French Canadians in New England Watch Cultural Identity Fade

First, the children stopped answering in French. Then the church school dropped half a day of classes in the language. Now, even the Acadian Social Club uses English at its meetings.

Then, when the cable company shut off its French-language channel from Quebec, many of the churchgoing, hockey-worshiping French Canadians in this city got mad.

They mounted a campaign to restore the French station, and with it a lost piece of themselves.

“It’s like someone takes a gun and shoots you when you have something like that,” said Louis LeBlanc.

The stocky, bearded LeBlanc was watching a card game at the Acadian Social Club. The club illustrates the plight and sorrow of an isolated people whose cultural identity is melting away.

An Acadian flag--France’s blue, white and red background with a yellow star--flaps in the winter wind beside the American flag. Inside, men play cards and chat in French. The bartender says, apologetically, that he can’t speak the language.

Just counting the Gardner residents of French-Canadian heritage poses a cross-cultural dilemma. The federal census put their number at 1,193, or 6.6% of the population of 17,900.

Acadians dispute that figure. They put their number at between 30% and 40% of this northern Massachusetts city. They point to entire pages of Cormiers, LeBlancs and other common Acadian names in the local phone book.

Their ancestors came to the region in the 1750s, when the British expelled thousands of French-speaking people from Acadia, the former French colony that now includes parts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Some expelled Acadians settled in Louisiana, where their descendants are known as Cajuns.

About 1915, another wave of New Brunswick residents journeyed 400 miles south to work in Gardner’s furniture mills.

“They’ve been known to be persecuted and pushed around and always held to their religion and . . . culture and . . . pride,” said Henry Ares, a French teacher whose Quebecois heritage gives him a slightly distanced perspective on the Acadians.

Val Ouellet, a building contractor with a thin mustache and thick accent, said he can’t understand why the cable company turned off the French channel.

“It makes us wonder if they have something against us, or what. You hope not,” he said.

Ouellet said French slowly faded from the local Roman Catholic school, and from many homes, as children were born in a new land.

“We’re French, and we love our French,” he said of the men, mostly in their 50s or older, at the social club. “Our kids 20 years from now, they won’t care about the French station.”

Val Cormier, an Acadian club officer, said members began to conduct sessions in English a few years ago. Last year, they Anglicized the club name to make it easier to file tax documents and the like.

Acadians said they pleaded with the cable company to restore the channel, which was canceled Jan. 1, because many elderly shut-ins depend on it for weekly Catholic Masses in French.

The Acadians, unaccustomed to political protest, went to a City Council meeting Dec. 30 to demand their station’s return. The meeting drew about 30 people, a record crowd in recent years.

Hank Ferris, who manages the area’s Cablevision system, said the channel programmed at CKSH-TV in Sherbrooke, Quebec, was pulled mainly because its weak signal often produced a poor picture.

He said the company is rechecking the signal and surveying the audience to see if the popularity of the French channel warrants restoring it.