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Evangeline: a tale of acadie

lish at all), lack of for- mal schooling and adherence to a

By some estimates, about 250,000 people still speak Louisiana French,

kind of earthy Catholicism. The Cajuns’ religion didn’t go down well with the predominantly Protestant inter- lopers who came in increasing num- bers from places

most of them residing in the 22 contiguous South Louisi-

ana parishes that form the heart of Franco- phone Louisiana. One interest- ing and little noted ethnic footnote to the Cajun story: Many Cajuns descended from French Celts, and if you’ve ever listened closely

The heartbreaking story of Le Grand Dérangement – the forced expulsion by the British of the Acadians from Canada – was immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the epic poem Evangeline. Evangeline and her fiancé Gabriel are tragically torn apart on their wedding day. She spends her entire life looking for him. Eventually the lovers are reunited, but Gabriel is on his deathbed and dies in her arms; Evangeline dies soon after. There are other versions of the legend of Evangeline. The best known is a novelette, Acadian Reminiscences: The True Story of Evangeline , by Felix Voorhies. Published in 1907, 60 years after Longfellow’s poem, the story stars Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux, the “real” Evangeline and Gabriel. In this version, the displaced couple are finally reunited, this time beneath an oak tree on the banks of Bayou Teche in St. Martinville (Voorhies’ hometown). Gabriel is married; a distraught Emmeline loses her sanity and dies. —Marcy Nathan, Creative Director

like Texas, Missis- sippi and Oklahoma to work the oil and gas fields that were popping up all over South Louisiana.

Things began to change for the Cajuns in the mid-1960s when Cajun music broke out from the swamplands onto a national stage and, along with the amped-up, Cre- olized interpretation of the Cajun repertoire known as zydeco, began to create a sen- sation at home and all over the world. This began to fuel not just an interest in the music, but the culture that created it and the food that nourished it. Gumbo, the one-pot soup made with a roux that had come to be most associated with Cajun culture, began to find its way into restaurants and homes all over America and the world. By the 1980s, Cajun had become hip — everybody wanted some part of Cajun cul- ture, even large numbers of the Bible Belt rednecks working the Louisiana oil patch who had derided the Cajuns earlier. Loui- siana elected a Cajun, Edwin Edwards, as governor multiple times. Cajun superstar chefs like Paul Prudhomme and John Folse began taking Cajun cuisine to places like New York, Los Angeles, Beijing and Tokyo, to rave reviews. In 1968, the Cajuns and other Louisiana French speakers got another nod toward their culture when the state leg- islature formed the Council for the Develop- ment of French in Louisiana, CODOFIL for short, to be the chief torchbearer in efforts to revive the very French that les Americaines had earlier tried to stamp out. Known then as either Cajun French (spo- ken by white French speakers) or Creole French (spoken predominantly by black French speakers), the preferred term today is Louisiana French. And far from being “bad French,” it is simply an antique form of clas- sic country French — basically an amalgam of Colonial French with roots principally in 17th-century northern and western France and the Canadian Maritime provinces from whence the Cajuns came, with borrow- ings from Spanish, Native American and English forms.

to Irish Celtic fiddle playing and the Cajun fiddle repertoire, it’s hard not to notice the similarities in style and melodies. It’s also incomplete to write about Cajuns without writing about “cajuns” — with a lit- tle c. My mother’s family are Toupses from Thibodaux and, for most of my mother’s life, she thought of herself as an actual Acadian. After all, the Toupses spoke Cajun French, danced the Cajun two-step and cooked Ca- jun gumbo with a Cajun roux. It turns out, however, that the Toupses descended from Swiss-German pioneers — who likely spoke both German and French — who migrated to France in the early 1700s and then in 1721 took a long sea voyage that landed them in the Louisiana colony, a full half-century before most of the Cajuns arrived. They were among the dozens of German- surnamed, Swiss-German families who settled near the present-day city of Hahn- ville and are known as “German Coasters.” But their other legacy is that intermarriage among Swiss-German and Cajuns was so common that essentially the cultures merged. One happy coda: That’s how sauerkraut and wieners became smothered cabbage and andouille — a leap forward, we can all agree, for sauerkraut.

Oak Tree Plate handcrafted by Tanya Nehrbass Schulze

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