Leaving the tight-knit community his family had called home for five generations along the Louisiana coast was one of the hardest things Chris Brunet has had to do.

But three years ago, he felt he had no other choice.

The Gulf of Mexico’s swelling waters were gradually consuming Isle de Jean Charles — the narrow strip of land in Terrebonne Parish that has been the homeland for the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians since the 1830s.

“This is where I was awakened to my Native American identity,” Brunet says on a sticky late afternoon in August as he sits in his wheelchair, gazing upon the tattered remains of his family’s island home. “I would want to be here if I had any choice in the world.”

In 2016, Louisiana received $48.3 million in federal Community Development Block Grant money to r

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