The Louisiana Folklore Society will offer Bayou Culture Gatherings on Zoom to help connect individuals interested in the human dimension of coastal issues. These monthly virtual gatherings are free and open to the public, but registration is required.
The first virtual session will be held Friday, January 28, from 12 to 1:30 p.m. CST featuring Jonathan Foret, executive director of the South Louisiana Wetlands Discovery Center in Houma. His talk is titled “Sinking In: Culture and Disruption,” which will explore what it means to impart culture with intention during times of disruption.
Coordinated by Mike Saunders, program director of the Bayou Cultural Collaborative, each Bayou Culture Gathering will feature a topic for discussion in addition to news, announcements and a question-and-answer session. Topics will range from the practical, such as how to help threatened community museums, to policy discussion, such as how to include cultural durability in community resilience conversations, to sessions that are devoted to simply sharing cultural traditions, such as a hike to forage wolfberries along brackish marshes.
The Bayou Culture Collaborative (BCC) offers strategies to help ensure Louisiana’s cultural traditions are passed on to future generations. The collaborative offers a way to connect anyone interested in the intersection of traditional culture, the arts, and science in the face of Louisiana’s land loss and the impact of migrations upon the state’s culture in the coming years.
While restoring the physical coast has received the most focus and funding, cultural concerns have received less attention. Seeing a need to address this gap in the community resilience conversation, the Louisiana Folklore Society started the BCC. Growing out of conversations at the 2018 Louisiana Folklore Society’s annual meeting in Houma, the BCC helps communities deal with a broad range of cultural issues while facing coastal land loss and other environmental changes—from assisting with repairs of small museums devastated by hurricanes, to tracking population movement after flood inundations, to protecting historic structures that lie in the path of future sea level rise.
The Zoom gatherings will be recorded and posted to the Louisiana Folklore Society (LFS) YouTube channel. LFS was founded in 1956 to encourage the study, documentation and accurate representation of the traditional cultures of Louisiana. Members include university professors, professional folklorists in the public sector, secondary school teachers, museum workers, graduate students and other individuals interested in Louisiana’s traditions and cultural groups.
To register for the Bayou Cultural Gatherings, visit here.
