year of climate emergency—then something astonishing happened: A global youth movement exploded, led by teenagers like Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future protests. Now millions of teen climate activists encircling the world are taking matters into their own hands.
Juliette and her brother are the last teenagers on a vanishing island: “From us on down,” she says, “nobody else lives here. We’re the last ones.”
But Juliette is now adding her voice to that of other youth activists. “I am numb and angry at the same time,” she admits, “because no one wants to leave home.” Climate change is real, she insists. “It’s common sense. It’s not just happening where I am, it’s happening everywhere. It crosses all borders. It’s real—like me not having a place to live in a couple of years.”
I ask Juliette what she will miss most when the island goes.
"It being there,” she says.
Extraordinary life. Extraordinary teen.
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Jackie Fielder: Meet the Young Indigenous Activist Running for California’s State Senate
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