Le Grand Dérangement: The Expulsion That Made Cajun Country

In the late summer of seventeen fifty-five, British colonial officers in Nova Scotia issued orders that had been debated and deferred for years. They were going to remove the Acadians.

The Acadians were French-speaking Catholic settlers who had lived in what the British called Nova Scotia, and what they called Acadie, for four generations. They farmed the coastal marshes with a system of dikes they had built themselves. They had intermarried with the Mi'kmaq people of the region. They had refused, through successive British demands, to swear an unconditional oath of loyalty to the Crown, offering instead modified oaths that would exempt them from military service against France. The British, preparing for what would become the Seven Years War, decided the ambiguity was intolerable.

The expulsion was not an abstraction. British soldiers came to the villages. Men were gathered into churches and told that their lands and livestock were forfeit to the Crown. Ships were loaded. Families were separated, some deliberately, some in the chaos of embarkation. Crops were burned. Villages were razed. Of the approximately ten thousand Acadians expelled between seventeen fifty-five and seventeen sixty-three, scholars estimate that perhaps a third died in transit, in exile, or of disease before reaching permanent settlement. They were scattered to the French Caribbean islands, to France, to Louisiana, to the eastern seaboard colonies, where they were often unwelcome.

The ones who reached Louisiana arrived in the seventeen sixties, when the territory was under Spanish colonial administration. They settled the bayous and prairies west of New Orleans, the land of the Attakapa and the Chitimacha nations, building communities in the waterlogged lowlands that reminded them, somewhat, of the coastal marshes they had lost. They brought their language, their Catholicism, their music, and their foodways: the communal boucherie tradition of hog-slaughtering and sausage-making, the fiddle and the accordion, the French that had survived the Atlantic crossing.

The word Cajun is a corruption of the word Acadien. The culture the world now calls Cajun, the food celebrated in restaurants across the country, the music featured at festivals, the landscape marketed to tourists, is the inheritance of people who were ethnically cleansed from their homeland, who lost a third of their number in the process, and who rebuilt something remarkable out of what remained.

The Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, a few miles from here, holds the names of the exiles. It also holds a bronze mural by artist George Rodrigue depicting the arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana. The Evangeline Oak by the bayou is named for the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem that romanticized the expulsion into a love story. History was considerably less romantic.