The Acadians: In Search of a Homeland Paperback - 2007

Excerpt

Introduction

Acadie in Question

It was the last day for the Acadians at Grand Pré, the last day for them to live normal lives in the community they had built over the past century. On the morrow the soldiers would arrive on British ships. Their commander had received instructions from Charles Lawrence, the acting governor of Nova Scotia, to forcibly remove the inhabitants, burn their houses, churches and mills and lay waste their fields. It was late September 1755 and much of the crop had not yet been harvested. But on the eve of the coming of the ships, the people of Grand Pré had no reason to fear the onset of winter. Over the generations, Acadians had learned the hard lessons of life in a new land whose winters were much more difficult than those in the region of France around La Rochelle from which many of the first settlers had come. Their homes were built for warmth, with wooden walls that were filled in with stone to provide insulation.

On their fertile marshland fields, close to the sea, the farmers of Grand Pré raised ample crops and livestock. To their diet, they added game and fish and wild berries. They were a largely self-sufficient people, although they conducted vigorous trade with New Englanders that provided them with goods they couldn’t produce themselves.

Once the crops were off the lands, the Acadians could turn their minds to other things during the coming cold months. Most weddings in Grand Pré were celebrated between late October and February, the period when the demands of harvesting and planting were in abeyance. This was a time as well for preserving food, and making furniture, tools and toys for the children. It was a time for celebration and enjoyment. And it was just around the corner.

Grand Pré was the largest of the settlements around the shores of the Baie Française (Bay of Fundy), the homeland of a new and distinctive people. The original settlers had left France for Acadie for a variety of reasons. Ambitious ones had come with the hope of making it in the fur trade or the fishery. Others came in search of adventure in a new age that offered Europeans the means to ­emigrate. Some sought escape from the strictures of French society, and others wanted to be freed from the vicious religious wars that devastated La Rochelle and other parts of France in the early seventeenth century.

Like other Acadian settlements, Grand Pré was made up of numerous small hamlets, where the members of extended families lived close to one another. The Acadians had branched off from the society of their original French homeland and had developed a way of life that set them apart from the French of France, as well as from the French Canadians who lived along the banks of the St. Lawrence River. The Acadians of Grand Pré had developed close ties with the Mi’kmaq of the region and there was a considerable amount of intermarriage between the two peoples. In Grand Pré and other settlements, Acadian children, Mi’kmaq children and children of mixed race all played together.

Prior to the deportation, the word Acadie referred to a territory that was repeatedly fought over by the empires of France and England. (While some believe the name Acadie derives from the Greek Arcadia, which symbolized an ideal land, others think it comes from an aboriginal word, perhaps the Mi’kmaq word Cadie, or the Maliseet word Quoddy. Both words connote a piece of cherished land. )

While the precise boundaries of Acadie were often in dispute, its broad shape was clear. Acadie included the territories of the present-day provinces of Nova Scotia (including Cape Breton Island), New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Lured by the warm summer weather into believing that all would be well, the French established their first settlement in what was to become Acadie in 1604 on the Île St. Croix, a small piece of land in the present-day state of Maine, located right next to the border of New Brunswick. The first winter was tragically disillusioning–over half of the men in the tiny settlement perished. The following year, the French expedition abandoned the island and moved across the Baie Française to the territory of present-day Nova Scotia, establishing the outpost of Port Royal.

Acadie has always been a tough territory on the northern edge of the temperate lands of North America, never an Arcadia, and vastly unlike the France from which the Acadians came. The new people developed their uniqueness in a morose and lonely setting, a land of dark green forests with only marginally decent agricultural prospects. Peninsular Nova Scotia, the homeland of most Acadians before the deportation, is a tough, unyielding, spiny territory that remains almost impassable in places, even in our time.

For the Acadians, the highway of hope, life, culture, song and freedom has always been the sea. The sea linked tiny settlements with one another, and the sea brought a good life for the Acadians, who soon grew into a people who mastered the fishery, the commerce of the region, and unlocked the way to farm the marshy lands next to salt water. But if the sea brought prosperity and communication, it was also the highway of war for those who often descended on Acadian communities to pillage and burn, and in the end to destroy their settlements and force them into exile.

The territory of Acadie was on the front lines of the clashes between the French and the English. In 1710, the bulk of Acadie was seized for the last time by the British. Under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, the British gained control of the territories of present-day New Brunswick and peninsular Nova Scotia, leaving only Cape Breton (Île Royale) and Prince Edward Island (Île St. Jean) in the hands of the French. For forty-five years, the Acadians lived uneasily under a British administration in a territory that the English called Nova Scotia. Repeatedly, they were pressured to swear an oath of allegiance to British rule. For the most part, the Acadians were willing to swear such an oath, but only if it included a caveat that they would not be required to take up arms against the French and the native Mi’kmaq in a future conflict.

A new struggle was playing out between the two empires, influenced crucially by the rising power of Massachusetts, with its appetite for Acadian farmland and for mastery over the fishery in Acadian waters. Against this backdrop, the relationship between the Acadians and the British administration in Halifax came to a crisis point. In the summer of 1755, Nova Scotia’s acting governor summoned the representatives of the Acadians and demanded that they take another oath of allegiance to the regime, an oath that, this time, would be unconditional. When they refused, the Acadian representatives were arrested and imprisoned.

The expulsion commenced. About seven thousand men, women and children were herded on board British ships and from there they were transported to the Thirteen Colonies to the south. As the Acadians set out on their voyage of despair, many of them to die in shipwrecks and of disease, their homes, churches and mills were put to the torch.

The authorities who dispatched the ships and the soldiers were determined to remove the Acadians from their homeland and scatter them so they would cease to exist as a people. The goal was precisely to destroy the Acadians – not by killing them, although thousands were to die in the process, but by robbing them of their collective sense of themselves.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“Laxer is in his element, using biography, diplomatic correspondence, journals and a bit of archaeology to give a terrifically lively account of the Acadians’ culture and efforts to preserve their Eden from colonial powers.”
–Calgary Herald

Praise for The Border:

“At once magisterial and entertaining . . . an essential contribution to our knowledge of our country, and our relationship with our southern neighbours.”
–Edmonton Journal