Chief Devon Parfait spent his early years in Dulac, a bayou community at the watery edge of Louisiana. He caught fish from the dock, bounced on his neighbor’s trampoline, and went out on his grandfather’s shrimp boat. But Hurricane Rita destroyed his family’s home in 2005, when he was 8, setting off years of displacement. The extended family migrated inland and eventually settled in the New Orleans suburb of Marrero.
Trauma followed Chief Devon for much of his childhood. Yet even as he struggled in school, the adults in his life believed and invested in him. His predecessor, Elder Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar, tapped him as the tribe’s future leader when he was 12. A mentor, geologist Rónadh Cox, helped prepare him academically until he gained admission to Williams College in Massachusetts. There, studying geosciences, he mapped Louisiana’s traditional Indigenous land and discovered that it was eroding faster than the state’s coastline as a whole.
He imagined becoming chief in middle age. But before he graduated, Elder Chief Shirell called him. “I think it’s time,” he recalls her saying. “You are so well equipped to help deal with the issues that we're facing right now.” He finished his undergraduate degree and was sworn in during a small, Covid-safe ceremony in 2022 at the age of 25.
Credits:
- Interview and text, Barry Yeoman
- Photos, John Noltner
- Editing and production, summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
- Audio Engineering, Razik Saifullah
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