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Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time - Season 1 Episode 5 - Wake Up Call - Full Movie
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Short filmTranscript
00:00The flooding in this city is leveling off, but 80% of New Orleans is still underwater.
00:09And while the mayor wants everyone to get out of the city, people here are still trying to figure out how to leave.
00:17The Superdome, which was the shelter of last resort, has become the last place anyone wants to be.
00:24No one's allowed just to walk out of here.
00:25No.
00:25No.
00:26When you say you want to just leave, what do they say?
00:29They tell us there's alligators, dead bodies, disease, and you won't make it.
00:37My cousin, that's the one I picked up from home, told me he didn't know how much he was going to be able to take.
00:42He said, I don't think I'm going to make it.
00:44He was about to break down up in there.
00:46I said, though, we're going to get out of here.
00:49Right next to the Superdome, they have a ramp.
00:53The bottom of the ramp was flooded out.
00:55And I seen, like, a group of National Guards, remember, like, they were sitting, like, on the backside by the ramp, just kicking it, relaxing, chilling.
01:03I guess they ain't thinking nobody going anywhere because of the water down there.
01:07So I was like, I'm going to try to sneak up and get my truck.
01:10We found my truck.
01:14I'm all excited.
01:15It just looked like this beautiful horse sitting on a hill.
01:20Right?
01:20I call it Pegasus.
01:22As a matter of fact, it just was the most beautiful sight I ever seen.
01:26My heart was beaten.
01:27Got to the truck, put the keys in, turned up, cranked it.
01:33Thank God, it started up again.
01:38We're just driving through the water.
01:39There's waves just pushing and pushing and pushing.
01:41As we pass by the convention center, I'm looking, I'm seeing all these people just, they don't know what's about to happen next.
01:52They just want to survive.
01:54They just want to get out of here.
01:56And all them people just looking up at me like, man, you about to get out of here in this truck.
02:02I'm holding on to my crucifix.
02:07I'm praying, I'm asking God to get us through it.
02:26This is where they're picking up some of the refugees out of the Superdome.
02:29And as you can see, these people look like they've been here for quite some time.
02:34There is one scrap of good news from New Orleans.
02:38More than a hundred buses evacuated thousands of people from the hell hole that was once the Louisiana Superdome.
02:46And more will be brought out tonight.
02:48After a successful bus evacuation of the Superdome, the National Guard organized the people in front of the convention center, got them on buses, and we sent them to the airport.
03:03Buses are loading up on top 2 street.
03:05When they put us on the school buses under the interstate bridge, they didn't tell us nothing.
03:16They didn't tell you where you were going.
03:18I was still out there by the convention center.
03:25I didn't feel like I could go no more.
03:27Like, I didn't even feel myself, you know.
03:31I was just done.
03:34And so when they say that the military is taking people to the airport and they're going different places.
03:40I said, man, I don't care where I go, I was going anywhere, the plane was going to fly me.
03:50The water had receded.
03:52So we took our mother, who was in a wheelchair, and the rest of the family, and we walked to a vacant lot where a helicopter landed.
04:02That Saturday, we had over 200 helicopters from the 82nd Airport on landing in New Orleans.
04:13The idea was to recover people and get them evacuated and take care of them at the airport.
04:20At the airport, we were met by National Guardsmen with guns who said, we must get on the plane.
04:28We begged them to let us go to our sister, who lived in Houma, Louisiana, which is about an hour's drive away from New Orleans.
04:42We had family that was ready to receive us, but we were forced to get on the plane.
04:49We had no choice.
04:50They had guns.
04:51The first airplanes are getting loaded.
04:55Everything seemed to be going well.
04:58But then one of the senior pilots on the ground flying a civilian airplane said, well, we can't take off.
05:05We don't have a manifest.
05:08So he told my major, and my major called me up and said, hey, boss, we got a problem.
05:15They haven't taken off.
05:16The people have been sitting here for hours because we don't have a manifest.
05:19I said, well, let me talk to him.
05:22So I talked to him on the phone and said, look, a lot of these people out here even have identification.
05:27There's no computers out here.
05:29We can't create no manifest.
05:30I said, we can give you a yellow piece of paper.
05:33And when they walk on the airplane, you take their names down, and that's going to be your manifest.
05:38And I fly the fucking airplane.
05:40And the planes took off.
05:42We asked, where were we going to go?
05:48Where is this plane going to land?
05:50We don't know.
05:53I said, you don't know.
05:54I said, everybody has to know where they're going to land.
05:58Don't they have to have a flight plan and this kind of thing?
06:01They said, just get on the plane, ma'am.
06:08Nothing.
06:08We didn't know anything.
06:10We knew that we were leaving New Orleans.
06:13My mind was blank.
06:14I didn't know what was going to be next.
06:16We didn't really have control over our destiny.
06:21They tell you you're going to go to Houston.
06:23They tell you you're going to go to Atlanta, to Chicago, San Francisco.
06:27God knows where you'll end up.
06:33The New Orleans International Airport is part of the largest airlift ever on U.S. soil.
06:39More than 10,000 hurricane survivors.
06:42Help us on the way.
06:43Help us on the way.
06:45We've witnessed all day airlifting evacuees to the Louis Armstrong International Airport.
06:49Buses also arriving to take people out of the once great city.
06:57I tell you what a difference a day makes.
07:0024 hours ago, this building behind me,
07:03crowded with thousands and thousands of the most desperate refugees you can imagine,
07:07has been emptied.
07:09God bless the United States Army.
07:11God bless the United States military.
07:13They pulled this thing together from chaos, confusion, anarchy.
07:17God bless you.
07:18Oh, I tell you what, it's great.
07:19The All-Americans are here to help Americans.
07:21That's it.
07:24Is this America?
07:27Do I have freedom of movement?
07:30I thought I was still living in America.
07:38So, you know, it was like,
07:40okay, I'm going to do what they tell me to do.
07:43I'm going to cooperate, I'm not going to cause a ruckus, but I will get back to New Orleans.
07:49The first wave of hurricane refugees from Louisiana is arriving in Texas this morning.
07:56They're being bused from the New Orleans Superdome.
07:58As we were moving around the country, the news media, we're calling people from New Orleans refugees.
08:07Dallas schools are opening their doors to storm refugee kids, and Dallas is delivering truckloads of donations to refugees.
08:15How can you be a refugee in your own country?
08:17How can you be a refugee in your own country?
08:18It offended not only me, but a lot of people.
08:21We are not refugees.
08:23We are American citizens that got caught up in a bad way.
08:26And we resent that word, refugees, and they shouldn't use that anymore.
08:32We've been traveling and traveling.
08:35We've been going from one shelter to the next shelter.
08:38But that's okay, because we're living.
08:42The thing that's not all right is we got family members scattered all around.
08:49Where they scattered at, we don't know.
08:51With approximately a million refugees, 30 states in all are accepting evacuees in this country's largest migration in 70 years.
09:03These were internally displaced people.
09:07This was the forced migration of people because of Katrina.
09:12And I think within modern history, that was the first time for a lot of Americans that that happened.
09:21I had never even heard Austin, Texas in my life.
09:25But Austin, they showed us love up there.
09:32But I didn't know where my life was headed from there.
09:38I currently live in Memphis, Tennessee.
09:41However, I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana.
09:43I'm here in Georgia.
09:44I have lost everything in my home.
09:47I live in Norman, Oklahoma.
09:49Houston, Texas.
09:50But I want to go back home.
09:52But now, I'm in Georgia.
09:53I was born and raised there.
10:05About a month after leaving the Superdome, once the water receded, I was able to come back to check on the house in St. Bernard Parish.
10:15Coming back after the city was emptied out, it was strange, for sure.
10:32A city that is known for celebrating, known for its food, known for being loud.
10:36When I came back to New Orleans, everything looked dead, everything smelled dead.
10:50It was just desolate, just, oh my God.
10:55I could not believe.
10:56I was like, this is never going to be back right.
10:58The graveyard, just the worst thing I've ever seen in my life.
11:10We have above-ground tombs.
11:13But the water saturated the earth, and it made a lot of the graves come up.
11:21We got caskets coming out, man.
11:23One of my cousins we had just buried, like, not too long ago.
11:27Her casket was actually sitting out in the open, exposed.
11:32Now my people graved, and it's right on top of my people's graves.
11:37Look all around.
11:39This, this, this not cool, man.
11:42I don't think anybody after they buried their people didn't want to see graves like this, man.
11:49I wasn't ready for this.
11:53It's one thing to think about the loss.
11:57It's another thing to see it.
12:00When you see it, it's real.
12:02When I saw my home for the first time, I was devastated.
12:10The tears just kind of rolled down my face.
12:13Mud was still inside the home.
12:16It was just a muddy mess.
12:19All of my belongings were ruined.
12:21All of my pictures, everything.
12:26I had mold that was like going up to the ceiling, almost.
12:30Birth certificates, pictures, everything was gone.
12:36When you come back to something that has been your dream,
12:48and you realize that it has been destroyed,
12:52it was like, what do I do?
12:58Oh, man.
13:09Man, look at my crib.
13:10It smashed down to the ground.
13:13My mama trailer.
13:15Look at my other crib that we just built.
13:17Lean it to the side.
13:18Look at my crib.
13:19Look at my crib.
13:20Look at my crib.
13:23Man, this don't even feel like home, man.
13:27Hey, girl.
13:28Hey, cinema.
13:29Hey.
13:30Hey, girl.
13:31Hey.
13:32Shake, missy.
13:33Shake, missy.
13:34Shake, missy.
13:35Shake, missy.
13:38I was a thousand.
13:45She was in the...
13:49She was in this...
13:54Look at that, you know?
14:01Look at my shit, man.
14:02My big screen.
14:04This devastation.
14:05Martin Luther King.
14:09I got some of my old letters from the military.
14:12My military books up there, man.
14:20We got to step over stuff, walk through stuff.
14:24Little stuff.
14:27I can't really get in here.
14:28There's so much mud and dick stuff up in here, man.
14:33It's going to be enough.
14:34But this house is damn gutted out.
14:38I got dick to mud in here.
14:40I can't get to nothing.
14:41I really can't find what I'm looking for.
14:43But honestly, I guess whatever I got out the deal,
14:49I guess it'll be all right, but...
14:51It's going to be like this, man.
14:52This shit is so fucked up.
14:55Everything you ever worked for, man.
14:58A game on your own.
15:00Even if you didn't have so fucking much, man.
15:01It was like this was yours, you know?
15:03It just leave you confused...
15:05It's like this was yours, you know?
15:06Man, it's so fucked up, everything you ever worked for man, a game on your own, even if
15:16you didn't have so fucking much man, this was like this was yours, you know.
15:30I just leave you confused.
15:34What are we gonna do?
15:36How are we gonna fix this?
15:40And it just seemed like it was unfixable at the time.
15:48Louisiana today officially ended the search for bodies of people killed by Hurricane Katrina.
15:54The death toll in the state now stands at 964.
16:01Because of the heat and the lack of communication and absence of medicine, a lot of the people
16:06we found in home, dead, were elderly, poor, and disabled, and they were alone.
16:13My brother, when we went walking in the water, kicked the stop sign and put a big hole in
16:20his leg.
16:21He died from an infection.
16:22And my niece that was walking with us.
16:28She had lupus already.
16:29But then she couldn't take her medicine so she developed meningitis and it moved up to her
16:35brains.
16:36So she couldn't talk.
16:37So she couldn't talk.
16:38All she could do is lay that with her eyes open.
16:43And so, you know, that was one of the reasons why I didn't want to come back to New Orleans.
16:50Because I didn't want to have to, like, relive that again.
17:05From the air today, we saw miles of once flooded houses.
17:12As many as 250,000 homes may be uninhabitable.
17:18In New Orleans, there was anger and frustration today when a sweeping new blueprint to rebuild
17:22the city was unveiled.
17:24Anyone who lives in a neighborhood highlighted here in yellow, most of the city, could be forced
17:29to move.
17:30The plan calls for new parks in green that would help control flooding.
17:34Residents would be resettled in areas circled in red.
17:38This was a plan that somebody had come up with to turn different areas into green spaces
17:46for people that would also be able to capture water during storms.
17:51A great, great idea, except that people actually lived there.
17:58When they came up with the plan about the new New Orleans, it angered me.
18:03Because many of the areas where the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale
18:08and people who did not have a voice were being discounted.
18:13Immediately, we need to identify and begin assembling properties that can become part of the system.
18:20The Lower Night Ward, it was supposed to be a green space.
18:24How are you going to make a green space out of my property?
18:28When the map came out, the first thing that came to my mind was hell no.
18:34It was hell no because it goes back to the legacy that that house that I live in provided.
18:40I'm not giving up this man's property, and I'm referring to my grandfather.
18:45Some worry that the black wards of the city are being intentionally neglected and may even be bulldozed,
18:52leaving residents displaced and disenfranchised.
18:57It did not go over well with me.
19:00It didn't go well with most of the citizens who wanted to come back and rebuild their homes and their life.
19:07And that's when I think folks started to think about how can we organize and fight back.
19:15Any area of the city of New Orleans that is sparsely populated, they are going to want to use the eminent domain to take over the properties.
19:26We have a resident on the phone, whoever didn't hear.
19:29We have a resident on the phone right now.
19:31She's watching them at Gavez and Renee bulldozing a home.
19:37Give me the city attorney's number.
19:40We will move the people.
19:41Just get your doze and stop.
19:43Ain't no danger as long as they stop.
19:45These are people's home.
19:47They're leaving.
19:48All right.
19:49Now you got a whole bunch of mad citizens that's in the city and going to get a whole lot mad.
19:57So mad they were screaming today at the commission that came up with the rebuilding plan.
20:02Don't tell me about what you're talking about.
20:05This is a big audacious plan.
20:06It was put together by obviously very brilliant people.
20:09But guess what?
20:10You missed the boat.
20:12In fairness to them, there were some areas that you knew because of the elevation
20:17and because of the amount of flooding that it may have taken on during the storm,
20:21it may have not made sense to rebuild there.
20:24But everything is personal in New Orleans.
20:27For people that grew up here, their neighborhood is everything.
20:30The high school where they went to is everything.
20:33So if the mayor says, if the city says, this part isn't going to come back,
20:37we're going to make this green space, like, it's going to cut you deep.
20:40I hate you because you've been in the background trying to scheme and get our land.
20:46It's been happening.
20:48That's not happening.
20:49We know that they have wildfires in California.
20:53They have tornadoes in the middle of America.
20:57They have flooding in Florida, but they've never told them, you can't rebuild.
21:02I don't think it's right if you try to take our property.
21:05Because like I said, over my dead body.
21:09I didn't die with Katrina. Bye.
21:12The blowback of it was so bad that the mayor basically said, not only we're not doing that,
21:24we're not going to do anything except what the localities want us to do.
21:28We as a community will have the ultimate say in how we move forward.
21:35If you don't have the resources, how can you put your life back together?
21:41The people who live in these more fluent neighborhoods, they're up here.
21:47So who's going to need the most resources?
21:50The people who are here or the people who are down here?
21:53It shouldn't be about equal.
21:54It should be about equity.
21:56How you survive a disaster is directly proportional to how well prepared and how well you all before the disaster.
22:06The bottom line in that, the poor got poor and the rich got richer.
22:21When the federal levees broke 10 years ago, we in the world gasped at the possibility that in the blink of an eye,
22:27New Orleans, as we know it, would be gone.
22:31But 10 years after Katrina, we're no longer recovering.
22:34We're not rebuilding, now we're creating.
22:38We're in the midst of a retail and restaurant building boom.
22:41Can you think of any other place in the world where you can lose 100,000 people
22:45and gain 600 more restaurants than we had before Katrina?
22:48I mean, come on.
22:49You want tomatoes on that?
22:50Ladies and gentlemen, your city is changing before your eyes.
22:55I'm going to try this alligator salsa.
22:59It was a tale of two cities.
23:02The rest of the city was pulling back together.
23:07But go ask those in the Night Ward.
23:09Ask them who was left behind.
23:14In some instances, the city was back.
23:15But it just wasn't back equitably for everybody.
23:19In some instances, the city was back.
23:20But it just wasn't back equitably for everyone.
23:26Louisiana got $10 billion in federal money to create and oversee the Road Home Program.
23:33It's the largest housing recovery effort in American history.
23:40Our plan offers a fair and practical solution to return people to their homes and their communities.
23:53This is a great victory for Louisiana.
24:08The Road Home turned out to be the road to nowhere for a lot of people.
24:18The Road Home was supposed to cover the costs that insurance and other federal aid didn't.
24:23People have waited for months for clearance of the money and everything else, strangled by all this red tape.
24:29Every time you went in there, applying to the government for Road Home assistance, it seemed like the rules changed from week to week.
24:38So now you have to expend more time and energy and you're still dealing with the mental effects of Hurricane Katrina.
24:48It's overwhelming.
24:50The Road Home had a fatal flaw.
24:53It awarded grants based on repair costs or pre-storm value, whichever was less.
24:59In the poorest neighborhoods, a home's pre-storm value tended to be less than the cost of repairing or rebuilding it.
25:06Those neighborhoods were majority black.
25:09So folks who lived in Lakeview, a predominantly white, upper middle class to upper class area that already had the resources to rebuild,
25:23they got more money than folks that lived in, let's just say, the Lower Ninth Ward.
25:29Even though the building materials cost was the same, a 2x4 for my house cost the same as a 2x4 for another person's house.
25:40So why are you going to give me a different amount of money?
25:44It was like they were sabotaging the recovery in areas where black folk lived.
25:50Everybody wants to come home.
25:52It's just that we can't come home because the government is trying to keep us away from home.
25:57This is going to cost at least $250,000 to repair my property.
26:03I was fully insured, but I had just borrowed on the building.
26:11And when I borrowed on the building, it was put for collateral.
26:14And when the storm hit and I went back, the bank took the money.
26:20They told me that they weren't giving me anything.
26:24I got zero from Road Home.
26:27Homeowners can choose repair, rebuild, accept a buyout and relocate within Louisiana, or sell and leave the state.
26:37I started looking at what they were trying to do.
26:40I'm like, you're not getting my property because I am not selling.
26:45But some folks just did give up and say, I don't want this headache. I'll take the buyout.
26:56And so what they accomplished with a lot of people was to get them out and away from the city.
27:06After like nine and a half years being in Austin, I went back to New Orleans.
27:11But when I came back, it wasn't no more affordable housing.
27:15No more houses in the hood, you know, where you can get a one-bedroom for $300 and a two-bedroom for $500.
27:26Back in the day, most of the houses was doubles.
27:30You know, a family on this side and a family on that side.
27:33But after Katrina, they started making single houses out of double houses like you see here.
27:42That's two families that's out of a house.
27:46The cost of living became so high, I made a decision to leave New Orleans.
27:52After Katrina, I knew I couldn't come back home immediately since I had to go out and work and make money.
28:10My dad had been a master carpenter for many years, so I just drove all the way to California to work with him.
28:19Now I just got to see the scenery, travel where God want me to travel, then go back home eventually.
28:28I just was thinking about a new beginning because I knew what I had left behind.
28:36It was a lot of devastation, a lot of pain, so I just had my moments when I'm like, you know, kind of like singing an old spiritual hymn, you know, from like my grandmother and going through the mountains.
28:48Lord, I'm climbing higher mountains, trying to get home.
29:00So that was kind of like my whole thing.
29:02Like I just was like, I'm just trying to get home and I don't even know where home is just yet.
29:07Trying to get home, you know I'm climbing higher mountains.
29:21Well, the driving force behind me coming back to New Orleans was my mom's.
29:27My mom, my birthday was November 30th.
29:30I made 50 years old, ain't that a blessing?
29:33After the storm, we had FEMA trailers all over the land.
29:37And that's another trailer in front of my house.
29:40And from that road home program, she did receive some money.
29:44My mom bought this trailer and sold with that money.
29:50My mom finally bought like a big mobile trailer to make sure we had a place to stay.
29:56But then maybe about 20 days later, my mom's passed away.
30:03All I have left is these pictures.
30:10I kept remodeling.
30:12I kept working on that house.
30:15Almost completely still have somewhere to go.
30:18But as the years start going on, the grants start going away.
30:22Eventually, I had to move to another location, make more money to be able to come back and put in resources.
30:29So every now and again, I would just come back, try to touch up on some things.
30:34Whoa.
30:36A lot of work still left to go up in here.
30:40But something that me was saying, for my mom's sake and everything that she did, I need to finish the house.
30:50Even though it was impossible to finish the house.
31:00Every time I come back here, I got memories of my life, my mom's, my stepdad, all my people right there.
31:09My neighbor, next door, she's gone. Everybody is gone.
31:14It's depressing to come here and look around and know that none of these people who know me, that know my story, they are no longer here.
31:21It's like pictures flashing, videos flashing of what it used to be, but it's no longer.
31:34So when I finally felt like I did all I could do, now maybe, I felt like my mom's spirit was all around me saying,
31:47it's time to go, man. You can go. It's okay. Don't worry about it. And I left.
31:54Hurricane Katrina laid bare the massive failures of the Corps of Engineers hurricane protection system of levees and flood walls.
32:16Congress gave the Corps $14.6 billion to make it right.
32:22All of this was done after Katrina.
32:27If you look at this, you can see the construction of it is different.
32:31It's more stable. It goes down deeper.
32:35And it's fortified much better to take stress from rising water or wind.
32:43Since Katrina, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers repaired the levees, many of the repairs are quite robust.
32:51However, the Corps of Engineers themselves recently admitted that when they determined the heights, they didn't take into account global warming.
33:03No sooner did the Corps of Engineers finish the last piece of that upgrade project,
33:07then it posted a notice in the Federal Register saying subsidence and sea level rise will cause levees to require future lifts.
33:15Within 70-odd years, the water level around New Orleans is going to be four feet higher than at present.
33:26In addition, many of the wetlands are gone. There's no friction. That water can move much further and get much higher.
33:35As it relates to climate change, communities of color are the ones who are impacted the first and the worst.
33:45Many folks that live in and among these communities do not have the resources that others have.
33:55And so they are at a higher risk for what's going to happen in the future.
34:02Tonight, Maria's direct hit devastating Puerto Rico.
34:05Unfortunately, it's not going to get any better.
34:08Sweeping devastation in Lahaina.
34:11It's just going to get worse.
34:12The deadliest and most devastating storm in North Carolina history.
34:17This is home. I've been here all my life.
34:38But what really gets me, the Lower Ninth Ward, really the hardest hit area, is forgotten.
34:53An entire ward of this city, the Ninth Ward, appears to be up to its rooftops in water.
35:00I told you earlier today, I didn't think this. It turned out to be Armageddon. I was wrong.
35:06The environmental injustice that is happening in our community.
35:14This is man-made.
35:22But that means also it could be man-solved.
35:26See?
35:36I can remember as a little boy, we used to go back there into the swamp.
35:41It was our wonderland, our playground.
35:45Playground.
35:57The park started out small, and it grew.
36:03It's a little bit like it was before.
36:17They're planting cypress trees.
36:23There's an outdoor classroom.
36:29You can fish.
36:33I'm an ambassador to the park.
36:35I welcome people.
36:37I tell them as much as I can about when I was growing up in that same area, you know, and what we were trying to do.
36:47Because this is something that we are doing for ourselves.
36:53The start over.
36:54A new beginning.
36:56When Katrina hit, and it took so many of our elders, it was like losing so much of our history.
37:10They celebrated together.
37:13They praised the Lord together.
37:19It was a true community.
37:23A lot of people couldn't come back.
37:28A lot of people didn't come back.
37:30It's heartbreaking because New Orleans lost a whole, maybe two generations of people.
37:39And that took away a lot of the culture that sits in this area.
37:53And so I wanted to come back into the community and do what I had to do.
38:00And I was not going to stop until I got back to where I intended to be back in 2005.
38:11Every penny I have made since Katrina has gone into me getting back into my salon and my property.
38:23It's mine.
38:24And like I told the people that wrote home, you will have to prime out of my wrinkled up little brown hands to get it.
38:37There's been a lot of changes in New Orleans since Katrina.
38:46You would enter by steps here and you would come into the living room.
38:51The living room ran the width of the lot.
38:54The kitchen would have been right up in here.
38:59This is where mom did all of her famous cooking.
39:04You know, I'm a New Orleans boy.
39:06There's a certain energy that comes out of that land.
39:12That house was an extension of me.
39:17And the most difficult thing was to demolish the house.
39:23I felt like I was taking a piece of me away.
39:28I really came back here because I couldn't stay away.
39:38I wanted to be home, but now it's the new New Orleans.
39:43It's totally different.
39:45You know, it's like the roots are here, but the tree's been stubbed.
39:51We still have our culture, and that's a good thing.
39:56A lot of my friends, they kept them masking and Mardi Gras going after Katrina.
40:06I talked to my dad, he said, son, no, I should worry.
40:10That was their life, you know, and it was my life too.
40:13He said, Mardi Gras, I'm on and go tell your story.
40:17I'm in a tribe that my father started, the Flamin' Arrows.
40:21We are the Flamin' Arrows.
40:23My dad, he was the Indian chief.
40:25My mom was a seamstress.
40:27We're really not Mardi Gras Indians.
40:30The correct name is just Black Maskin' Indians.
40:34On Carnival Morning, we wear these suits and pay homage to the real native Indians who helped our people.
40:44So it's a family thing passed down through generations.
40:53It's my last time putting on a suit, but I have grandchildren and I'm going to keep the tradition going.
41:02We got to pass the torch down.
41:10One of my cousins who I'm turning my tribe over to, he was like, well, you know, we need you to come back home because we can't let you go out like that.
41:21I still take New Orleans with me wherever I go, but before Katrina I would have never thought that I would have ever left New Orleans.
41:40You know, I just thought that I was going to be a New Orleanian, like, all my life.
41:56I mean, I love New Orleans, but it's not the same New Orleans.
42:06Twenty years later, it's totally different.
42:11The talk is different. The walk is different.
42:15The neighborhoods that we grew up in with our families, it's totally different.
42:22Katrina took a lot, but it didn't take my pride, my dignity, or my culture.
42:33That's one thing I can say about New Orleans. This is some surviving people.
42:39We are the canaries in this coal mine called America.
42:43The horrors that people went through after Katrina didn't have to happen.
42:49There's no way you could justify to me why Hurricane Katrina turned from a disaster to a tragedy.
42:58I guess the bottom line, it shows how much we cared then for the most vulnerable and how much we care right now.
43:10What would make America great is our ability to reach out and help others in time of need.
43:21But that's where the lesson is learned.
43:25It's upon us. It's upon us to wake up.
43:29B.C.
43:33The H.C.
43:36The H.C.
43:38The H.C.
43:40The H.C.
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