The history of the Central Wetlands Unit is rich, vast, and shared by diverse groups of people throughout time. It spans 12 miles from West to East beginning in Orleans Parish, where it is wedged between contemporary neighborhoods the Lower 9th Ward and the East, crosses the North side of St Bernard Parish and terminates on the shores of Lake Borgne. Historically, this area was a densely forested cypress and tupelo swamp with several bayous, ridges, creeks, and ponds dotting it throughout. Its hydrological function was to absorb excess rainwater and seasonal floods from the Mississippi River to its South, capturing sediment and nutrients through the interconnected roots of our native trees. Several indigenous communities living in what was known as Bulbancha-the land of many tongues-used the main artery of the river and its many smaller winding bayous to trade goods, languages, and cultural practices. More famous tribes that first populated this land include Chawasha, Atakapa-Ishak, Choctaw, Chitimacha and many more. Land practices such as creating middens using discarded shells, using control burn techniques on marsh lands, foraging and cultivating local crops for nutritionally dense diets are all lessons being re-taught and re-learned by modern audiences today. More information is available from contemporary tribal communities at fpcclousiana.org (First People's Conservation Council). Throughout the period of early colonization many European populations such as the French, Spanish, German, and English came to the Delta region with little knowledge of this landscape, but could recognize the abundance of the land and waters as well as the significance of its location at the mouth of the Mississippi River. As European representatives fought each other for control of the area, they worked against the sovereignty of the first peoples and countered communal land use practices in the pursuit of capitalist enterprises and extractivism. Logging industry cut down ancient cypress swamps, and dredged canals through the water systems. Dredging and draining swamps to create dry ground to build permanent and private property countered the wisdom of tribes that made use of high ground and seasonal occupancy of the area. Cash cropping plants like indigo, rice, cotton, tobacco, and more brought on the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Orleans was an epicenter of this violent regime. European capitalists kidnapped and brutalized skilled craftsmen, farmers, architects, often from the Senegambia Alluvial Plane on the coast of West Africa for their ability to build levees, withstand the hot and humid climate, and create many of the iconic cultural symbols celebrated by wider society in New Orleans today. Plantations that fronted narrow strips of the high banks of the Mississippi River ran lengthwise over fertile ground created by its floods and terminated as the land gradually sloped downwards toward cypress swamps. Colonizers stigmatized swamps as dangerous and confusing spaces ridden with disease and rot-a place hard to extract resources from to sell to a European market, that needed to be changed and controlled in order to benefit from it. And often swamps are filled with danger-predatory reptiles, blood sucking insects, sinking mud, winding and secluded waterways. But for marginalized populations living under colonial expansion, the swamps were places of fugitive freedom hidden from view. People from West Africa who survived the harrowing crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and were brought to slave markets in the French Quarter to work these lands for the benefit of their oppressors managed to resist and escape through the swamps. They are called Maroons, and they lived in Bayou Bienvenue. Examples of maroons and resistance to slavery can be found globally, wherever slavery existed. The most famous Maroon leader in Southeast Louisiana is named Juan San Malo or St. Malo, and his village was further Southeast also within Lake Borgne. More information on these incredible historical figures can be found in the research of Dr. Diane Jones-Allen. The contemporary neighborhood of the Lower 9th Ward has many cultural ties to the maroons, including traditions of hunting fishing and trapping in the bayou and the formation of Black Masking Mardi Gras Indians, a tradition noting indigenous and West African interactions through the development of colonial America. The Central Wetlands and the neighborhoods that surround it were continuously marginalized and excluded from central power structures. Its borders were leveed using concrete and metal walls. Industrial waste such as landfills, wastewater treatment facilities, and scrap yards began occupying this peripheral landscape. In 1896 pump station #6 began directed groundwater runoff into the system. In 1923 the industrial canal bisected the 9th Ward neighborhood. In the 1960's MRGO canal opened, dredging 12 miles of canal that opened up this freshwater system to the gulf, destroying and remaining cypress trees. Throughout the 1960s white flight triggered by racist fears and violent reactions to integration changed the racial makeup of the neighborhood from multicultural to majority Black, with the highest rates of home ownership among Black neighborhoods in the country. In 2005, the neighborhood was nearly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The wetlands behind the levees had been killed off for decades by saltwater intrusion. The levees were deeply neglected and could not withstand the unmitigated storm surge. Homes were uninhabitable and hundreds died in the immediate aftermath. Thousands died in the prolonged aftermath of delayed and denied recovery, loss of community networks, forced displacement, loss of income, homelessness, and more. CGR was born in the aftermath. MRGO was finally closed in 2012, allowing the water to freshen again. In 2012 CGR staff planted many cypress trees and marsh grasses in Orleans Parish, in Bayou Bienvenue. A wooden platform was built to cross the levee. In 2023 we continued planting these native trees in Bayou Bienvenue with CWRC.