Last Stand on the Island

Last Stand on the Island documents the last generations of French-speaking Native Americans who live on an island that's disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico. They are the Isle Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaws, descendants of French settlers who took Indian wives and moved to a twenty four square mile strip of marshland in the mid-1800s. Once a self-sufficient community of 350 people, who grew their own food, raised cattle, fished, shrimped and hunted, since the exploration of the area by oil companies began in the 1920s, the island has washed away to a mere quarter-mile wide and half-mile long, its thick forests, gardens and wildlife long gone. After five hurricanes in the last six years, twenty four families remain, stubbornly refusing to abandon their ancestral land. 

a documentary-in-progress 

by Carmen Elsa Lopez and Evan Abramson