Remembering and Forgetting the Past on the Mississippi River: Toward an Environmental History of Catholicism

Abstract: After the flood of 1927, the US government decided to master the Mississippi River. Nowhere was this state-sponsored determination more evident than in the lower Mississippi River delta. An historical examination of a cluster of Catholic churches in Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana, permits some understanding of how physical and material alterations to landscapes are not easily traced, especially when we consider the temporal and spatial scales of change to the Mississippi over the last one hundred years. In that time, Catholics of Pointe Coupée Parish managed to retain, erase, and revise aspects of their bonds to a river once central to the lives of their ancestors. This is not at all surprising, as the fallibility of memory is made apparent every time we try to tell stories about our pasts. Pointe Coupée Parish is one site where we can explore how alterations to a landscape have an impact not only on the trajectory of a Catholic community's future, but also on access to its past. Absences of memory in the living, combined with the erasure of material remains in modified landscapes, challenge us to consider how we might account for the relationship between Catholicism and the built environment throughout American history.