65agement are supposed to encour-
age. Under Section 106 of the
National Historic Preservation
Act, any construction project on
federal lands or that requires fed-
eral permits must involve an ar-
chaeological assessment. The
process is intended to ensure that
“the historical and cultural foun-
dations of the Nation” are “pre-
served as a living part of our
community...to give a sense of ori-
entation to the American people.”
The survey Formosa initiated in
2017 concluded that the St. James
project wouldn’t put any histor-
ically valuable sites at risk. Then
an anonymous researcher no-
tified the Louisiana Division of
Archaeology about a map from
1878 indicating that below modern
fields, there might be hidden cem-
eteries for the former Buena Vista
estate and neighboring Acadia
Plantation, which the long par-
cel also included. Formosa hired
archaeologists to examine the
property in 2018; they concluded
that little remained of those sites
and suggested the fence around
the Buena Vista plot. But the
independent researcher again no-
tified authorities that For mosa’s
search relied on outdated marks
of latitude and longitude from
old maps, and may have been di-
rected at the wrong locations.
Over 10 days in May 2019, ar-
chaeologists from the private firm
TerraXplorations reexamined the
area on Formosa’s behalf. They
scraped away long trenches of soil
across two target locations and
found at least four burial plots,
along with grave shafts. Due to the
lack of headstones and historical
references to the site, they wrote
in their report, it was most likely
a slave cemetery. The researchers
concluded that whatever remained
of the neighboring Acadia plan-
tation’s graves must have been
destroyed by previous owners.
At that point, Formosa was
legally required to share its dis-
covery of human remains only
with law enforcement and the
Louisiana Division of Archaeol-
ogy. In January 2020, a month
after learning about the exca-
vation results through a public
records request, RISE and other
advocacy organizations like the
Center for Biological Diversity
and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade
filed a lawsuit against the US
Army Corps of Engineers. The
activists accused the agency of
wrongly granting Formosa its per-
mits, partly on the grounds that
the company failed to properly
identify possible burials on the
complex and inform the commu-
nity. The Center for Constitutional
Rights commissioned an archaeo-
logical report from a third firm,
Coastal Environments, Inc. That
analysis, released in March 2020,
found anomalies that could indi-
cate an additional five gravesites.
It also revealed that Formosa’s
consultants had likely dug in the
wrong spot when they examined
the former Acadia plantation.
Janile Parks, director of com-
munity and government relations
for Formosa’s Louisiana subsidi-
ary, FG LA, says the company has
“always taken great care to re-
spect, protect, and not disturb this
recently discovered unmarked
burial area” on the former Buena
Vista plantation. She adds, “FG
is, and has been, fully transparent
and fully cooperative with the St.
James Parish Council and with all
state and federal agencies, includ-
ing those charged with oversight
of cultural resources and burial
sites.” Parks also says that none
of the additional anomalies in
the Coastal Environments report
have been conclusively proven to
be cemeteries. “It is important
to note that, despite assertions
made by outside groups about
ancestral ties to the site, no ar-
chaeologist has been able to
confirm the identity, ethnicity, or
race of the remains.”
The uncertainty surrounding
the St. James site isn’t unique.Many burial plots may lie untallied
beneath Cancer Alley. In the last
decade, the Shell Oil Company
identified more than 1,000 planta-
tion graves as it surveyed land for
its Convent refinery west of New
Orleans. Some praised Shell for
its efforts to document and avoid
the sites, but the outcome doesn’t
sit right with everyone. Residents
whose ancestors lie in Shell’s prop-
erty now need permission to visit.
Lavigne isn’t interested in see-
ing a memorial for the Buena Vista
gravesite sitting in the shadow of
a massive petrochemical complex.
For her, the plants pose too much of
a threat to the living for such a ges-
ture to hold any meaning. “There
won’t be anybody here,” she says.
“They’ll come put their facility here
and watch us die off.”EFFORTS to document and raise
awareness about long-neglected Black
gravesites have so far sprung up only
from local communities. And without
a database of such cemeteries, it’s
unclear how many unmarked burial
grounds exist across the country. But
archaeologists, historians, and poli-
ticians are starting to advocate for a
more coordinated approach.
In February 2019, US representa-
tives Alma Adams of North Carolina
and Donald McEachin of Virginia
introduced a bill to establish an
African- American Burial Grounds
Network within the National Parks
Service. The measure would provide
federal recognition for these locations
and help collect information on them,
which would be useful for descendant
communities and developers alike. It
could keep sites like the Buena Vista
cemetery from being missed during
compulsory digs. It could also help
right disparities in how the US pre-
serves its history. There are nearly
100,000 entries on the National
Regi ster of Historic Places, but only
2 percent are devoted to the heritage
of Black Americans, according to aVOICES OF THEIR ANCESTORShttp://www.bookshq.net (CONTINUED ON PAGE 128)