For You, Bayou
Joanitah Nakiggwe explores Bayou St. John’s indigenous roots and its current role as a grounding space for young Black and brown people.
Behind This Story | The following story featured in “My Park, My Place, My Peace,” a multimedia series geared at sparking a broader conversation about the history of local parks and recreation, and what it looks like to ensure our public green space serves Black and brown communities well into the future. Want to see more stories like this one? Support Lede New Orleans and its community-centered reporting by becoming a supporting donor.
By Joanitah Nakiggwe
I can still recall the day one of my best friends and college roommate took me and our core friend group to Bayou St. John for the first time. It is one of his favorite spots in the city. It was November 2020, the fall of my senior year at Tulane University. It was late and the evening air was crisp. We hung outside for a little bit to watch the sunset, but it was too cold to stay there. We spent the rest of the evening laughing and telling stories in a car parked in the U.S. Post Office parking lot on Norman C. Francis Parkway. It was one of the last times we would be able to all hang out together since that night my friend shared that he would be graduating early and leaving at the end of the semester. It was a bittersweet moment, but a beautiful one. The bayou has been starred in my favorites folder on Google Maps ever since.
Years later, I see Bayou St. John as a cultural and physical cornerstone for New Orleans. In the seven years that I have lived here, this bayou has become more than just a physical space–it’s also a grounding and community space for myself and my peers from all over the city.
I am always willing to travel from my home in Uptown just to spend some time there. My boyfriend and I often go on picnic dates around the parts closer to Lake Pontchartrain. Every month or so we pack our picnic basket with sandwich materials and snacks, load up the car with blankets and activities, and spend an afternoon on the banks of the bayou painting or reading or talking — just basking in the warmth of the sun, immersed in quality time.
Originally known as Bayou Choupic after the large brown mudfish that swam in it, Bayou St. John was once a four-mile-long natural waterway that drained water across 25 square miles of tributaries stretching from northwest of the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain. As writer Jeffery Darrensbourg, a member of the Alligator Band of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Indians, told the “Listen to New Orleans” project in 2021, the waterway is a significant site for his and other indigenous nations in the region, including the Chapitoulas and Choctaw. Pre-colonization, it was a vibrant connecting waterway and pathway for trade for his and a range of indigenous nations. Indigenous people showed the route to brothers Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, who founded the first French settlements in the region.
European settlers referred to the portage trail along the bayou as the “Grand Route St. John,” what we now know as Esplanade Avenue. Bayou St. John remained a means of commerce and trade as well as a route for travel connecting various settlers to different parts of the city.
Today, the bayou is a shorter, 3-mile-long stretch of water running along City Park and through neighborhoods like Bayou St. John, Mid-City and Gentilly. But it’s still alive and vibrant. Locals and tourists alike use the space for trail running, kayaking, walking their dogs, hanging out at eateries fronting the water, and spending time in the sun along the bayou banks. Each spring, I congregate with hundreds of neighbors on the bayou each year to see the Mardi Gras Indians prepare for Downtown Super Sunday. Adults and kids pull out their cameras and phones to take pictures and videos of the Indians dancing in their hand-sewn suits, all of us immersed in a sea of bright colorful feathers and beads and music and jubilee. And in May, people gather from all over the city to celebrate Bayou Boogaloo, an annual festival held on the bayou, paddling up in their kayaks, canoes and various flotation devices to enjoy local music and food.
Last year for a friend’s birthday, they wanted to gather and spend the afternoon walking the bayou and picking up trash. It was so successful that we expanded this birthday excursion into a trash pickup community group project where we get together about once a month to spend time together on Bayou St. John while doing our part to beautify the waterway. We saw the need and importance of community and wanted to give back to a city and space that had given us so much. It felt special to be able to launch an impromptu cleanup project with my friends in a place like Bayou St. John.
Bayou St. John is small, but mighty, and it serves more than just Mid-City and the surrounding neighborhoods. It has undergone a lot of change in order to become the spot that it is today, but the spirit of the place lives on. We need to appreciate and preserve this waterway and all the stories it holds.
Joanitah Nakiggwe (she/her) works as an academic life coach at Tulane University, her alma mater. She has a passion for art, graphic design and photography.
This article is available to republish under a Creative Commons license. Read Lede New Orleans’ publishing guidelines here.
Support Lede New Orleans and its community-centered reporting by becoming a supporting donor.
To get weekly emails with New Orleans stories and events, sign up for Lede New Orleans’ newsletter.
