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STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND The Cajuns came to Louisiana when the British kicked them out of the Acadia colony of New France in 1755. That is a bigger deal than it might seem. Acadia wasn’t a colony in the way Jamestown was a colony — a few buildings, a blacksmith, a church and some walls to keep out invaders. Rather, it was a colony the way Virginia was a colony, and was about the same size. Meanwhile, New France wasn’t some tiny fly-by-night patch of ground, or little island, claimed by some guy with a boat and a flag. At the time, New France was the largest empire in the history of North America by contiguous geography, by far, clocking in at 3,000,000 square miles — about the size of the continental United States today. So, what happened? Claiming land isn’t the same as controlling land. Particularly in the New World in the 18th century, territory was aspirational and, in reality, you only owned as much as your last war revealed. (George Washington taught the British this lesson in 1783, for example.) So even though the empire of New France was large geographically, its population was very small. Depending on alliances in Europe and wars in the New World, anyone at any time could claim or chip away at anyone else’s holdings. And the British really, really wanted the strategi cally located Acadia (today, Nova Scotia in Canada). Before the British expelled the Acadians, the feisty French fought with them for 45 years. Finally, during the French and Indian War, the British gained the upper hand. The land was thus seized. When the dust settled, the Brits gave the Acadians a chance to sign oaths of allegiance to King George II. The Acadians refused (better dead than redcoat), and the British banished them in what was called “Le Grand Dérangement.” It was a pretty traumatic

Folk Tails By David W. Brown Y ou might be surprised to learn that the Cajuns were not the first to look at a crawfish and think: “Hmm, that looks tasty. I think I will eat 200 of them for dinner.” Still, crawfish proved the perfect food for the Cajuns when they got to Louisiana, in that it was cheap, nutritious and an ideal canvas for the application of French culinary techniques. But if the Cajuns didn’t eat them first, who did? And anyway, where did all these Cajuns, with their strange appetites and great recipes, come from anyway? And why do people associate all this with the city of New Orleans? The answers are a little more compli cated than you might expect, and involve three big journeys.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE BAYOUS Speaking of having your land stolen, the Acadians were not the first to set foot here. Before Europeans arrived in the New World, several American Indian tribes owned Louisiana, including the Chitim acha, Atakapa, Caddo, Choctaw, Natchez, Tunica and Houma. The Houma migrated to modern-day Baton Rouge from Missis sippi and Alabama, and had a rough go of it overall, fighting with other tribes, and eventually having to deal with the Europeans steadily encroaching as well. (The Houma and the Bayagoula tribes marked the border of their hunting grounds with red poles — those rouge batons would later give the city its name.) In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the Houma had moved almost entirely to remote areas that today are part of Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes, in the southernmost part of the state. Eventually, the Houma established Ouiski Bayou, a settlement near what is now Downtown Houma. The Spanish at this time claimed to own the land, but “gave” it to the Houma, and when French settlers — most notably, the Acadians — came to the region, they even called the community Houma. (I should note that this is the simple version, The name “Houma” is a Choctaw word meaning “red,” and the tribe’s symbol was — you guessed it — a crawfish. It represented bravery . The Houma, who had been doing it for centuries in the South, excelled at harvesting crawfish and other seafood.

affair. As they left their homes, thousands of French colonists died from disease, in firefights, and on board sinking ships. Though the Acadians went all over the place, the best of them ended up in modern-day Louisiana.

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