The assumed objectivity of the land/water boundary forgets the memory and identity embedded in coastal landscapes. In response, continued local acts of boundary resistance and subversion can sustain such communal identity. For a steadily increasing amount of coastal communities, this boundary line on the map is not only moving constantly, it is formed by physical characteristics on the ground that the Army Corps of Engineers has determined to be a boundary between private land and state-owned water. In the case of the Biloxi Chitimacha Choctaw tribe on the Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, this Ordinary High Water Mark divides native and state properties. This Native American community, forced to leave for a land-locked parcel farther north, will eventually lose their island to the state as this mark rises with the sea in the next fifty years. However, if the water mark can be altered and blurred, the tribe will maintain ownership of their land and have a reason to return after they leave.
Using the format of a guidebook, the project suggests acts of community resistance against this mark, and strategizes how island communities can maintain access to their waters and their culture. Through the persistent action of the community, the island is still their own. Their identity as Native Americans strengthens and continuously re-establishes as they shape their own land. Here, culture and landscape have a co-dependency that renders the land evermore present in our current conversation of political boundaries. Social formation is derived through landscape practices and conversely, the land is formed by the memory and identities embedded in it.
