Louisiana’s Acadian heritage is a legendary part of not only its history but its very cultural identity, an aspect of its background that has made it a distinctive region. Yet how and why Acadiana became a hub of “Cajun” settlement and its true boundaries are little-known to all but the most knowledgeable of south Louisiana history. If anyone has an interest in learning the facts about Acadiana and separating truth from fiction, one cannot find a better source on the subject than Carl A. Brasseux’s Founding of New Acadia. I recently listened to an audiobook version of the title.
A native of the region and longtime instructor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (the “Ragin’ Cajuns!), Brasseaux is the author of more than two dozen books and is a specialist in the cultural history of south Louisiana. His nonfiction writings, ranging from monographs on settlements to discussion of race and regional foodways, form an essential catalog of writings on Acadiana. The Founding of New Acadia, originally published by LSU Press in 1987, still stands as perhaps the essential standard resource on the Acadians.
As Brasseux chronicles in a swift-moving but thorough narrative, the Acadian story begins in Nova Scotia in the early eighteenth century, where these French-speaking settlers created a community that survived British acquisition of the territory they inhabited through a special recognition of neutrality. This arrangement broke down during the French and Indian War, as British authorities came to view the French enclave as a potential threat to the colony’s safety and had it deported. Ultimately more than 12,000 people were forcibly relocated between 1755 and 1764 and resettled in various British seaboard colonies, with a large concentration originally being sent to Maryland. A substantial portion, nearly 3,000 in total, were first sent to northern France before being resettled in North America. Only in the 1770s were many of these groups finally sent to the Attakapas region of what is today south-central Louisiana. There they would found several communities that endure to this day.
Brasseux chronicles this story of diaspora and cultural resilience in detail. Along the way he relates the story of how their most legendary communities took root in the eighteenth century Gulf South and came to be the iconic region of Louisiana that it is today. Information on Acadian lifestyle, relations with Spanish, Indian, and Creole neighbors, and their enduring cultural heritage are related in this definitive study. As Brasseux points out, this relatively small group of people has had an outsized influence on regional cultural heritage over the centuries despite their longstanding insularity. Today, he argues, Cajun society is thriving as never before.
JMB
The Historians Manifesto 
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