The Acadian Expulsion and the Making of Cajun Country

The word Cajun is a corruption of Acadien, and the Acadien story begins not in Louisiana but in Nova Scotia, in the province the French called Acadie. French settlers had farmed the tidal marshes of the Bay of Fundy since the sixteen hundreds, developing a dike-and-aboiteau system to reclaim land from the sea and a culture that was stubbornly, proudly its own. In seventeen fifty-five, the British lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia began the deportation of most of the Acadian population, more than ten thousand people, because they refused to swear an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British Crown.

Families were separated at the wharves. Ships carried Acadians to Massachusetts, Maryland, Georgia, and the Caribbean. Thousands died in the crossings or in exile from disease and displacement.

The American poet Longfellow later made the expulsion famous in his eighteen forty-seven narrative poem Evangeline, though historians note he compressed and romanticized a tragedy that was real enough on its own terms. Beginning in the seventeen sixties and continuing through the seventeen eighties, some Acadian exiles made their way to Louisiana, then under Spanish governance, which welcomed French-speaking Catholics as a counterweight to Anglo settlers. They settled the bayou country west of New Orleans, the prairies around present-day Lafayette and Opelousas, and the marshes along the Gulf.

They brought their fiddle music, their French dialect, their Catholic feast days, and their love of rice, pork, and the crawfish that ran thick in the bayous. Contact with African, Spanish, and Indigenous neighbors transformed the culture into something new: Cajun. The music they play today on Vermilion Parish back roads on a Saturday night is a direct line to Acadie, filtered through two and a half centuries of Louisiana mud and salt air.