A Cajun man can

After spending a lot of time in my kayak exploring Cypress Swamps in and around my home turf, I decided to go visit a Cypress Sawmill Museum in Paterson Louisiana. A place I’ve driven by many many many times, while driving west.

Whether we were going to Texas as a kid to visit my maternal family, or going to Centerville for our annual 4th of July celebrations with my paternal family, or heading to the deer camp for a long weekend, I’ve been passing by this museum for a long time.

But since my recent trips into the swamps, seeing pieces of infrastructure whose use and history I could only guess at, and my deeper appreciation for Louisiana-ness as I realize the perilous state of our coastline, I decided to recruit my friend Josh Turner and take a ride to that Museum.

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Here’s a link I talk about in the video:

Whether Cypress or Petroleum, industrialists have been coming to Louisiana and putting Louisianans to work in their own backyards; where they used to hunt and trap and fish, and gather edible plants.

We slowly shifted from eking out a living getting food from the swamps, to eking out living getting paid to destroy them in one way or another.

This video is about that, and about me wondering how that changed my paternal family history in that shift, and about the trade offs made for stability in an unstable time. It also gives a little acknowledgment to what a government *can* do with an appropriate corporate tax rate and the political will to make it so: The New Deal/WPA…

I’m not an authority, I’m a layman. Please help correct or color my assertions in the comments.

I’m from illiterate working class stock, who’s been tricked into putting their “x” on the line for generations. We can’t undo that, but we can acknowledge it, and make adjustments for those behind us.

I realize I talk about my people here, and not about the people who where here before, and up until the “Indigenous peoples removal act” in the 1830’s. I will spend more time exploring those stories as well as the Black populations in the swamps. If you have links and would to share, please do so in the comments below.