Six months later, we are still dealing with the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Finding displaced people continues to be a major challenge because we tended to use their physical mailing address and their telephone land lines. I had very few email addresses or cell phone numbers for artists, community organizations, or folklorists. The mail is still irregular in New Orleans and land lines don’t work.

After the hurricanes, Susan Roach worked with Shana Walton with the Tulane Deep South Humanity Center to create the Hurricane Research Coalition and develop materials, including topics and question forms for hurricane survivors and responders. The forms are modeled after the Library of Congress’s Veteran’s History Project. The LOC’s American Folklife Center staff helped with the documents and agreed to be a secondary repository. The Coalition is seeking a centralized database of interviews and research. The Folklife Program has provided webspace for the project until it finds a permanent home. Owens will manage the site and post information about any oral history projects documenting the impact of the hurricanes. The materials are posted online at www.louisianafolklife.org. Select "In The Wake of the Hurricanes." There is also a Yahoo discussion group, Researchinthewake.

Following a strategic planning process and a new budgeting process, the Louisiana Folklife Program's guidelines have dramatically changed so that all programs now support building a cultural economy. The only program relatively unchanged is the fellowships. Regrettably, the apprenticeships didn’t make it through the budget process even though they were ranked very high as supporting the cultural economy since they support traditions that make the state unique and authentic. We may be able to support them through a special initiative this year if the budget predictions aren’t as a bad as they are presently. I am very pleased that a new program did get funded. The Folklife Initiative Fund will support fieldwork and then implementing projects that use the fieldwork to support the economy. Another new program has potential for folk artists: Artist Entrepreneurs will support artists in growing their business as an artist.

Louisiana State Museum opened a new site in Baton Rouge in January including much of the Folklife Program’s Creole State Collection. The entire third floor features Louisiana’s folk traditions, music, and Mardi Gras, the first permanent exhibit to feature the folk traditions of the entire state. The Regional Folklorists and I provided and identified video clips, photos and other interpretive materials. We will be recommending to museum staff topics for lectures, folk artists for demonstrations and performances, and other educational programming.

Monroe cancelled the 2005 Louisiana Folklife Festival after Katrina because no lodging was available in the city and city resources were dedicated to hurricane relief. Susan Roach worked with Mike Luster to get the Louisiana Folklife Festival materials from 1994 - 2006 archived before he left for his new job in Arkansas.

Regional Folklorist Susan Roach (msroach@latech.edu), in addition to her work with the Hurricane Research Coalition discussed above, partnered with the Shreveport Regional Arts Council (SRAC) and Dayna Lee to help them produce an exhibit “Folk Art Is...” from the Southern Arts Federation. She continues to work on the Louisiana Quilt Documentation Project and develop online materials for Folklife in Louisiana website, which includes a searchable database of quilts, articles, and resources about quilting.

Regional Folklorist Dayna Lee (daynal@nsula.edu) is working with the Creole community and Creole Center to interview displaced Creole residents of New Orleans who are now in the Cane River community, families hosting evacuees, and the affects on the community. She is working on two driving tours with the Apalachee Tribe and Cane River Creole. Other projects she is assisting include the Alexandria Civil Rights Project, Key Ingredients exhibit from the Smithsonian, a GIS project to map locations of oral histories, digitizing the vernacular architecture photography collection of cultural geographer George Stokes. She worked with the Creole Heritage Center on a video, The Common Pot, on Creole foodways and are currently working to create a Creole foodways map of Louisiana that will document Creole communities, restaurants, and food traditions throughout the state. She continues to work with NSU’s Williamson Museum on a southeastern Indian basketry collection inventory. Southeastern Indian Split Cane Basketry by H. F. Gregory and Dayna Lee, will be published by NSU Press in 2005.

Regional Folklorist Laura Westbrook’s (laura@roussev.net) entire region was impacted by Hurricane Katrina and she spends most of her time on Katrina-related issues. All projects that she had formerly been assisting have been rendered moot by the storms and their aftermath. Laura’s home flooded with 10 feet of water, and she lost everything. She evacuated to Florida until her parent’s house in Metairie got electricity, where she’s currently working. Much of the university is still working out of homes with cell phones. Soon after the hurricane she knew that the program office had some flooding and looting, but no one was permitted on campus until December. Then she was permitted to check on her office and determined that some equipment was stolen, but all in all little was lost. Someone had raised most items from the floor. Program records or field materials were safe.

Laura has been conducting some interviews and consulting on some new projects that are recovery-related, including working with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) representatives to determine a number of communities within south Louisiana that merit special attention, and possible financial consideration as a Traditional Cultural Property, a form of historic property recognized by the National Register of Historic Places. The Gulf Coast Foodways Renaissance Project, an oral history project and exhibit to collect food-related hurricane oral histories to chronicle the impact on the foodways of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, while tracking the rebirth of the food industries. This is a collaboration between the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans and The Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.