The Fading Cajun Culture (Part 1)

south Louisiana filled with both wildlife and beauty has become a mecca of tourism due in part to a group of people known as the Cajuns many of whom are direct descendants of Acadians but what is the connection between Cajuns and Acadians what events caused these people to experience tremendous hardships persecution and sacrifice to gain a better perspective on the culture we must look to the past and view the experiences that made the culture what it is today by examining the past we can gain a full appreciation of the customs that are fading and the tremendous loss that will occur if steps are not taken to protect this incredible American treasure the Acadians were originally French people that migrated from France over to Nova Scotia but what part of France did they actually live in what did they do in France prior to leaving and what would cause them to leave a land that was so beautiful and travel across the ocean to a land that was raw and untamed they came from a very concentrated area in the eastern part of France the largest city that they were grouped around was poitiers in eastern France close to the Atlantic Ocean and probably 95% of these early Acadians they were French at the time were farmers they lived in small villages they worked on farms they were very much small farmers like we find today in Louisiana so the roots of their origins in eastern France very much reflect the type of life that they led when they went to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and then later were transported to Louisiana and other places so that long agricultural rural tradition has been with the Acadians since since they left ramp at the Acadian population had moved from France to Nova Scotia were somewhat diverse but most of them came from a place that's called today Levon dead which is an old province called Poitou in France and most of them were engaged in as farmers in a feudal system that existed in France at that time in other words they worked and formed for the property that belonged to a lord or someone that was a big property owner over there I draw a distinction between the Cajuns and the Acadians I refer to the Cajuns distant ancestors as the as the Acadians and they came from southwestern France in the area around plot 2 and there were several reasons why they wanted to leave France to come to the new world there had been a lot of religious violence between Catholics and Protestants in that part of France there had been famine there have been disease they were living on the estates of nobility who levied high taxes on them the phenomena people always ask why did the ik why did the French leave the area and why did why would they go to what was basically one of the first settlements in Canada was in Nova Scotia and the main reason was actually religious unrest this was the time in the 17th century where there were a lot of conflicts between Protestants and Catholics the Acadians themselves were very Catholic in nature or the French in that region and they were under a lot of pressure in eastern France to lend adherents either to the Protestants or Catholics and they got to the point where they just felt it was disrupting their lifestyle to to a level where they decided to ship off to the new world and be able to develop the kind of culture and and religious lifestyle and family lifestyle that they wanted to maintain religious turmoil was very important in the decision to go to the new world because in that area of poitou they had long been since that since the latter part of the 16th century and into the 17th century horrendous chaos and turmoil between Protestant people who mainly were protesting against the churches it was administered from Paris and there were there were horrendous there were massacres that took place there were burning at the stake of which is in all kinds of things during that time so there were I'm certain that that was one of the issues that they were trying to escape although the French people in the area of part two were persecuted for their religious beliefs and this was certainly the main reason that they left the area there were other factors that caused them to consider moving to a different region and starting a new life another reason is that the there was an offer of free land to people who were going to the new world and that enticed many of these these Frenchmen to go to the new world because they equated having their own land with with freedom so they they left France that southwest region of France and went to the new world and they would work for X number of years I think it's five five years for the company trapping furs and at the end of that five years they were free to work for themselves entirely they say that the cod fish were so numerous that you could practically walk on the water they had that many fish there so that had been a draw to people from northern Europe for a long time now so some of them came and engaged in fishing industry early on another thing that happened during the colonial period and it was part of the mercantile system had to do with trapping and so there were some trappers there who tried to make a living in that in that capacity what's interesting about the Acadians in Nova Scotia between the you know the early 1600s and 1700s was that they did develop an agriculture base there to their lifestyle and in order to do that they had to and they had to drain some land that was periodically flooded by the Bay of Fundy and so the Bay of fun he had such a great title range that when the tide would come in it would push far far into the inlets and and flood a lot of land but by building dikes they were able to keep the flooded Tidewater out and eventually the rain water would desalinate or you know freshen up the land that used to be covered by salt water and all of that became prime farmland and the Acadians had to of course build and maintain those dikes and that's one of the things that the Acadians are best known for is to develop an agricultural economy that captured land from the sea when they first arrived they discovered that they had to adapt their own agricultural style to a new region that was very different it was a oceanfront a different climate they'd be they had to reclaim land in order to plant and so they built a tremendous system of dikes and channels in order to sort of bring the land back very very similar to the type of land we have in south Louisiana strangely enough there are a lot of parallels but they were also very isolated and were left alone by both the French and the bread issue at different times controlled that part of Canada and so they were able to continue theirs their strong family ties their agricultural ties they enhance that with fishing and seafood and trapping they learned from the Native Americans in the area and as long as they were left alone they were very contented what happened though was that about the beginning of the 18th century around 1700 the British took over finally after the 30 Years War and took over the control of the area and they were very nervous about the Acadians at that time because number one they were Catholic and the Anglican Church was really strong and the British wanted the Acadians to change their religion say thing that had caused them to leave France in the first place the other thing was that they considered themselves still French and they were asked to swear an oath to the king of England something that they refused to do England demanded that the Acadians who and who wanted to be neutral but they demanded that the Acadians of would not fight against England and that they would they would change religion too because in those days religion and politics were not too far different so if you support the Catholic Church you would be you would be supporting France and England of course was not Catholic so that was one of the issues but that's one of the issues and of course you know it's told you know that the the refusal to swear allegiance to the crown of England is what caused the exile and that indeed that was that one of the events and one of the factors but of course there was a war a huge war brewing at that very time and it broke out about that time we call it the French and Indian War so from England's point of view they wanted to get rid of that population because had they joined with the French people in Quebec they would have been difficult to defeat as it was they were still difficult to defeat but they they did defeat the French it was easier after exiling the Acadians a plan was devised to gather up all of the Acadians and at that time and bring them into a church still very religious they brought all the men into a church they lock them in they took the wives and children and separated them and then they announced that they were going to deport them this is what we called a Gandhi Raja you know the big upheaval and the plan was to take these Acadians who were reluctant to follow the British rule and to disperse them throughout the a British colonies in North America so we know that many of them ended up coming to Louisiana but a good number of them were also dropped off in the colonies along the eastern seaboard places like Maryland Connecticut Virginia some of them were even transported back to France but they all left on boats and then a number of them actually came to Louisiana of the 15 to 18,000 Acadians who lived in pre expulsion Nova Scotia about half of them died during the expulsion due to starvation disease exposure and even violence at the hands of the British you and when they settle in south Louisiana they encountered other peoples who were already here or who would come here later for example there were a lot of Frenchmen who had come to Louisiana directly from France who were already here when the Acadians arrived there were Spaniards here there were a lot of Germans the Spaniards who founded New Iberia would get here after a lot of the Acadians were already here they came here in 1779 hitting's had already been here a few years by then by the 1750s there was enough cattle in that area to start that trade so that's still well before the Acadians arrived there were some people like Andre Moss who operated from laravel to st. Martinville and then on the other side eventually on the other side of the bayou west of the Bayou Teche as well and we see cattle brands for example they go back to the 1730's so there they were had that those kind of things going prior to the Acadian arrival eventually about 3,000 Acadians made their way to Louisiana beginning in 1764 65 and settled not too far away from where we are now in new Iberia they settled around a false point and then spread out from there throughout south Louisiana there were two hundred and some-odd Acadians in the first group that came to the postage Ataka Paul that was in st. martinville around st. martinville but actually it was in-law of the ship where they first arrived there a number of them actually came to Louisiana which at that time was under Spanish rule the French had passed it on to the Spanish and during that hundred years the Spanish were very happy to have the Acadians because the Acadians had two qualities that they were looking for they wanted to be farmers so they didn't want to stay in New Orleans or any of the cities in the colonies they were passive they were hard-working and so they were given land grants and the idea was from sort of from down around Morgan City up through Opelousas grants were given along bayous for farmers and Acadians to settle they thought that they could use them then as a buffer between peoples in Texas what was still Mexico at the time and Louisiana the Acadians live side-by-side with these other peoples but didn't really intermarry with them on a large scale until the end of the Civil War and this is actually Carl Brazos research that I'm citing from his book Acadian to Cajun and transformation of a people who's a very title tells you that the the Cajuns and the Acadians were not quite the same people the Acadians as Brazel points out begin to intermarry on a large scale with other ethnic groups right after the Civil War and the reason for this is that these other ethnic groups the Spanish the French the Germans and others had held themselves apart from the Acadians and looked down on them because the Acadians had always been subsistence farmers they grew just enough to survive these other peoples you know acquired material wealth to live more comfortably they were upwardly mobile but after the Civil War the economy in the south was ruined the economy in French Louisiana the southern part of Louisiana was also ruined the the Acadians and these these newly impoverished ethnic groups that had previously looked down on them we're now after the civil war working together side by side in the fields as sharecroppers and tenant farmers and that made it acceptable that once they were all equally poor to intermarry with the Acadians for the first time so you had a lot of Acadians marrying non Acadians on a widespread basis for the first time over 50 percent of the marriages that Carl Brazeau looked at in the census data and elsewhere at church records over fifty percent of the time young Acadian men an Acadian women were marrying non Acadian men and women so you had you know Boudreaux and Thibodeaux sand and Terios marrying app shires and Hugh lands and emails who were all Germans they were marrying Romero's and me Gaza's and dart Dez's who were all Spanish they were marrying you know font nose and swallows who were French Creoles and that's why today all of these distinctly non Acadians surnames like that are considered Cajun nevertheless because Cajuns by their very nature are a mixture of ethnic groups Acadian French Creole Spanish German and other ethnic groups after the Civil War there became a creeping what we call an American ization and Acadians and Cajuns were resistant to that in fact as little as twenty years ago I would talk to a Cajun in French and I would ask them what they were and who they were and they would not say they were American they'd say just sweep America shook a jack that is they identified themselves as Cajuns and not really as American because they were resistant to this sort of Americanization of their culture partly because it was Protestant partly because it was another language partly because it brought in a lot of new technologies and industries that they were not comfortable with and so there was a sort of passive resistance I should say but then three things happened in the 20th century that really changed Cajun culture forever the first was the imposition of English as the language of the schools which happened around 1920 and in 1920 you could no longer speak French at school in fact it was it was disallowed and you would be punished and several Cajun poets have written about this a famous poet Joss and they wrote something called you cannot speak French on the playground you cannot speak French on the playground and this really sort of stigmatized and caused a very negative reaction by cages to their own language they had not learned how to read and write French they had just spoken it it was strictly a spoken language in here English was presented through the schools as the future as the literate language as the superior language and so a whole cultural complex developed amongst Cajuns where what they spoke what they say chapelle de novo francais I speak bad French and this really stuck with them they didn't want to pass it on to their children because they wanted their children to be successful and so French became sort of a a hidden language that the older people would speak to themselves so their children wouldn't understand what they were talking about and they hid it away in everything that they did so this was a tremendous impact on on the culture and language when when I was a kid I learned how to speak French because my grandfather lived with us but during those days when you spoke French or if you spoke French when you spoke English you had what we call a Cajun accent and because of that people kind of look down on you when when in my freshman year in college I took a speech course the professor's name was dr. Doherty never forget dr. Doherty now the course had nothing to do with pronunciation it had to do with how to give a speech but at the end of the semester he pulled me aside and he said me

Channel: Ray Breaux

Views: 475,780

Rating: 4.7952366 out of 5

Keywords: Cajun (Ethnicity), Culture (Website Category), Documentary (TV Genre), The History Channel (TV Network), History (TV Genre), Acadians (Ethnicity), Cajun dialect, creole, Cajun Cuisine, Swamp, Acadian, French, Nova Scotia, Cajun Culture, Cajun Creole accent, Customs

Id: xaAMCDvpOn8

Length: 24min 51sec (1491 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2015