New Orleans, Louisiana, French Quarter, May 2014.
I returned to New Orleans in May 2014 to attend the National Health Care for the Homeless Conference and Policy Symposium. The last time I was in New Orleans was in the summer of 2005, less than a month before Hurricane Katrina tried to return the city to the sea. In Seattle, in the first few years after Katrina, I had taken care of many homeless and near homeless patients who had been displaced by the storm. I knew that most of these patients were among the more than 100,000 former residents of New Orleans who left in the aftermath of Katrina.
Now, almost a decade after the devastating hurricane and the national tragedy of how it was handled, I wondered how the citizens of New Orleans had chosen to remember it. I went back to New Orleans to participate in the conference and policy symposium, but also to track down their Katrina memorials, their collective sites of memory. Hurricane Katrina was, of course, both a natural and a man-made disaster, what with its socially determined patterns of protection and vulnerability based on race, class, and gender–not to mention the effects of environmental degradation and Global Warming. How individuals and communities deal with the aftermath of a large-scale and complex disaster was something I’d been pondering. I had recently visited the Christchurch, New Zealand post-earthquake sites of memory (and written about it in a series of blog posts, the most popular one here).
How do people deal with and bear witness to trauma?
I went in search of the National Katrina Memorial Park. No one, not even the concierge at my mega French Quarter conference hotel had ever heard of this memorial. With hazy directions and a very silly-simplified tourist map from my hotel, I hopped on a streetcar not named Desire and headed up Canal Street towards the Cities of the Dead.
The Katrina National Memorial Park is located at 5050 Canal Street, across the street from some strange Herb import store painted bright green (reminiscent of the Green Pharma’ing of Seattle since our state legalized marijuana). Entering the black wrought-iron gates and reading the first marker/sign greeting me inside, I realized that I had arrived at Potter’s Field, or the ‘City of the Poor and Forsaken Dead’ as I prefer to call it.
It is the site of the Charity Hospital Cemetery, on land purchased by Charity Hospital in 1848, and called Potter’s Field in the lingo of the time. “It has historically been used to bury the unclaimed from throughout the city, including the victims of several yellow fever and influenza epidemics,” proclaims the sign. It also contains the ashes of people who “donated their remains to the Louisiana State Anatomical Board for medical education.”
Walking farther into the cemetery, I was greeted by these strange, shiny black marble structures, which another sign identified as the Katrina Memorial mausoleums. They contain the ashes of the dead.
A sign states that the swirling pathways lined with these strange structures is supposed to mimic the shape of the hurricane. It is designed to “create a meditative labyrinth, a healing space for reflection.” The fact that the Katrina mausoleums most strongly echo back to the Nazi concentration camp boxcars for extermination of Jews, Gypsies, disabled, homeless and other ‘undesirables,’ did not make this space–this site of memory–either meditative or healing. Who, I wondered, was responsible for the design of this place?
Ah, of course! I thought, as I read a sign stating that this Katrina Memorial was created by Dr. Frank Minyad, Coroner of Orleans Parish. Dr. Minyard, an OB/GYN physician by training, a white man dubbed “Dr. Jazz” as well as “friend of the police” because of love of both trumpet-playing and covering up controversial ‘accidental’ deaths of black men while in police custody. Dr. Minyard, the self-proclaimed “community servant,” upholder of what he calls “the Palace of Truth,” at the time of Katrina our county’s longest-serving big city elected coroner (and not a forensic pathologist,) and a rather loathsome interviewee in Frontline’s 2011 stark, startling, and effective video episode Postmortum: Death Investigation Crisis in America. I show and discuss this video every spring in my undergraduate nursing health policy course, so I remembered Minyard very well.
As sat on a bench waiting for the Streetcar Not Named Desire back to my French Quarter tourist hotel, I felt sad, empty, and duped. This was not the community/collective site of memory of proper remembrance of the national shame, of “Is this America?” of post Hurricane Katrina that I had come in search of.