Hurricane Katrina traumatized the city of New Orleans and the Gulf South. It filled most Americans and global citizens with grief and rage in the late summer of 2005. As the world watched, feeling powerless to help the many thousands of suffering people, at first stunned and then furious over the ineptitude of government response to this long-predicted disaster, the Tunica-Biloxi Tribal Nation tended to the needs of thousands of evacuees on its small reservation three hours northwest of New Orleans directly along a designated hurricane evacuation route. Among the many nontribal evacuees were a relatively small number of tribal families who had lived in the New Orleans area, some of them for generations, as a result of earlier, less visible kinds of trauma. In surveying the ordinary and extraordinary, Hurricane Katrina reveals a number of important lessons about the Tunica-Biloxi people, their history, and the status of indigenous nations in Louisiana. Part of this article's intent is to provide a straightforward narrative of Tunica experiences during a local disaster with global implications that the authors hope will be valuable to tribal members and historians of Native peoples in the United States. More than just a retelling of events, though, the narrative intervenes in scholarly, popular, and political discourses by connecting Tunica people to contemporary events in a way that undermines the tendency to see Indian tribes as significant players only in a distant past. (Contains 4 figures and 38 notes.)