I mentioned in andouille that the sausage that’s a staple of Cajun cuisine came originally from Normandy and was also spread to Calabria by French nobles from Anjou. But the Cajuns themselves trace through many places in the New World, notably parts now named after Scotland and an English king with German roots but at the time named after a place in Greece, and ultimately came from France – but not Normandy or Anjou.
That “place in Greece” is Arcadia, in the heart of the Peloponnesian peninsula, and I’ve already written in detail about it. Arcadia became a byword for an idealized idyllic unspoiled wilderness with forests primeval. It was applied by Giovanni da Verrazzano to the Atlantic coast of North America north of Virginia (which would include not just Baltimore, New York City, and Boston but Cheesequake too). Eventually the name shifted farther up the coast and even inland, and – possibly under the influence of a Mi’kmaq word for ‘fertile land’ – dropped the r, to become the French colony of L’Acadie (or, sometimes, La Cadie), which was located primarily on the peninsula we today call Nova Scotia, spreading north into what is now New Brunswick.
The fact these provinces are now called Nova Scotia (“New Scotland”) and New Brunswick (in honour of King George III, who was also prince-elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Germany) gives a clue to how the Acadians became the Cajuns.
The French settlers in Acadia arrived in the early 1600s from the area of Aquitaine, in southwest France; in that way they were different from other French settlers in New France, who largely came from Paris and the northwest. In the early 1700s, when England gained control of Acadia, the Acadian settlers were required to declare loyalty to the English crown, which, in general, they would not do (for reasons religious as well as political). And so most of them were forced out in what came to be known as the Grand Dérangement, or the Expulsion of the Acadians.
This event was memorialized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his epic poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadia, which (ignoring the Mi’kmaq, who had been there before and were – and are – still there), draws again on the Arcadian mythos:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?
This A(r)cadian ideal is also a key part of the national Canadian mythos – see the paintings of the Group of Seven, among other emblematic bits of Canadiana. But massive movements of people, often involuntary, have always been an important part of Canadian history.
The Acadians were first relocated to Maryland, New York, and New England – which you may remember were Verrazzano’s Arcadia, not that it matters – but subsequently they largely ended up deported to France. Some of them ultimately came back around to Canada, to Acadia, to rejoin the few who had escaped expulsion. But they didn’t return to the part they had left; they were forced farther north into New Brunswick, and that is where les Acadiens still have an important presence (Suzie LeBlanc has released two lovely albums of Acadien folk songs, just for example). The name Acadia has hung on in Nova Scotia as well: in the Annapolis Valley, for instance, one of the varieties of grapes the local wineries grow is called L’Acadie, and after a day of wine touring you can drive into Wolfville and have a look at Acadia University.
But in 1785 some of the Acadians in France chose instead to follow the lead of one Henri Peyroux de la Coudrenière, who had a financial interest in inducing them to resettle in a colony farther south in America, one that already had a significant French presence but had more recently been acquired by Spain: Louisiana. These Acadiens, who had – through dropping the a or rebracketing l’Acadie to la Cadie – become Cadiens, became known by their English-speaking neighbours (and by themselves as they spoke English) as Cajuns, through the same process by which Barbadians have come to be called Bajans and by which Canadian became, on the cover of Mark Orkin’s bestseller, Canajan, Eh?
And the area of Louisiana that is the Cajun heartland, about a third of the state on the south and southwest (and not actually including New Orleans), is these days called Acadiana – a name that it first got in the 1950s, drawing in part on Acadia Parish, which has had that name since 1886. Some things keep coming around.
Sesquiotica 