Acadians
The Acadians are an ethnic group descended from the French who settled in the New France colony of Acadia during the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, most descendants of Acadians live in either the Northern American region of Acadia, where descendants of Acadians who escaped the Expulsion of the Acadians re-settled, or in Louisiana, where thousands of Acadians moved in the late 1700s. Descendants of the Louisiana Acadians are most commonly known as Cajuns, the anglicized term of "Acadian".
Acadia was one of the five regions of New France, located in what is now Eastern Canada's Maritime provinces, as well as parts of Quebec and present-day Maine to the Kennebec River. It was ethnically, geographically and administratively different from the other French colonies such as the French colony of Canada. As a result, the Acadians developed a distinct history and culture. The settlers whose descendants became Acadians primarily came from the west-central region of France, such as the rural areas of Poitou-Charentes. During the French and Indian War, British colonial officers suspected that Acadians were aligned with France, after finding some Acadians fighting alongside French troops at Fort Beauséjour. Though most Acadians remained neutral during the war, the British, together with New England legislators and militia, carried out the Great Expulsion of the Acadians between 1755 and 1764. They forcefully deported approximately 11,500 Acadians from the maritime region. Approximately one-third perished from disease and drowning.
In retrospect, the result has been described as an ethnic cleansing of the Acadians from Maritime Canada.
Acadians speak a variety of French called Acadian French, which has a few regional accents. Most can also speak English. The Louisiana Cajun descendants tend to speak English, including Cajun English, or Louisiana French, a relative of Acadian French from Canada, though most have been primarily anglophone since the mid-20th century. Most Acadians in Canada continue to live in majority French-speaking communities, notably those in New Brunswick, where Acadians and Francophones are granted autonomy in areas such as education and health. In some cases, Acadians intermarried with Indigenous peoples, in particular, the Mi'kmaq.
Estimates of contemporary Acadian populations vary widely. The Canadian census of 2006 reported only 96,145 Acadians in Canada, based on self-declared ethnic identity. However, the Canadian Encyclopedia estimates that there are at least 500,000 people of Acadian ancestry in Canada, which would include many who declared their ethnic identity for the census as French or as Canadian.
Pre-deportation history
During the early 17th century, about 60 French families were established in Acadia. They developed relations with the peoples of the Wabanaki Confederacy. The Acadians lived mainly in the coastal regions of the Bay of Fundy; they reclaimed farming land from the sea by building dikes to control water and drain certain wetlands.Living in a contested borderland region between French Canada and the British territories on New England and the coast, the Acadians often became entangled in the conflict between the powers. Their competition in Europe played out in North America as well. Over a period of 74 years, six wars took place in Acadia and Nova Scotia, in which the Wabanaki Confederacy and some Acadians fought to keep the British from taking over the region. While France lost political control of Acadia in 1713, the Mí'kmaq did not concede land to the British. Along with Acadians, the Mi'kmaq used military force to resist the British. That was particularly evident in the early 1720s during Dummer's War.
The British had conquered Acadia in 1710. Over the next 45 years, the Acadians refused to sign an unconditional oath of allegiance to Britain. Many were influenced by Father Jean-Louis Le Loutre, who from his arrival in 1738 until his capture in 1755, preached against the "English devils".
Father Le Loutre led the Acadian people during the Acadian Exodus, as an act of defiance towards British demands and oppression. Acadians took part in various militia operations against the British and maintained vital supply lines to the French Fortress of Louisbourg and Fort Beausejour.
During the French and Indian War, the British sought to neutralize any military threat posed by the Acadians and to interrupt the vital supply lines which they provided to Louisbourg by making them sign an oath of allegiance to the crown.
The British founded the town of Halifax and fortified it in 1749 in order to establish a base against the French. The Mi'kmaq resisted the increased number of British settlements by making numerous raids on Halifax, Dartmouth, Lawrencetown, and Lunenburg. During the French and Indian War, the Mi'kmaq assisted the Acadians in resisting the British during the Expulsion of the Acadians.
Many Acadians might have signed an unconditional oath to the British monarchy had the circumstances been better, while other Acadians would not sign because it was religious oath which denied the Catholic faith because the British Monarch was head of the Church of England.
Acadians had numerous reasons against signing an oath of loyalty to the British Crown. Acadian men feared that signing the oath would commit them to fighting against France during wartime. They also worried about whether their Mi'kmaq neighbours might perceive an oath as acknowledging the British claim to Acadia rather than that of the indigenous Mi'kmaq. Acadians believed that if they signed the oath, they might put their villages at risk of attack by the Mi'kmaq.
Geographical distribution
Data from this section from Statistics Canada, 2021.Provinces and territories
Today about one third of the population of the officially bilingual province of New Brunswick speaks French as their mother tongue. About half of these are of Acadian ancestry, and there are also many Acadian institutions, organizations and cultural events.Deportation
In the Great Expulsion, after the Battle of Fort Beauséjour beginning in August 1755 under Lieutenant Governor Lawrence, approximately 11,500 Acadians were expelled, families were separated, their lands and property confiscated, and in some cases their homes were burned. The Acadians were deported to separated locations throughout the British eastern seaboard colonies, from New England to Georgia, where many were put into forced labour, imprisoned, or put into servitude.Second wave
The British conducted a second and smaller expulsion of Acadians after taking control of the north shore of what is now New Brunswick. After the fall of Quebec and defeat of the French, the British lost interest in such relocations.Some Acadians were deported to England, some to the Caribbean, and some to France. After being expelled to France, many Acadians were eventually recruited by the Spanish government to migrate to Luisiana. These Acadians settled into or alongside the existing Louisiana Creole settlements, sometimes intermarrying with Creoles, and gradually developed what became known as Cajun culture.
Louisiana Acadians
After 1758, thousands were transported to France. Most of the Acadians who later went to Louisiana sailed there from France on five Spanish ships. These had been provided by the Spanish Crown, which was eager to populate their Louisiana colony with Catholic settlers who might provide farmers to supply the needs of New Orleans residents. The Spanish had hired agents to seek out the dispossessed Acadians in Brittany and kept this effort secret in order to avoid angering the French king. These new arrivals from France joined the earlier wave expelled from Acadia, and gradually their descendants developed the Cajun population and culture. They continued to be attached to French culture and language, and Catholicism.Image:Grand Pré.JPG|thumb|left|Sculptor Louis-Philippe Hébert's sculpture of Evangeline at the Grand-Pré National Historic Site in Nova Scotia|203x203px
The Spanish offered the Acadians lowlands along the Mississippi River in order to block British expansion from the east. Some would have preferred Western Louisiana, where many of their families and friends had settled. In addition, that land was more suitable to mixed crops of agriculture. Rebels among them marched to New Orleans and ousted the Spanish governor. The Spanish later sent infantry from other colonies to put down the rebellion and execute the leaders. After the rebellion in December 1769, Spanish Governor O'Reilly permitted the Acadians who had settled across the river from Natchez to resettle along the Iberville or Amite rivers closer to New Orleans.
Returnees
In time, some Acadians returned to the Maritime provinces of Canada, mainly to New Brunswick and coastal villages that were not occupied by colonists from New England.The British prohibited them from resettling their lands and villages in what became Nova Scotia. A few of the Acadians in this area had evaded the British for several years, but the brutal winter weather eventually forced them to surrender. Some returnees settled in the region of Fort Sainte-Anne, now Fredericton, but were later displaced when the Crown awarded land grants to numerous United Empire Loyalists from the Thirteen Colonies after the victory of the United States in the American Revolution. Most of the descendants of Acadian returnees now live primarily on the eastern coast of New Brunswick, Canada.
In 2003, at the request of Acadian representatives, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada issued a Royal Proclamation acknowledging the deportation. She established 28 July as an annual day of commemoration, beginning in 2005. The day is called the "Great Upheaval" on some English-language calendars.
Before the American Revolutionary War, the Crown settled Protestant European immigrants and New England Planters in former Acadian communities and farmland. After the war, it made land grants in Nova Scotia to Loyalists. British policy was to establish a majority culture of Protestant religions and to assimilate Acadians with the local populations where they resettled.