Evangeline’s People : Acadia: Way of Life Fights for Survival

Still stands the forest primeval; but under the shade of its branches

Dwells another race with other customs and language.

Only along the shore of the mournful and misty Atlantic

Linger a few Acadian peasants, whose fathers from exile

Wandered back to their native land to die in its bosom.

--”Evangeline,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Atlantic is still a mournful and misty ocean and the hemlock trees looming just beyond this tiny New Brunswick village have the brooding melancholy of a primeval forest, but the sad melody of Longfellow’s poem is no longer sung by the descendants of his Acadian peasants.

In today’s Acadia, Evangeline’s people live on.

Through drastic exile two centuries ago, and years of government indifference, if not antagonism, Longfellow’s gentle, French-speaking farmers and fishermen have survived, testimony to their determination to preserve a distinct identity in an alien society.

English Seldom Spoken

From a remnant community of no more than 2,000 in the mid-18th Century, the Acadians in Canada have grown to about 280,000, most of them in the maritime province of New Brunswick.

Even though they make up only about a third of the province’s population, Acadians are guaranteed their own language and culture. They have their own university, a television station, two radio stations, two daily newspapers and several weeklies. In large areas of New Brunswick, English is seldom spoken, except by the few tourists who have discovered the uncultivated beauty of the Acadian seacoast.

To visit this hamlet on the south shore of the Chaleur Bay is to visit a different world, a place separate from the common vision of North America, where even the French-speaking people of Quebec are alien.

“We are not Canadians, we’re not even French Canadians,” said Leon Theriault, a historian at Le Universite de Moncton, the Acadian university about 150 miles south of Caraquet.

First, An Acadian

“When I think about it,” Theriault said in an interview, “I have to say that I am an Acadian, then a Maritimer, then maybe a Canadian.”

As he spoke, he waved his arm over a small desk flag, a French tricolor but with a small gold star in the blue stripe. That flag, a reminder of the community’s French origins but with a unique and separating adornment, is flown all over Caraquet. It is only one of the signs that this is definitely an Acadian town.

The people here do not dress as if they were 17th-Century French peasants, but their language would be more easily understood in the Paris of 1604 than the Montreal of 1987.

And their attitudes reflect the independence and self-reliance of the lobstermen they are, a maritime sense of purpose that marks them as different from their French-speaking cosmopolitan counterparts in Montreal as it does from Toronto’s bankers and stockbrokers.

It has been this sense of self, of distinction, that has provided these descendants of early 17th-Century immigrants from France’s Loire Valley with the strength not only to survive but to force the dominant society to make them concessions that larger groups have never achieved.

Yet Acadian leaders are now concerned that this very success is as threatening to their survival as persecution was to their forebears.

“There is a strong possibility that we will survive only as a museum piece,” Theriault said. “We’re not going to be destroyed, but assimilation is taking its toll, and unfortunately we don’t express ourselves in terms of power.”

This, he said, means that most Acadians have become complacent about the gains they have made and are not pushing to perpetuate or create the political institutions he says are necessary to guarantee growth and survival.

Death of a Party

“In the 1970s,” he said, “we had our political party and an idea of creating a new province, like Quebec. But with the gains that came from that pressure, we became complacent and satisfied. The party died in 1983 and we have reverted to discussing linguistic and cultural affairs.”

But even to those young intellectuals who think that survival means creating new forms of political expression and power, there is recognition that language and cultural issues are also essential to maintaining a meaningful and distinct identity.

“We want to live in the 20th Century,” said Melvin Gallant, a writer and editor in Moncton, “and if we want to live today we have to evolve.”

Still, “we can’t reject the past,” Gallant acknowledged, adding that “the deportation is a fact, and we can’t erase it from our background.”

Act of Inhumanity

There it is, the phrase that for all the talk about political power and evolution, remains the most important factor in Acadian life.

The French term is “le grand derangement,” but however it is described, what happened to the Acadians in 1755 was one of those terrible acts of inhumanity that resulted in the victims’ will to survive rather than their destruction.

Longfellow’s “Evangeline” is no longer the fixture it once was in high school literature classes. It is sometimes ridiculed by critics, but the epic poem remains an important account of the deportation.

And, Moncton University’s Theriault says of “Evangeline,” “even though it’s American we still know it, and it has a strong impact on us.”

The Acadian story began in the early 16th Century, when French settlers landed on what is now Nova Scotia and established one of the European colonies in North America. Because of French indifference, the Acadians, as they soon were called, never maintained the identity with or dependence on the Old Country that developed in Quebec.

Neutrality Maintained

In fact, through the years of war between France and Britain over North America, the Acadians maintained a determined neutrality, asking only that they be left alone to farm and fish.

But in 1755, four years before France was forced to give up its claim to Canada, the British decided they could not live with a French presence in the part of Canada they then controlled, no matter how benign. And when the Acadians refused to swear an oath of allegiance, local British rulers decided something had to be done.

Charles Lawrence, the British governor, called leaders of the 8,000 Acadians to a meeting at Grand Pre and, as Longfellow described it, told the people that, painful though he found the task, he had to:

“ . . . deliver the will of our monarch;

Namely, that all your lands, and dwellings, and cattle of all kinds

Forfeited be to the crown; and that you yourselves from this province

Be transported to other lands.”

To other lands they went. In her search for her exiled lover, Gabriel, the young Evangeline traveled to Louisiana (where the Acadians became known as Cajuns), to Nebraska, the Ozark mountains, Delaware and Philadelphia. The two lovers died, a fate that befell more than half of the Acadians who were driven from their homes.

Stragglers’ Fate

As it turned out, by the time the British allowed the Acadians to return to Canada, after 1763, only 2,000 went back, the lingering few of Longfellow’s somber conclusion. An estimated 4,000 of the original exiles had died at sea or in jails, according to historians, and 2,000 more stayed behind in small and vulnerable groups in their places of exile.

But those ragged stragglers who did return to Canada did not go home. They were not allowed to do so. They were scattered throughout the Maritime Provinces, mostly to New Brunswick, though some went to Prince Edward Island and other parts of Nova Scotia.

While they evolved from a pitiful few to a relatively prosperous and significant factor in their new home--there has been one Acadian premier of New Brunswick, and it is conceded that no provincial political leader can succeed without major Acadian support--it was the experience in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia that concerns current Acadian leaders, not what has happened to them in New Brunswick.

According to experts at Moncton University, the greatest concentration of Acadian names in Canada is in Halifax, Nova Scotia, although almost no one in the area can speak French and almost no one considers himself Acadian.

Assimilation’s Toll

The same is true on Prince Edward Island. Assimilation “has destroyed us,” except in New Brunswick, according to Roger Doiron, president of Le Societe des Acadians du Nouveau-Brunswick.

“When we returned,” he said, “there was so much of an overwhelming English presence that we couldn’t survive. If you look, you can see that we have disappeared altogether.”

And despite the apparent strength of the New Brunswick Acadians, the signs are not good for the future. Doiron puts the intermarriage rate between Acadians and English speakers at 50%. And as Gallant says, “the children of intermarriage almost all assimilate and are lost to us.”

Some of the reasons for this trend in the face of otherwise unparalleled success in establishing a distinct society are plain, others not so plain. As Theriault put it:

“Everywhere you look, whatever you listen to, English is dominant, not only from Canada but because of the growing American influence. You can even see it in our own language. You can hear Acadians in totally French-speaking towns say ‘cross le street,’ or say ‘about’ or ‘smile.’ ”

‘You Can Fish in French’

Despite the official bilingual status of New Brunswick and even the parallel governmental and educational institutions, he said, “it is difficult if not impossible to live your life entirely in French; it is true you can fish in French but little else.”

Doiron is doubtful about long-term survival. He talked about a provincial government report issued in 1984 that cited discrimination against Acadians and called for fuller implementation of laws requiring equal services in French and English.

“There were (anti-French) demonstrations,” he said. “People threw bricks. It was frightening. But the facts showed that we are under-represented, that we don’t have equal services and those we do have are not always equal. But people don’t want to hear.”

What this means, he said, is that Acadians have to know English to get along, which is not only discriminating but creates a lack of self-confidence that ultimately undermines the group’s validity.

An example of this was provided by Moncton lawyer Bernard Richard, who told of French-speaking clients who will not accept the legality of a will, a sales agreement or any other legal document unless it is written in English.

“This leaves French for use in songs and poetry,” Theriault said. “We have reverted to discussing linguistics and culture, but we are not moving forward and we are not creating the institutions we need to fight for our rights, and unless we do that we will not survive.”

As Gallant put it, “We don’t want to leave Longfellow as our historian.”