我們告了來自台灣的公司——台塑，路易斯安那州的新興「污染巨頭」

Three decades ago our family first encountered Formosa plastics. We were only ten years old when the company tried to build one of its heavily polluting plants in our community and intrude on our family’s land in Wallace, Louisiana.

That affair ended when it was discovered Formosa had engaged in backroom dealings with one of our local elected officials. He went to jail. Formosa stalled its project. Today, they’re back.

Our names are Jo and Joy Banner. We are twin sisters and tenth generation Louisianans. We’re also co-founders and co-directors of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the history of the enslaved Africans brought to this land by protecting the culture and community of their descendants.

It’s that history, culture, and community that Formosa Plastics now threatens St. James, our neighboring parish. The Taiwan-based giant has purchased a vast tract of land along the Mississippi River with plans to build a plastics plant whose emissions would threaten the health and safety of communities. While they promise jobs, we know from experience that when plants come to town, what they bring is pollution. 

Using petroleum from wells here and in neighboring states, these corporations produce dangerous chemicals and byproducts along the Mississippi. Their fumes fill the air, their waste contaminates nearby land, and leaks and runoff can spill into the water. 

These same corporations follow a centuries-old template first established by the plantation owners who once forced our ancestors to work this land. They exploit the people of our communities, leaving them with the pollution and health problems, but none of the profits. Meanwhile, they take up all the land they can along the Mississippi to connect their businesses with the global marketplace. 

Inclusive Louisiana, an environmental justice organization led by descendants, are fighting to protect their community from Formosa’s harmful impacts to the living community and the desecration of the land of their ancestors' burial grounds.

The land Formosa purchased along the river once was part of the Buena Vista Plantation, a sprawling agricultural operation that used the labor of enslaved Africans and their children to produce vast wealth for the plantation owners. Since the purchase, it has come to light that at least five people, some of them children, are buried on that site. Local knowledge held by the founders of Inclusive, led to the discovery of the burial site and with further research revealed the names of at least five people.

Despite this chilling fact, Formosa is pushing forward with its plans for a massive plant on this sacred land. That’s why we’ve brought suit in federal court with our sister organization, Inclusive Louisiana: because we cannot allow them to desecrate the graves and erase the memory of those who worked this land against their will.

Our first claim is simple. Formosa must allow access to the site and establish it as a cemetery. This is a simple matter that has been attempted by Inclusive Louisiana resolve out of court for years, asking that descendants be allowed  to return to the site, hold prayer ceremonies, and lay headstones. At every turn, they have denied those  requests to honor the dead and mark their graves. Though they permitted one visit to hold a prayer ceremony, the company’s lawyers forced us to jump over multiple hurdles and their private security hounded us as we gathered to pray. 

Our second claim is more novel and more creative. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution outlaws slavery. We argue that because Formosa has purchased the former plantation and has claimed ownership of everything on or in it – including the remains of enslaved people – they have stepped into the shoes of the former plantation owners, legally speaking. Because it is now of course illegal to own human beings, we assert that Formosa’s ownership of the gravesite and the human remains in it is illegal as well.

Our hope here is to break the legal claim the corporation implicitly makes to these disrespected ancestors. With a court declaring that Formosa cannot own the remains of these people, we will be able to right an historic injustice and afford those interred on this site the dignity in death they were denied in life.

Historic parallels and ironies are woven throughout this case. As plantation owners once treated enslaved people as disposable, today, Formosa produces disposable products with the same disregard for the environment and the immediate health and safety of the very people descended from the enslaved here on the Mississippi. 

This current trajectory isn’t sustainable, but we can do better. We can preserve this cemetery – and unmarked historic sites across our area – to bring scholars, archaeologists, genealogists, and tourism to our area. By creating a new economy, one built on respect and dignity, we can create jobs and thriving communities without the pollution of heavy industry.

Jo and Joy Banner are sisters originally from Wallace, Louisiana and are the co-founders and co-directors of The Descendants Project, a non-profit organization committed to the intergenerational healing and flourishing of the Black descendant community in the Louisiana River Parishes.