1755 - Acadian to Cajun
The Acadian story begins in France. The people who would become the Cajuns came primarily from the rural areas of the Vendee region of western France. In 1604, they began settling in Acadie, now Nova Scotia, Canada, where they prospered as farmers and fishers.
Over the next century, the ownership of the colony of Acadie changed hands several times. In 1713 Great Britain acquired permanent control of Acadie, but many Acadians did not become cooperative British subjects, preferring to maintain their independence and refusing to swear allegiance to the British crown and church.
A cohesive and independent culture flourished in the New World before the Acadians — a name derived from the French colony of Acadia where they settled — found themselves under the authority of a hostile British government, which gained control of that section of eastern Canada in the early 1700s.
In 1755 the British began the removal of the Acadians from their homeland. The "outlaws" were taken into custody by a British officer, then herded onto British ships setting sail for destinations unknown to the exiles. Le Grand Dérangement dispersed the Acadians to France, the Caribbean, Britain, and to British colonies along North America’s east coast.
One group, led by Joseph “Beausoleil” Broussard, eventually made their way to New Orleans — following a much smaller group that had arrived a few months before — and from there found their way to the banks of the Bayou Teche. Over the next two decades, more than 2,000 Acadians from France and the Atlantic seaboard made their way to Louisiana.
Many of the exiles were unhappy in their new homes and moved on. Some of them found their way to south Louisiana and began settling in the rural areas west of New Orleans. By the early 1800s, nearly 4000 Acadians had arrived and settled in Louisiana.
The early Acadian culture was influenced by the European, African and Native American cultures that mingled in Louisiana, but it is the French culture — Cajun and Creole — that has come to define the region, assimilating the German, Spanish, Irish and other immigrant groups that followed, rather than the other way around.
Many lived in the bayou country where they hunted, fished, trapped, and lived off the bounty of the Mississippi River delta. Some moved beyond the Atchafalaya Basin onto southwest Louisiana’s prairies to raise cattle and rice. The new arrivals learned new skills and shared what they brought with them with the many peoples already in the area: American Indians, free people of color, enslaved Africans and their descendants, and immigrants from Europe, Asia, and North and South America.
The Acadians became Cajuns as they adapted to their new home and its people. Their French changed as did their architecture, music, and food. The Cajuns of Louisiana today are renowned for their music, their food, and their ability to hold on to tradition while making the most of the present.
Acadiana is the name given to the traditional twenty-two parish Cajun homeland, which in 1971 the Louisiana state legislature officially recognized for its unique Cajun and Acadian heritage (per House Concurrent Resolution No. 496). Despite the frequent association of Cajuns with swamplands, Acadiana actually consists of prairies, marshes, and wooded river (or bayou) lands. Acadiana often is applied only to Lafayette Parish and several neighboring parishes, usually Acadia, Iberia, St. Landry, St. Martin, and Vermilion parishes, and sometimes also Evangeline and St. Mary; this eight-parish area, however, is actually the "Cajun Heartland, USA" district, which makes up only about a third of the entire Acadiana region.
People still know how to dance, which is unusual enough but even more so because the dancing is done to music often played on an instrument — the button accordion — that has long since fallen out of favor in mainstream American culture.
And the songs are still sung in French, a language that is no longer widespread in the region but has somehow managed to hang on 250 years after the arrival of French-speaking Acadians and more than a century after any other significant French immigration to the state.
They came as families, focused on learning how to survive and create a society in a strange new environment rather than on fighting, building new trade routes or expanding the boundaries of an empire.
The food alone sets the region apart, the product of two centuries of cross-cultural borrowing and innovation that has created a culinary world filled with gumbo, étouffée, fricassée, maque choux, boudin, chaudin, andouille and boiled crawfish.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
