How many burial sites are on the land where Formosa Plastics plans to build?

Rise St. James and Formosa Plastics don’t agree about what’s going to happen in the future.  The environmental justice group says air, water and soil quality are already awful in St. James Parish, and, if Formosa Plastics is allowed to build a $9.4B manufacturing complex on the west bank, the environment will become even more toxic. “We’re already having trouble breathing…. We already can’t drink the water,” said Sharon Lavigne, who founded Rise St. James in 2018 when she heard Formosa was looking to build two miles from her home.

Formosa disagrees with Lavigne’s prediction that its Sunshine Project (to be built near the Sunshine Bridge) will cause more suffering. Janile Parks, a spokesperson for the company, says Formosa “is committed to the St. James community and to protecting the health and safety of its employees, the community and the environment.” The company’s plan, Parks said, “includes rigorous emission controls and operating limits in its design and in its air permit applications” and the company will “comply with multiple laws, regulations and permits designed to protect public health.”

In June 2019, Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt, a federal judge in Texas, ruled that Formosa had not only violated the Clean Water act by discharging pollution into the state’s waterways but that they’d also violated Texas’ permits. Formosa agreed to pay $50 million to settle with the residents and environmental groups that sued the company.

Formosa and Rise St. James not only disagree about what will happen in the future;  they also disagree about the past. Formosa plans to build on former sugarcane plantations near the Mississippi River, and Rise St. James says that on those 2,400 acres, there are as many as seven gravesites for Black people who died while enslaved.  Formosa says it’s identified two possible burial sites and concluded that only one actually has graves. And, with the state’s blessing, Parks said, Formosa has fenced that area off to preserve it.

Rise St. James says Formosa wouldn’t have found the site it acknowledges if the company hadn’t been made to repeatedly go back and look again after concluding there were no graves there. And Rise St. James alleges that, even now, the company isn’t looking hard to find burial grounds whose presence might derail its mega-construction project.

Motion for injunction filed

Rise St. James, Louisiana Bucket Brigade and Healthy Gulf are seeking to halt — and ultimately block — Formosa’s plan for St. James Parish. As previously reported, the environmental groups requested an injunction against Formosa Tuesday in federal court in the District of Columbia.

The Center for Biological Diversity filed the suit for the plaintiffs and names the Army Corps of Engineers and FG LA LLC, a subsidiary of Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics, as defendants. The plaintiffs allege that, in giving Fomorsa the permits it needs to build, the Corps violated the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Rivers and Harbors Act and, because of potential desecration of graves, the National Historic Preservation Act.

The day after that motion for an injunction was filed, Parks, the spokesperson for Formosa, described the company’s search for gravesites in an email. “ In 2017, FG initiated an archaeological assessment of the property,” Parks wrote. “In coordination with the State Historic Preservation Office, archaeologists identified through historic maps only two potential unmarked burial sites on the property. At one of these sites, known as the Buena Vista site, four sets of human remains were found on the property. At the direction of SHPO, FG has fenced in and protected the Buena Vista site within the boundary of its property. FG will always be respectful of the burial remains discovered on its property.”

But even after Formosa acknowledged the presence of buried bodies on its site, it objected to a request from Rise St. James to let its members hold a Juneteenth prayer service over those bodies. A  St. James Parish judge ruled that Formosa would lose nothing by letting Rise St. James members pray over those graves for an hour and granted Rise St. James permission.. Formosa appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal in Gretna to keep the group off the land, but a 3-judge panel let the district court judge’s ruling stand, and so Rise St. James members went to the site of those graves on June 19.

In a virtual press conference held after the injunction was filed Tuesday, Lavigne, the leader of Rise St. James, said the company made it as difficult as possible for them to gather and pray.  They were made to park at a distance and walk, Lavigne said, and they also were forced to line up for temperature checks. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, gatekeepers holding infrared thermometers have become a common sight, but Lavigne wasn’t expecting to be screened for fever outdoors. “Check our temperature?  For what? The people in the graves already dead,” Lavigne  said. “Formosa took a lot of our time that we were supposed to spend doing our ceremony.”

Number of gravesites in dispute

Rise St. James, in a March 11 letter to the St. James Parish Council, argues that at the former Acadia Plantation, Formosa “chose to investigate an area where the cemetery was not located.” Relying on a report from Coastal Environments, Inc.,  a Baton Rouge company that conducts environmental and archaeological investigations, Rise St. James informed the Parish Council that in addition to Buena Vista and Acadia, there may be four more cemeteries beneath Formosa’s planned footprint and one more close to it.

“After two rounds of investigation, no evidence of burials was found at Acadia,” Parks wrote in Wednesday’s email. “Those working against FG‘s project in St. James Parish have referred to ‘other possible cemeteries’ but these are anomalies – like a tree, for example – on historic aerial photographs that have never been shown on any historic map as a possible cemetery. They are simply anomalies, which are defined as anything inconsistent with agricultural use.”

According to Parks, “FG has done thousands of shovel tests on the property many of which were done in the areas of or near these claimed anomalies, and no remains have been found other than at the Buena Vista site.”

Not counting what was found at Buena Vista and Acadia, CEI noted a series of 13 anomalies that appear over several decades of aerial imagery. The company was able to exclude eight of those anomalies as possible cemeteries but believes the remaining five could be.

Parks cited the example of a tree as an anomaly that’s not a gravesite, but that’s not a sound conclusion,  said Kathe Hambrick, founder of the River Road African Burial Grounds Coalition.

“Trees were commonly placed as a marker at the head of a grave,” Hambrick said in an email Wednesday. “We know this to be the case in Louisiana, Caribbean and some parts of Africa.”

Hambrick, who is also the founder and director of the River Road African American Museum in Donaldsonville, upriver from the proposed Sunshine Project, wrote “I refer to these ‘cemeteries’ as sacred places and burial grounds that deserve to be protected in the same way as Native American burial grounds. We, as African Americans on the River Road have lost so much of our land, history and culture because of displacement over the years.

In 2013 Shell Oil discovered that as many as 1,000 Black people who died while enslaved were buried on the land where Shell built its oil refinery in Convent. The oil company later worked with Hambrick and her museum to conduct archeological and geneological studies, to schedule a memorial service for the dead and to provide limited access to the site for the public and people whose ancestors may be buried there. 

“I hope Formosa will at least do what Shell Oil did in ‘partnership to protect’ what’s left,” Hambrick said. 

This story was updated to clarify that while activists believe that there may be five more burial sites than Formosa acknowledges, only four are within the boundaries of Formosa’s planned construction. The fifth is nearby.