ROUSES_MayJun2019_Magazine-Print

The Cajun journey to the land that would become America began in violence, dislocation and tragedy, and yet their eventual triumphant assimilation in Louisiana — a place they have stamped forever as their own — is among the greatest refugee success stories of recent centuries. The Cajun odyssey started in France in the early 1600s, when the French monarchy went looking for hearty pioneers to settle its eastern Canadian maritime territories — the provinces known today as Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island but which were then called “Acadie.” The French settlers, principally from the Poitou- Charentes and Vendée regions of west-central France, referred to themselves as les Acadiens. The British would use the term Acadians; later in Francophone Louisiana it became “Cadiens” and eventually was anglicized by the Americans to Cajuns. After 150 mostly peaceful years in Acadie, the Acadians were swept up in the nine-year territorial battle between the British and French known as the French and Indian War. Though taking no sides in the conflict, the Roman Catholic Acadians drew the suspicion of the British because of their reluctance to take a loyalty oath to the English and their Protestant king. The Acadians also sat on some of the richest farmland in all of Canada — land that the British decided ought to be in the hands of the British settlers they hoped to coax there. (The British prevailed in the war.) So in 1755, the British began confiscating and burn- ing Acadian farmsteads and sending Acadians into exile to other colonies aboard cargo ships, where they languished under often deplorable conditions. Many families were separated and almost half of the 12,000 Acadian deportees died. This act is known as “Le Grand Dérangement.” Clusters of survivors began arriving between 1763 and 1776 in the Louisiana territories, recently ceded to Spain by France, but which les a c a d i e n s by Ken Wells

supported a robust and sympathetic French-speaking culture. They were greatly aided by the Spanish, who ran the Louisiana colony for nearly four decades after gaining it from the French in the treaty that ended the French and Indian War. The Spanish — eager to shore up the manpower of the Louisiana colony as a foil against British incur- sions — would help to boatlift the Acadians from some of their way- stops in the Caribbean and points in North America. And in 1767, the Spanish warmly welcomed several hundred bedraggled Acadian refugees who arrived by chartered ship in New Orleans after being stranded in Maryland and Pennsylvania for years. The Cajuns initially felt at home in Louisiana, even under Spanish rule, for New Orleans and most of South Louisiana never stopped being anything other than a French-centric colony during the Span- ish period. The Cajuns had farmed and fished in Acadie and found their new home a paradise on that front. They would settle the remote bayous, swamps and prairies of South Louisiana and live in relative isolation, their culture, music and antique French intact. The Cajun experience after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 be- gan to change as les Americaines undertook a concerted effort to make Louisiana an English-speaking territory and English the official language. The drive to assimilate the Cajuns — and stamp out their language — gained particular momentum in the acculturation pres- sures that naturally followed World War I and escalated after World War II. Louisiana’s English-speaking population began to grow rap- idly, and conveniences like roads and radios, as well as secularizing amenities like public schools, began to peel away the Cajun isolation. Cajun kids were banned from speaking French on the school grounds, and Cajun adults found themselves often being ridiculed for their “bad” French, thickly accented English (if they spoke Eng-

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