To inhabitants of the Gulf Coast region of Louisiana, food is much more than nourishment. The acts of gathering, preparing, and sharing food are ways to raise children, bond with friends, and build community. In Bayou Harvest: Subsistence Practice in Coastal Louisiana, Helen A. Regis and Shana Walton examine how coastal residents deploy self-reliance and care for each other through harvesting and sharing food. Pulling from four years of fieldwork and study, Walton and Regis explore harvesting, hunting, and foraging by Native Americans, Cajuns, and other Bayou residents. This engagement with Indigenous thinkers and their neighbors yields a multifaceted view of subsistence in Louisiana. Readers will learn about coastal residents’ love for the land and water, their deep connections to place, and how they identify with their food and game heritage. The book also delves into their worries about the future, particularly storms, pollution, and land loss in the coastal region. Using a set of narratives that documents the everyday food practices of these communities, the authors conclude that subsistence is not so much a specific task like peeling shrimp or harvesting sassafras, but is fundamentally about what these activities mean to the people of the coast. Drawn together with immersive writing, this book explores a way of life that is vibrant, built on deep historical roots, and profoundly threatened by the Gulf’s shrinking coast.

"This work serves as a model for compiling ethnohistories of other nonliterate peoples."--BOOK JACKET.

From the author of the popular Million Dollar Mysteries and Smart Chick Mysteries comes a new stand-alone novel full of hidden staircases, buried secrets, and the promise of hope found in knowing God. Miranda Miller wasn't looking for the news the day the letter came. But, trying to survive in troubled circumstances, she welcomes the chance to change her location for a period of time. The letter informs her that her grandparents' estate is finally about to become hers. She immediately heads down to Louisiana and the old house by the bayou. There Miranda finds secrets that lead to life-changing revelations. This suspenseful story reminiscent of old Gothic tales has a complex mystery and a vivid sense of the Deep South. It shows how God can take the darkest circumstances and use them to light a bright path leading to the future.

The Cajun coast of Louisiana is home to a way of life as unique, complex, and beautiful as the terrain itself. As award-winning travel writer Mike Tidwell journeys through the bayou, he introduces us to the food and the language, the shrimp fisherman, the Houma Indians, and the rich cultural history that makes it unlike any other place in the world. But seeing the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, and whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, Tidwell also explains why each introduction may be a farewell—as the storied Louisiana coast steadily erodes into the Gulf of Mexico. Part travelogue, part environmental exposé, Bayou Farewell is the richly evocative chronicle of the author's travels through a world that is vanishing before our eyes.

National estuarine inventory.