Introduction
Imagine a large bowl surrounded by water. The bowl, for what lives inside it, seems expansive enough, but the reality one can choose to forget from that vantage point is that the bowl is faithfully sinking with each passing year. The water surrounding the bowl stays out only thanks to human-created structures that form the bowl's sides and rim. What has been created can be destroyed. It is indeed a perilous perch, this bowl. Its name is New Orleans.
In introducing my ninth grade students to our study of New Orleans via the interdisciplinary science and humanities Natural Disaster Project, I will help them envision this city using the imagery of the bowl as both geographic reality and metaphor. The bowl helps explain New Orleans' precarious position as a city largely living below sea level and sinking every year, separated from the banks and the swells of the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain only by human-made levees, which history has sorely demonstrated are quite breachable. The metaphor of New Orleans as bowl can begin to explain the unique and fascinating evolution of this city as one unlike any other in the United States, a city whose location was central to the migrations of enslaved and free people of color during its early colonial years and in the centuries since, has continued to host and nurture a mix of, among others, artisans, sex workers, poets, shrimpers, migrants and immigrants, writers, blue-collar workers, and generations of families whose roots trace back to the antebellum era. New Orleans does figure as one of the world's most fascinating cities, in part, as Kathleen Wilson articulates, because of "[T]he relentless migrations—of people, ideas, goods, and practices—that created, and continue to re-cast …New Orleans", producing a "tradition of performance that refused to fade". 1 It is largely the rituals of performance that have drawn millions of visitors to the Big Easy over the centuries; the flair and unique cultural meshing of New Orleans' performance, coupled with a sense that different rules apply here, have also inspired countless travelers to come and stay in New Orleans.
Because of its richness of culture, traditions, intermixing of peoples and natural geography,—a geography, like anywhere else, that has been duly shaped and imprinted by human desires, needs and accompanying choices—young people can gain a lot both for the sake of New Orleans and also for the sake of their better knowing and understanding the richness they carry through their families' lives and within themselves. The tragedy and lessons of Katrina will provide my students with a complicated and illuminating look at how much the effects of natural disasters are impacted and exacerbated by human choices. This unit will provide students with a vibrant forum to engage with social action in the face of injustice. We will explore the following types of questions: What choices did people make as Katrina headed to the Gulf Coast? How did civic leaders and community members respond to the crises around them? What could have been possible? What actions are necessary once the devastation has hit? Ideally, this unit will also help students consider the unnamed value not only of their own cultural traditions but also of their and the larger community's actions as they connect to the continued existence of the earth.
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