BP Oil SLick/Gulf of Mexico - Americas Toilet Bowl

When Nazia Dardar looks at the seemingly endless lake of water behind her stilted bayou home, the 76-year-old sees what once was a farm.

Cows roamed there, she says, back when the lake was land.

"C'est le jour et la nuit," she says in French, the most common language down here on the farthest and swampiest reaches of the Mississippi River delta. "It's day and night."

Perhaps nowhere is the protracted death of the Gulf Coast more apparent than in Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana, and other indigenous bayou communities where, decades before the BP oil disaster, the marsh started disintegrating and environmental problems washed in from as far away as North Dakota and New York.

The Gulf of Mexico became, in effect, the United States' toilet bowl -- known for its seasonal "dead zones," high erosion rates, dirty industry, ingrained poverty and, now, for the biggest oil disaster in the history of the country. Compare that legacy on the Gulf Coast with the East Coast, with its wealth, and the West, with its more-sterling record of environmental stewardship.

Since the massive oil disaster began nearly 100 days ago, some American Indian communities on the coast here for centuries, including Pointe-Aux-Chenes, have begun grappling with the idea that they may need to retreat from the oil-sullied marshes.

Some fear cultural extinction.

READ FURTHER ON CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/07/27/gulf.history.environment.toilet/index.html#fbid=mZVWtInEJRN