Well Bottom Blues

Colonialism is a defining political framework of our time. I’m trying to consider my own family line through that lens. At one time I was inclined to call Johan Jacob Folse a settler rather than a colonist, but Likud Israel has poisoned the word settler. In my view Bienville and John Law were the colonizers, as were the conquistadors who led to eventual Spanish rule in Louisiana. Many of the settlers in the territory were either refugees, the sex-trafficked young women and children called casket girls. and the enslaved. These were not colonizers.

My people were refugees, fleeing Protestant prosecution of Catholics in the Palatinate in what is now Germany. They were closest to the people from the global South coming to North America in Europe, away from their damaged countries, the failed colonies of other centuries. Should my ancestors, who arrived before the Acadians, be considered colonizers? Should they have stayed in Germany and possibly died in a Protestant pogrom? Yes, they contributed to the colonial enterprise because New Orleans likely would have starved if the Germans hadn’t settled up river and farmed, but like most American immigrants they ran from other horrors.

If you’re going to criticize my ancestors, I’m going to ask you if you would apply the same criticism to people fleeing the collapsing colonial states in the south. Aren’t they contributing to the U.S.’ colonial enterprise? Perhaps the original French Canadian settlers were ambitious settlers. I don’t know that part of their history. By the time they arrived in Louisiana, they were refugees from the colonial wars between Great Britain and France. The casquette girls, in spite of the myths of their virtue and the reputed care of the Ursuline nuns (which the order denies occured) were in fact sex trafficked young women and children, taken from orphanages and poor/work houses, or from prison where they were convicted or accused sex workers or petty criminals. Were these European women and girls colonizers, or closer to the enslaved in the eighteenth century power dynamic?

The United States was and is a colonial enterprise. Every inch of land taken from the natives, every new territory and state was itself a new colony of the new United States. My home in New Orleans is the cultural center of Louisiana, which state is very much still and has always been an extractive plantation colony. Indigo, cotton, timber, oil and gas and desthly chemicals, and the new data center madness that will sipjon our aquifers as once the plantation owners siphoned oil, all of it is extractive and contributes little or nothing to the people who do the work.

Louisiana has always been and will remain a plantation state. Only the names on the property titles and of the products change, and our political leaders who embrace the extractive and poisonous industries I refer to as the godsons of cotton because we haven’t completely escaped that era. Like slavery the underlying economics has just been reconfigured.

Our collapsing coast is a direct result of the exploitation by the greater United States: all the canals dredged to the marsh leading to its collapse to get to the oil and gas, and the channelization of the river without which the United States would never have prospered, are the direct causes. Natural subsidence of delta land has been accelerated from geological time to calendar time. Global warming and sea level rise are just icing on the cake.

Before you criticize my ancestors and all the non-Anglo immigrants as colonizers, the people who fled intolerable circumstances or were trafficked to the United States, do you hold the Mexicans and Hondurans to the same standard? If you don’t then your colonial critique collapses. Yes we live in a world shaped by the colonial enterprise, but we need to consider how to examine the near-term world of significant if not mass migration. We should start by looking back from our solidarity with economic and political refugees of today into our own history and considering in the past who were the colonizers and who were the displaced and trafficked immigrant settlers in the colonial world.