Cultural and religious connections that bind Southern Louisiana’s coastal communities to the land and water

Virgin Mary statues in an empty fieldWhat composes a community and the cultures within? In Southern Louisiana, communities are constructed by the people and the ecosystems that surround them.

Michael Pasquier, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and History and the Jaak Seynaeve Professor of Christian Studies, begins our conversation with Our Lady of Prompt Succor and the prayers offered to protect the people of Southern Louisiana from approaching storms. The connections of the people to the land and water shape the culture of those that call Louisiana home. We explore these connections and how the stories of the past can help us prepare for the future. (Full transcript below.)

Listen to the full episode below, and subscribe to LSU Experimental on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Additional resources

LSU Experimental is a podcast series that shares the research and the “behind the scenes” stories of LSU faculty, student, and alumni investigators across the disciplines. Listen and learn about the exciting topics of study and the individuals posing the questions. Each episode is recorded and produced in CxC Studio 151 on the campus of Louisiana State University, and is supported by LSU Communication across the Curriculum and LSU College of Science. LSU Experimental is hosted by Dr. Becky Carmichael and edited by Kyle Sirovy.

 

Transcript

This is LSU Experimental where we explore exciting research occurring at Louisiana State University and learn about the individuals posing the questions. I’m Becky Carmichael.

Michael Pasquier, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and History, begins our conversation with Our Lady of Prompt Succor and the prayers offered to protect the people of Southern Louisiana from approaching storms. The connections of the people to the land and water shape the culture of those that call Louisiana home. We explore these connections and how the stories of the past can help us prepare for the future.   

…

MICHAEL PASQUIER

[0:40] Catholics in Louisiana pray to Our Lady of Prompt Succor during hurricane season. Or at least some of them do. Prayer cards with a picture of this rather obscure Mary rest in the pews of many churches, especially those nearer to the Gulf of Mexico. Congregations recite the prayer for quick help at the end of masses. Others keep copies of purses, displayed on car dashboards, tucked in the corners of bathroom mirrors, or crammed into junk drawers. The prayer goes like this:

“Our Father in Heaven, through the intercession of Our Lady of Prompt Succor, spare us during this hurricane season from all harm. Protect us and our homes from all disasters of nature. Our Lady of Prompt Succor hasten to help us. We ask this through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”

Since 1900, around 50 hurricanes have hit Louisiana. That's a lot of disaster and, presumably, that's a lot of prayer. It isn't an accident then that there is a Catholic Church devoted to Our Lady of Prompt Succor in Golden Meadow, Louisiana. The church is located on Highway 1 in Bayou Lafourche. It's one of the last stops you can take before you drive over the levee and dive into the unprotected zone of Louisiana’s disappearing wetlands. It appears to some Catholics that Louisiana’s elaborate flood protection system, thousands of miles of levees, dams, weirs, canales, diversions, reservoirs, spillways, requires another layer of defense in the form of the Virgin Mary. I'm a historian of religion in the United States. I'm also a kid from South Louisiana. Among other things I'm fascinated by the cultural impact of environmental and infrastructure changes to Louisiana endangered landscape. I'm interested in telling stories and listening to the stories of people with an intimate knowledge of Louisiana waterways and life ways—people who have been most affected by the decisions of policymakers, politicians, engineers, and scientists, to construct the flood wall here, but not there. Or restore this fishery but not that one. Or to rebuild this devastated community, but let that one dissolve. By understanding the relationship between people, land, and water, I believe that our knowledge of the past and our perspectives on the present can make a difference in how we prepare for the future.

…

BECKY

Mike Pasquier, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I've been really excited to talk to you about your work that you've been doing along a coast with those coastal communities and I'm really excited to learn more about and understand what it's like to do research in this particular area where it’s this merge of societal and cultural influence that's really connected by the environment. So thank you for coming in and joining me.


MIKE PASQUIER

Thanks.


BECKY

You just gave us a little taste of this whole idea of those that are in the Catholic faith using prayer or using prayer to a specific icon. Icon is the right word?


MIKE

Mmm Hmm. Yeah.


BECKY

As a side note, I’m not a Catholic. I’ve not been raised as a Catholic so there's some things there…


MIKE

Well Protestants are really good at identifying icons and calling them of the devil so mean you should have some background in that too. Unless you’re not even Protestant.


BECKY

Ummm….


MIKE

I’m just messing with you.


BECKY

I’m not, yeah...


[laughs]


BECKY

You’re going to see that as my husband says that I’m a heathen. So, it’s great.


MIKE

Oh, no, I’m a terrible Catholic so it’s fine.


BECKY

[laughs] But yeah, so would you say that when Mary Prompt Succor?


MIKE

Prompt Succor. So prompt - being prompt or quick and Succor, s-u-c-c-o-r, meaning help or assistance.


BECKY

Really?


MIKE

Yeah, the French, being Prompt Succor, and so the translation in English because this devotion to Mary came from France and Louisiana has some French roots going back to around the Battle of New Orleans. And that particular Devotion to Mary, over time, became associated with flooding and other water related disasters and natural disasters so Our Lady of Prompt Succor became the Mary that people in Louisiana pray to during hurricane season. There are a lot of other manifestations of Mary. Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Lords—all of which you can find devotions to here in Louisiana. But during hurricane season, you’re not going to pray to Our Lady of Guadalupe. You’re going to pray to Our Lady of Prompt Succor. It’s a funny Catholic thing going on when it comes to this multiplicity of Marys. They all share this one common idea, but the way in which they’re made manifest through different devotions depends on where you are and Louisiana has this peculiar Mary.


BECKY

So dependent on where you are and basically, the time with which you are in a particular location. So, is Louisiana unique for saying this particular prayer for Mary of Prompt Succor than, than other locations along the Gulf Coast?


MIKE

Well, let’s back up and to say that, to say that all Catholic in Louisiana pray to Our Lady of Prompt Succor would be inaccurate, right?


BECKY

OK.


MIKE

Prayer is a complicated thing and devotions to Mary are a complicated thing for Catholics. Some, some have that kind of relationship with this idea of Mary and some don’t. Some might find that prayer meaningful, others might just say it just because they're saying in it at Mass, right. So the way in which people understand prayer in the meaningfulness of prayer just really depends upon the person. But that isn’t to say it isn’t relatively well known throughout coastal Louisiana sort of below the I-10 corridor and I would say, too, that the idea of devotion to Mary, specifically Our Lady of Prompt Succor, does have some salience throughout the Gulf Coast but certainly concentrated in New Orleans where it was sort of originated and then in Louisiana more generally.  


BECKY

That is exciting to hear of something that was originated and then tied with these major natural events that are cyclic and occur. When did you become inspired to start looking at this particular aspect?


MIKE

Well, I wouldn’t call it inspiration. I would call it academic inquiry.


BECKY

OK.


MIKE

And it was while I was at LSU as an undergraduate between 1998 and 2002 and I was writing an undergraduate honors thesis in the Honors College here at LSU and I wrote the kinda first, I wouldn't call it academic—I was an undergraduate at the time—but aspiring academic thesis on the history of the devotion to Our Lady of Prompt Succor. So I spent a lot of time in archives in New Orleans, the Archdiocesan archive, the Ursuline archives, and others to look at how the idea of Our Lady of Prompt Succor evolved over the course of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. And so that’s where it comes from. I don’t have a personal devotion to Our Lady of Prompt Succor or any Mary for that matter but I do find that many people do and it allows... I use Our Lady of Prompt Succor as an example for how we can think about the ways in which culture, and religion is a part of culture, plays a role in how people understand their landscape, their ecology, their environment—to say nothing of the society in which they live and who they are in that society—and how this is just another layer of defense in a way that people rightly are very concerned about in Louisiana when it comes to hurricane season and the reception of hurricanes during hurricane season and our response to them. And this idea of a natural disaster and what is natural about disaster. I think a lot of historians today recognize that at this point in the United States and around the world very few disasters are natural.


BECKY

And I think that here in Louisiana we've got some prime examples of things that we can even discuss how this particular of a hurricane for instance influences us as a society, as communities, as groups of people. But then also we have to recognize that our interaction with our environment that may have, or I would say has influenced that impact. And so really kind of seeing that it is messy and seeing blurred lines and so what’s been our role in the aftermath of these events. So you just kind of answered for me how you got into this particular area of research. Were you always interested in religious studies?


MIKE

I started out in political science ‘cause I thought that I wanted to want to be a lawyer and that didn’t work out so I shifted over and got a double major in religious studies and history which was a great pairing for me because I love history and specifically American history and I focused on basically the history of religion in the United States. And I'm very fortunate to have kept that as a job now here at LSU and to be able to focus on that on a professional level but it also becomes very personal and not everybody has that opportunity, I see it as an opportunity, to be able to come home to a place and to bring a kind of personal, and in some cases even emotional, connection to the subjects that I find academically interesting and important to investigate. It adds a kind of layer of urgency and not that you have to be from a place to study a place, but for me it allows me to kind of push a little bit harder and work a little bit longer when it comes to building rapport with a community or with a family or with an individual. I'm trying to get that story right and done in a respectful way and in ways that can inform not just an interested public who likes good stories but also potentially decision-makers and policymakers who play an outsized role, or, certainly a larger role than I play, in decisions made to restore and protect our coasts.


BECKY

I would imagine too that because you have this personal connection—are you originally from the Southern Louisiana area so you’ve been able you’ve  already grown up within those communities?


MIKE

I'm always suspicious of anyone who just, when I walk up to them and ask them to talk to me, they just let her rip. And with apparently no filters. I don't want somebody, I don't want to have an encounter like that. I want people to size me up and I want people to be aware of the fact that even though I might be from Louisiana, I'm not a part of their family. You know in some cases, I’ve known them for two or three minutes. And I think it's important and ethically we are required to be sure that those who we're listening to and those who we tell we might use what they're saying in order to tell another story through my own interpretation, that were just clear about those kinds of things.

That being said, sometimes doors are easily or more easily opened. It’s kind of who's your mama are you Catholic and can you make a roux kind of encounter that you have with with people in south Louisiana. I'm not that you have to do I have to make a roux or be Catholic in order to build rapport and get to know people on a personal level but sometimes it does help. I find that it's not uncommon that I'll be one maybe two degrees removed in terms of my family and other people's families but that doesn't mean that what I'm able to learn from people I'm speaking to that it's any better or worse or have different kinds of quality than someone who's not from here and who doesn't have that kind of connection. In fact, I find that sometimes that can be a handicap in that I might have some blinders in the questions that I'm able to pose to people who are familiar with in this kind of deep way. That people from the outside they wouldn't have those blinders. So I would, I think there is are pluses and minuses to being from a place and also kind of studying a place.


BECKY

[14:30] For someone who is not familiar with the type of research that you conduct, could you walk us through a little bit about what that might look like on a daily basis or even when you're getting ready to propose a project? What are some of the big things that you would do?


MIKE

One of the, I call it a burden, I shouldn't call it a burden, but one of the things about being a religious studies professor is that people don't ordinarily understand what you mean, what I mean, by religion or the study of religion or religious studies. When I told my grandmother, my mawmaw, years ago that I was majoring in religious studies and also had a girlfriend at the time who became my wife, her question to me was, “how are you going to be a priest?” because to study religion was to think theology and then the application of that being is he’s going to be a priest. The study of religion in an academic at a place like LSU, is nonsectarian, non confessional. I see myself, I'm trained as a historian and as an anthropologist. And so I try to understand religion through those academic disciplinary lenses. I see religion as a component of culture. It is alongside other ways in which people self identify or how they identify others through race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, things like that. Religion is a part of that jumbled mix of who we are. And so I feel comfortable studying things related to the environment in the coast because I see religion as just part of everyday life. I think it’s confusing for some people whenever I tell them that I work on the history and culture of coastal Louisiana, but they know that I'm a religious studies professor and putting those two things together sometimes leads to some questions and the way that I answer those questions is to say that religion is a part of culture and religion is a part of everyday life even if one doesn't identify oneself is religious we are surrounded by people who do look through that lens and see themselves in the world that way. So that's how I can at least I can justify to like tenure and promotion people that I'm studying religion.


BECKY

I think that you just mentioned, you know as it's part of the culture, that this is also, when you're looking at the effects that Louisiana is experiencing along its coast, as a result of industries, the way that we have created levees, as well as you know any of these tropical storms, natural disturbances that have happened from the ecological perspective I constantly am thinking what's happening to the land? Where is the land going? What's happening to the organisms? And sometimes I personally lose sight of, oh, we're not just losing this particular seabird or this particular plant, we're losing heritage. We’re losing our past.

 

MIKE

[17:50] So, I produced alongside Zack Godshall here at LSU, he’s a filmmaker in the English Department, a film called Water Like Stone, which was about a fishing village in Lafourche Parish called Leeville. Leeville is outside of the levee protection system about midway between Golden Meadow at the end of the Ring Levee and Grand Isle in Port Fourchon, which are both on the coast. Our exploration of the people who live and work in Leeville was a way for us to try and understand the place that, within our lifetimes, might not be inhabitable. When we look and we see these kind of these maps of coastal land loss in Louisiana and these kind of red zones, this projected land loss, if we do nothing or if we do you know these certain things but not these things were going to lose this these lands and Leeville’s in that red zone. And there are other communities like that throughout south Louisiana. And what that documentary does, among other things, is to try and listen to people talk about a place’s past, a place’s present, and then, in a weird way and maybe in an unfortunate way, to reflect the point of the future of a place that will not be. And when we think about, cause I'm a historian, I'm good at the past. I'm good at time. Right, historians are all about time. What we’re often times not so good at is space. And when we combined and layer space and time in in a place like Leeville, we can start to understand this kind of depth of knowledge and depth of experience that happens over generations and that is deeply embedded in families and communities. But that can and certainly isn't static. We should never think of it is kind of a static museum piece.


BECKY

Right.


MIKE

An artifact. It's evolving. It's fluid. It's in flux because that's the way that all people live in Louisiana no different. But it does lead to questions about where does a place reside or where is a place located if it isn't a place anymore? If it isn't a place as we understand it where you around in and smell and see and go to the post office and go to a grocery store and go to a church. This place had that and it's losing that. And where does it exist?

I got to know of a librarian in South Lafourche named Mr. Paul Choquette, who makes an appearance in Water Like Stone, and he wants told me that preservation is salvation.


BECKY

Oh, I like that.


MIKE

And preservation and salvation in meaning that, for him, where he and others expect that overtime, and we’re talking about long-time here, decades, not only is this place going to change, but there is the possibility that it just won't be, it won't be a place where people can live anymore and then the land in one with people walk today might not be there.


BECKY

And I'm glad you brought up Water Like Stone. Remind me when, what year did you do that documentary?


MIKE

Zack and I did a lot of the fieldwork and the recordings in 2011 and 2012. And then it came out in 2013 I think and it premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival and it also screen at a lot of film festivals around the country and we still screen it today. And there's another project that, we can go back to Water Like Stone, but another project that I'm working on now is called Coastal Voices, which among other things it’s a podcast series and one of the podcast episodes is going to be based upon Water Like Stone, so there's going to be a kind of an audio, shorter audio version of Water Like Stone with a little more narration, as well as an opportunity for people to watch the film for free on the website so that’s going to be coming soon.


BECKY

Did you find that the work that you did with Zack Godshall on the Water Like Stone project, did that inform Coastal Voices?


MIKE

Yes. So my first book was on French priests in the Antebellum South, which is not what I usually focus on today. When I arrived at LSU in 2009, there was a couple years of there after this the Deepwater Horizon explosion disaster, several men died and the well was open and flowing for many weeks afterwards and it was at that point that something, I don't know what it was, something kind of clicked in me and I kind of took a turn in my research agenda and I just couldn't, I was just reoriented. And in doing that ever since then, so I thought I was I started to look at through the history of oil exploration and extraction in Louisiana. My dad work for Exxon you know and so many of my family members either have or currently do work in oil and gas industries. So many Louisianans do as well. I mean, we’re all in as a society, as a state, for better or for worse, right? And I wanted to understand that. But it didn't take very long for me to see that that was just one piece of a much more complex puzzle when it comes to understanding life and work and play in coastal Louisiana.


BECKY

Absolutely.


MIKE

And so it was from that moment that I had the opportunity to just kind of swim around, so to speak, in communities and families and businesses and just kind of listen to people and learn from people in order for me to go into, I guess it's been almost 10 years now, my kind of exploration, personal and professional, of the people who called the coast home. So Water Like Stone came after that. I've written some things more of an academic setting for academic venues on these on these issues. I did a book called Gods of the Mississippi, which is sort of the history of religion and culture in the Mississippi Valley. And I like to say that the history of the coast is a history of the Mississippi River, specifically the Gulf Coast because it was a delta. It doesn't really work like a delta anymore, but all that we, all of the land that we have is because of the Mississippi and its tributaries. And all of the land that we lost is because of what largely because of what we've done to the Mississippi, which is to make it stop working as a delta. And so when I think about the Gulf, if I have to think of it in this connection or rather disconnection to the Mississippi and the other waterways in coastal Louisiana.


BECKY

So you just mentioned, brought up this idea of these complexities that we as a society in Louisiana face, our cultural aspect, the appreciation for the lands, but then the revenue aspect.

Do you want to talk a little about, do you feel comfortable talking about that complexity?


MIKE

When I'm talking to people in coastal communities are even in communities in the interior, right, at refineries up and down the Mississippi River and other other rivers, other area State, we can't escape the fact that oil and gas are an integral component to the state's economy with follow on connections to, not just our nation's economy, but the global economy. It’s not going to go away. I was recently speaking to an amateur historian who wrote a book on sort of the early state of early days of the oil and gas industry, guy named Woody Falgoust. He lives in Houma. He's a lawyer by trade, but he he also is a pretty decent little historian, not a little historians, a great historian, and he's very articulate about the irony and the tragedy isn't lost, I think, on most Louisianans. There is a kind of deal made, some would say for us, that is difficult to shake. Finding ways to live within that reality, but also find ways to work within and refine—that was pun.

[laughs]

It’s challenging. I guess I would say, I can answer it this way. I have yet to write or produce anything that is specifically related to oil and gas industry. It's always tangential to, to what I do when it comes to looking at the history and culture of coastal Louisiana and I'll give you a couple of examples.

When Zack and I were filming Water Like Stone, there was a fisherman, a young guy my age maybe a little younger who—I am getting older so he's probably a lot younger—who wanted to talk about his experience of the BP oil spill and he wanted to talk about his being exposed to different kinds of contaminants and him not being as well as he was beforehand. But in the middle of him being recorded and after having said that he was cool with it, he started to say some things that made him change his mind. And he didn't want to talk about it. And he didn't want to go public with it. it was powerful stuff, like so many people who experience the actual event, but also the aftermath of it, both people who were involved in the cleanup, but also the people who were affected in as in terms of fisheries and other kinds of ecological problems. And he caught himself and he said, “no, nevermind. I'm not going to, I’m not going to go there.”

Another example that is going to be in one of the podcast episodes that's about Port Fourchon. It's an episode about the working coast and the people who live and work on the coast, typically in the oil and gas industry or in the maritime industry. And, there is today, as of a few months ago, a statue of what's called the Lady of the Gulf. It is in Port Fourchon. It's, I think, 15 or 20 feet high and it's a statue that is dedicated to the memories of those who have died in the Gulf. Most of them in the oil and gas industry or in the fishing industries. In addition to the fact that it's just a touching, sort of tribute to not just those who died but their families and a place for them to go to remember their lives, but also speaks to the dangers and the risks that come with the industries off the coast and also the rewards when it comes to the economy, right?


BECKY

Right.


MIKE

And so many Louisianans, and other people from all over the world and come to Louisiana, that's their world. That's the world in which they live. That's the world that allowed for my me to go to good private schools, to get a good college education, to not have to take out too many loans, and that's a common Louisiana story. It's a story that when I was talking to Woody Falgoust, who is a local historian in Houma who wrote a book on the history of the maritime industry and the oil and gas industry—the book’s call The Cajun Mariners. He’s a lawyer today because of the generations before him will work their butts off, who sweated a lot more than he does in his air-conditioned office, and who people who sweat a lot more than me in my air condition office. Louisiana is all-in in a lot of ways and but that doesn't mean that we can't recognize the ironies and the tragedies that come with it.


BECKY

I don't think that there's very many people in the state of Louisiana that do not have a direct or indirect connection with someone who is, who is either been injured, lost their life, or are currently working within any of those industries, whether it’s fisheries or oil and gas.


MIKE

I can give you an example of the kind of past, present, and future of the oil and gas industry in Louisiana and it comes in the person, he's a net maker, Mr. Surgney in Golden Meadow. And he was, you know, he's done all the gas stuff as a young man. He did the fishing stuff. He did the troweling stuff and then he became a net maker. He's an old guy now, you know, he would say he's retired, but he still makes nets. When the BP disaster occurred, he was asked by a buddy he has to be one of his deckhands to go work and do the cleanup. And he made a lot of money over those several months. And he's very proud of the fact that with that money, he was able to buy himself his tomb. Cause in places like South Lafouche, they have these family cemeteries that are on family lots and so it's right here he's the caretaker of it and he called his BP tomb.


BECKY

Oh, wow.


MIKE

This is his and he’s proud of it ‘cause he worked his ass off. And he now doesn't have to burden his family with …


BECKY

With that cost.


MIKE

... with that cost that always comes in death …


BECKY

Wow…


MIKE

… and it again, it shows us, and it's anecdotal, I get it, but it shows us how on an individual basis but exponentially it's a common experience of how people are intimately connected to the oil and gas industry, in the maritime industry, and the fishing industry, that are all kind of wrapped up together in Louisiana.


BECKY

From the things that you’ve studied here in Louisiana and in relation to the cultural aspects of the people, the connection to the land, the connection to the water, have you seen this in other locations or is it something that's kind of... I would imagine this is not something that's unique to Louisiana, that I would imagine there's other kinds of aspects of any community that you can, you can examine this.


MIKE

The relationship between people, land, and water in Louisiana is both unique to this place but it's also in a ways transferable to or comparable to other places in the United States, as well as around the world. And I think we can probably go through the litany of reasons why Louisiana is unique. For starters, it has a French and then Spanish colonial origin, which I can give you just one example of how that has an important impact on the way in which people live in Louisiana. France, the French colonies oriented their settlements along waterways, along rivers, and bayous so we have what's called the arpent system of land management, which creates these kind of long slender lots of land that extend from waterways, and away from waterways, and so the, everyone is kind of oriented towards rivers, oriented towards waterways, leading, in our case, to the Gulf of Mexico. So everything is kind of oriented towards water and away from land oddly. As opposed to more of a British model and other European models where it's more… the way we orient ourselves today, which is more grid, towns, town centers, squares that kind of stuff. It wasn't structured that way. And that leads to, you know, for generations and generations has this kind of subconscious kind of quality at the end of it all where we still today see kind of remnants of that way of orienting ourselves on the landscape. So that's one way in which Louisiana is unique and how we interact with water. But I would also say that there are certain conditions that are very comparable to other places around the United States. Both because of the ecology, but also because of the economies that grow out of those ecologies. So you can think of the Chesapeake Bay area, or you can think of Apalachicola and Apalachicola Bay, and they have a great oyster tradition there and an estuary, a very important estuary that grows out of or into Apalachicola Bay. Any kind of estuary environment, any kind of coastal environment, is going to have something that kind of looks and smells like Louisiana in less developed areas. Right? So Louisiana made decisions and how it was going to live with the coast, it was much more industrial, in terms of oil and gas compared to a place like Florida, which invested in tourism in other forms of development. So that coastal experience is somewhat different. What we share now, though, are common risks …


BECKY

Yeah.


MIKE

... when it comes to storm surges, increased intensification of hurricanes, climate change, sea level rise, those kinds of things. Yeah, we’re kind of all in it together.


BECKY

All in it together and then I also think that there's the culture that's associated within, which industry was selected if you will, the things that have arisen out of those, that relationship.


I kinda want to turn this ...


MIKE

Yeah, turn it.


BECKY

... a little bit because I can talk to you about climate change and all this other stuff for a while. But what I also want to ask you was [laughs] have you ever had to do a “MacGyver” move in the field? So you're out, you're trying to collect this information, you're trying to get to a particular community, have you ever had to “MacGyver” anything?


MIKE

So if you would ask my friends, close friends or just acquaintances, they will let you know that I am the farthest thing from MacGyver ...


BECKY

[laughs]


MIKE

... and I'm very aware of that. I know my limitations when it comes to those kinds of activities. But if we kind of riff on what we need by MacGyver, I have been in a situation where someone needed to take a phone call and then end up being rather long and I ended up cooking dinner for, ahh, for an older couple and what was on the stove or what was in the bowls ready for preparation—they were making oyster spaghetti.


BECKY

Oyster spaghetti?


MIKE

So it was a big bowl of raw oysters, kind of floating in their goo—which I love. It’s great. Freshly shucked. I helped them shuck ‘em. And then I had to boil some pasta, which I like cooking—so this, this is my happy place. It’s not MacGyver. This is more like, you know…


BECKY

This is, this is a happy kind of moment ...


MIKE

Yeah


BECKY

...of interacting. These are people that you are interviewing, right?


MIKE

Yeah, yeah, yeah


BECKY

Oh! This is even better!


MIKE

And so, and I had to make the marinara sauce and I had to—I didn't have never made oysters spaghetti so but I figured it couldn't be that difficult. And it wasn't. You just make the marinara sauce and then you throw the oysters in there and they kind of float around and then you mix it with pasta, which was great. I have never made it since because, whereas I have to go and buy oysters, they can just get them from their neighbor.


BECKY

Wow!


MIKE

Yeah.


BECKY

That’s a cool moment though. A cool interaction and then just that personal opportunity, the personal, kind of, that little connection that can be made. I think that would open up other conversations.


MIKE

It does! And I had students with me. This was years ago. I was going a project with Digital Media here at LSU so we all got to feast on oyster spaghetti.


BECKY

I think that what I like even more is that you’ve said that there were students involved because I think that anytime we can bring a student with us, they can be in that experience with us and kind of see that things don’t always happen in a cookbook style. It can just, these impromptu moments, can be so valuable.


MIKE

You’ve got to roll with it.


BECKY

[laughs] Umm, what’s your career path been toward this particular place? Did you have any bumps in the road or did you have anything that kind of, as you were going from that undergraduate as a political science and … Oh, sorry, you started as a political science. But as an undergrad starting with history and religious studies. Once you graduated, did you go right into graduate school?


MIKE

Yeah.


BECKY

So you already had a pretty straight trajectory?


MIKE

My undergraduate and graduate school process was about as textbook as you can make it in that I went to LSU, got my degree, got my double major in history religious studies in 4 years. Graduated with honors, had a thesis, parlayed that into a graduate program at Florida State University. Did that Master’s and the Ph.D. program in 5 years.


BECKY

Oh, wow.


MIKE

Spent that one year a visiting professor at LSU. One year as a postdoc. Excuse me, one year as a visiting professor at, did I say FSU? I can’t remember. So I’d spent one year as a visiting professor at FSU after my Ph.D. Then one year as a postdoc at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And then landed at LSU.


BECKY

Nice!


MIKE

It's about as, and there's so much luck involved in that. And there's so much that has to fall into place. And I made it sound kind of simple. It was, I have one patch of gray hair and it happened in graduate school and I haven’t had gray hair since. But it's it's the most anxiety-filled period of my life thus far. Umm...


BECKY

I would agree with that.


MIKE

And I tell students who want to study religious studies or history or anything in the humanities, or any graduate work for that matter, I tell them, the second after they ask me what they should do, I tell them don't do it.


BECKY

[laughs]


MIKE

But the reason I tell them that is, and then I follow up with, that’s the advice I got from my undergraduate advisor. And what it does is, it allowed me to go to check myself at the door and say either I'm all in, and I understand the risks, and understand the competitiveness, and the lack of promises at the end of that road.


BECKY

Yeah.


MIKE

... and the students, our students need to know that as well.


BECKY

Yes. There's things that I wish I would have asked myself going in. But I'm also glad that I did it. I'm glad that I survived and saw the light at the end of the tunnel and got to that space. But yeah I think that make sure that you're prepared mentally for the unexpected and the expected.

The other question I had was actually in regards to students and what advice would you give them. You’ve already given some advice in terms of if they're starting grad school, what would you tell them and why? But I, I really one of the things I was interested in is if students wanted to get involved, what are some ideas that you would have for them if they wanted to step into this realm?


MIKE

So ever since I got it to LSU, most of my classes I've been able to incorporate my own research agenda into the classroom setting and finding ways to involve my students in the research process. It's not, they're not just consumers of information that I'm the expert on, but they are also the creators and the interpreters of information that they glean from the field or from an archive. Right? So just this last semester, I taught in upper level history course on religion in the United States and in doing so, I had my students, you know relatively small class, interview and conduct oral histories in one specific Catholic community in French Settlement, Louisiana, which is between Baton Rouge and Lake Maurepas. About 45 minutes from here. This is a community that flooded in 2016. And it was an opportunity, I think, for my students - none of who fortunately none of whom flooded personally but who did know people who did, we all did. And this was one particular church that was a kind of clearing house and staging ground for relief and recovery in the immediate aftermath and in the long-term afterwards. And so it was an opportunity for the students to sit down and listen deeply to people's memories of that event and how they understand their lives today because of the event. The students gained a lot from that professionally in terms of learning how to go through the interview process to prepare for interviews, to write transcripts, to edit these things for public listening and things like that. But it also was a way for students to look someone in the face, to look at the face of the other and just shut up and listen. And I find that creating opportunities or spaces or places for people to just shut up and listen to other people is often times rare, but it is important both for my students, I think, but also for the public at large. And so what’s been really nice is that I've been able to use these interviews that were recorded my students and incorporate them into this podcast series that I've started and an episode specifically on French Settlement and the process of remembering the flood of 2016, which is something that hundreds of thousands of people who flooded or didn't flood have memories of.


BECKY

Absolutely.


MIKE

It's something that continues to influence the way in which we live in and around Baton Rouge.


BECKY

Did you have one particular, do you have one example of something a student captured during your class that is particularly memorable to you?


MIKE

Definitely. There are a lot of, it's, it's incredible and humbling sometimes to listen to what people were willing to disclose to these 18, 19, 20- year old kids or young adults. One person in particular, her name is Ms. Jane Visenaut, she's from French Settlement. And it was a religion class, so I encouraged my students to ask them if they ever prayed during flood. Which led to Ms. Visenaut saying that she used to, and it’s on the podcast episode, that she went to sleep praying her rosary every night. She’d fall asleep and if she woke up at night, in the middle of the night, she continued her rosary. And I can't say too much more quoting it cause then I'll start crying as well, but those kinds of very poignant, and powerful, and personal moments that people, I think, heroically are willing to share, allow for us to understand. I think we already kind of do, implicitly or even personally understand the human impact of what happened. It's not just about the 75,000 structures that were inundated. It's not just the 10 billion dollars that you know the number that you hear on the news about what the cost was. But that punctuating those statistics with these deeply, sometimes raw, reflections on that event, it adds a layer of seriousness to what we’re, what we faced and what we're facing as a community, as a society, as a state, that I think people need to hear. I think we all hear it all the time, but we need to listen more and we need to listen more deeply.


BECKY

I agree. I think that this is, that particular event, as well as any of, any of the events since I have moved to Louisiana, which I moved here in 2013, excuse me, 2003. You end up either knowing someone who has been affected or you’re affected yourself. And I do think taking in those very personal accounts and realizing that those statistics that we are reciting are people's lives. There are aspects of their lives that were just lost. It takes it back to what happens when that place is not physically there. It was there at a point in time, but maybe it's not right there at the moment. How do you still remember it? Do you think that there was this is a way to hold those stories make sense to try to ensure that that place continues to exist even if it's not physically there.


Is a course that you plan on teaching again?


MIKE

I have work with the Communication across the Curriculum here at LSU on many occasions and I've also worked with the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History here in LSU conducting oral history projects from general education courses all the way up to upper-level courses and I'm not going to stop.


BECKY

Awesome.


MIKE

And there’s always a community or a problem or theme or subject that I'm going to find relevant to the courses that I'm teaching and I'm going to put my students out there and they're going to meet people and their going to learn from them.


BECKY

And I think that’s really exciting. So I also want to give a moment, so Coastal Voices this is your podcast it's currently, it's currently rolling. Remind, would you tell our listeners what's the URL so they can go and find it.


MIKE

Coastal Voices is funded by, sponsored by The Whiting Foundation. They gave me the money to do this, what they call public-facing humanities project. So it’s made not for the ivory tower. It’s made for, I called the mom test. It’s made for my mom. Is she going to be able to digest this and enjoy it? And I think she has.


BECKY

Awesome!


MIKE

In addition, so it's, it's a website at this point. The website, CoastalVoices.lsu.edu and it includes a podcast series. It includes photo galleries. It includes video interviews. It includes maps of, right now, six different locations specific sites, specific communities, in Louisiana that, taken together, provide for a kind of more whole, or understanding of our spatial narrative or some of the challenges and some of the opportunities that Louisiana and coastal Louisiana is facing. It starts in Morganza, where the Mississippi wants to divert itself down the Atchafalaya River and it makes its way to French Settlement and then to places like Leeville and Port Fourchon, Cocodrie, and Shell Beach in St. Bernard Parish and other locations hopefully in the future. And it's all about shutting up and listening, not to politicians or policymakers or engineers or scientists, although they do make some cameo appearances. It's meant more to listen to people with more intimate local knowledge of the waterways and lifeways and that relationship between people, land, and water.


BECKY

I think that knowledge that’s housed within someone who has, who is living there every day or they've been there for many decades, that’s powerful knowledge to have and it goes back too to everyone is a participant. Everyone is participating in either the process of understanding and aspect for or they’re a participant in the dissemination of information. Which then to me is valuable to those engineers, the politicians, and to the scientists.


Mike, thank you so much again for sitting down, finding time in your busy schedule to sit down with me today I'm, I'm really excited to hear additional episodes from Coastal Voices so I’m really excited to see what the next stage of that is.


MIKE

Thank you, ma’am.

...

This episode of LSU experimental was recorded and produced in CXC Studio 151, here on the campus of Louisiana State University, and is supported by LSU's Communication across the Curriculum and the College of Science. Today's interview was conducted by me, Becky Carmichael, and produced by Grant Kimbell and Kyle Sirovy. Theme music is “Bramby at Full Gallop” by PC3. To learn more about today's episode, subscribe to the podcast, ask questions and recommend future investigators, visit CXC.LSU.EDU/Experimental.

 

 

LSU