Creole peoples

Creole peoples may refer to various ethnic groups around the world. The term's meaning exhibits regional variations, often sparking debate.
Creole peoples represent a diverse array of ethnicities, each possessing a distinct cultural identity that has been shaped over time. The emergence of creole languages, frequently associated with Creole ethnicity, is a separate phenomenon.
In specific historical contexts, particularly during the European colonial era, the term Creole applies to ethnicities formed through large-scale population movements. These movements involved people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds who converged upon newly established colonial territories. Often involuntarily separated from their ancestral homelands, these populations were forced to adapt and create a new way of life. Through a process of cultural amalgamation, they selectively adopted and merged desirable elements from their varied heritages. This resulted in the emergence of novel social norms, languages, and cultural practices that transcended their individual origins.
This process of cultural amalgamation, termed creolization, is characterized by rapid social change that ultimately leads to the formation of a distinct Creole identity.

Etymology and overview

The English word creole derives from the French créole, which in turn came from Portuguese crioulo, a diminutive of cria meaning a person raised in one's house. Cria is derived from criar, meaning "to raise or bring up", itself derived from the Latin creare, meaning "to make, bring forth, produce, beget"; which is also the source of the English word "create". It originally referred to the descendants of European colonists who had been born in the colony. Creole is also known by cognates in other languages, such as crioulo, criollo, creolo, kriolu, criol, kreyol, kreol, kriol, krio, and kriyoyo.
In Louisiana, the term Creole has been used since 1792 to represent descendants of African or mixed heritage parents as well as children of French and Spanish descent with no racial mixing. Its use as in the name for languages started from 1879, while as an adjective for languages, its use began around 1748.
In Spanish-speaking countries, the word Criollo refers to the descendants of Europeans born in the Americas, but also in some countries, to describe something local or very typical of a particular Latin American region.
In the Caribbean, the term broadly refers to all the people, whatever their class or ancestry —, East Asian, European, Indian — who are part of the culture of the Caribbean. In Trinidad, the term Creole is used to designate all Trinidadians except those of Asian origin. In Suriname, the term refers only to the descendants of enslaved Africans and in neighboring French Guiana the term refers to anyone, regardless of skin colour, who has adopted a European lifestyle.
File:Cafe Creole.jpg|thumb|Trilingual signs on Cafe Kreol in Cape Verde.
In, the term Creole refers to any ethnic group formed during the European colonial era, with some mix of African and non-African racial or cultural heritage. Creole communities are found on most African islands and along the continent's coastal regions where indigenous first interacted with Europeans. As a result of these contacts, five major Creole types emerged in : Portuguese,, Dutch, French and ].
The Crioulos of African or mixed Portuguese and descent eventually gave rise to several ethnic groups in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, Angola and Mozambique. The French-speaking Mauritian and Seychellois Creoles are both either African or ethnically mixed and Christianized. On Réunion, the term Creole applies to all people born on the island, while in, the blending of East African and Southeast Asian slaves with Dutch settlers, later produced a creolized population. The Fernandino Creole peoples of Equatorial Guinea are a mix of Cubans with Emancipados and English-speaking Liberated, while the Americo-Liberians and Sierra Leone Creoles resulted from the intermingling of Liberated in Sierra Recaptives with Caribbean people and s.
Perhaps due to the range of divergent descriptions and lack of a coherent definition, Norwegian anthropologist T. H. Eriksen concludes:
The following ethnic groups have been historically characterized as "Creole" peoples:

Alaska

Alaskan Creole, sometimes colloquially spelled "Kriol" in English, are a unique people who first came about through the intermingling of Sibero-Russian promyshlenniki men with Aleut and Eskimo women in the late 18th century and assumed a prominent position in the economy of Russian America and the North Pacific Rim.

Arkansas

French roots run deep in Arkansas. It was in Arkansas, near the original site of Arkansas Post, in the late seventeenth century, that Sieur de la Salle established what he imagined would be the center of French empire in North America. What actually emerged, did indeed encompass Arkansas: a vast arc of French forts and settlements, linking the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes and beyond, the Northern Atlantic and France itself. French officials hoped this network of settlements and trading posts would serve as a bulwark against the expanding British settlements to the east and those of the Spanish to the south and west.
French ambitions in North America within historic French Louisiana came to a grinding halt with their loss to Great Britain in the Seven Years’ War, and although the Spanish takeover of the territory known as la Louisiane preserved many existing cultural, religious, and legal norms, most of the remaining Francophone communities disappeared after the 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory by the United States opened the door to rapid Anglo-American settlement.
But Creole culture in Arkansas persisted. French-speaking hunters and settlers, many of mixed European and indigenous ancestry, some enslaved or formerly enslaved people of African descent, continued to live and work in this region. New French-speakers continued to arrive as well, albeit in comparatively small numbers, even after Arkansas’s acquisition by the United States and annexation as a territory in 1819.

Chesapeake Colonies

is a term coined by historian Ira Berlin to describe a group of people from Angola and Central Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries with cultural or ethnic ties to Africa, Europe, and sometimes the Caribbean. Some of these people arrived in the Chesapeake Colonies as the Charter Generation of slaves during the European colonization of the Americas before 1660. Some had lived and worked in Europe or the Caribbean before coming to North America. Examples of such men included John Punch and Emanuel Driggus.
Also, during the early settlement of the colonies, children born of immigrants in the colonies were often referred to as "Creole". This is found more often in the Chesapeake Colonies.

Louisiana

In the United States, the words "Louisiana Creole" refers to people of any race or mixture thereof who are descended from colonial French La Louisiane and colonial Spanish Louisiana settlers before the Louisiana region became part of the United States in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. Both the word and the ethnic group derive from a similar usage, beginning in the Caribbean in the 16th century, which distinguished people born in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies from the various new arrivals born in their respective, non-Caribbean homelands. Some writers from other parts of the country have mistakenly assumed the term to refer only to people of mixed racial descent, but this is not the traditional Louisiana usage.
In Louisiana, the term "Creole" was first used to describe people born in Louisiana, who used the term to distinguish themselves from newly arrived immigrants. It was not a racial or ethnic identifier; it was simply synonymous with "born in the New World," meant to separate native-born people of any ethnic background—white, African, or any mixture thereof—from European immigrants and slaves imported from Africa. Later, the term was racialized after newly arrived Anglo-Americans began to associate créolité, or the quality of being Creole, with racially mixed ancestry. This caused many white Creoles to eventually abandon the label out of fear that the term would lead mainstream Americans to believe them to be of racially mixed descent. Later writers occasionally make distinctions among French Creoles, Creoles of Color, and occasionally, African Creoles ; these categories, however, are later inventions, and most primary documents from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make use of the word "Creole" without any additional qualifier. Creoles of Spanish and German descent also exist, and Spanish Creoles survive today as Isleños and Malagueños, both found in southern Louisiana. However, all racial categories of Creoles - from Caucasian, mixed racial, African, to Native American - tended to think and refer to themselves solely as Creole, a commonality in many other Francophone and Iberoamerican cultures, who tend to lack strict racial separations common in United States History and other countries with large populations from Northern Europe's various cultures. This racial neutrality persists to the modern day, as many Creoles do not use race as a factor for being a part of the ethno-culture.
Contemporary usage has again broadened the meaning of Louisiana Creoles to describe a broad cultural group of people of all races who share a colonial Louisianian background. Louisianians who identify themselves as "Creole" are most commonly from historically Francophone and Hispanic communities. Some of their ancestors came to Louisiana directly from France, Spain, or Germany, while others came via the French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and Canada. Many Louisiana Creole families arrived in Louisiana from Saint-Domingue as refugees from the Haitian Revolution, along with other immigrants from Caribbean colonial centers like Santo Domingo and Havana. The children of slaves brought primarily from Western Africa were also considered Creoles, as were children born of unions between Native Americans and non-Natives. Creole culture in Louisiana thus consists of a unique blend of European, Native American, and African cultures.
Louisianians descended from the French Acadians of Canada are also Creoles in a strict sense, and there are many historical examples of people of full European ancestry and with Acadian surnames, such as the influential Alexandre and Alfred Mouton, being explicitly described as "Creoles." Today, however, the descendants of the Acadians are more commonly referred to as, and identify as, 'Cajuns'—a derivation of the word Acadian, indicating French Canadian settlers as ancestors. The distinction between "Cajuns" and "Creoles" is stronger today than it was in the past because American racial ideologies have strongly influenced the meaning of the word "Creole" to the extent that there is no longer unanimous agreement among Louisianians on the word's precise definition. Today, many assume that any francophone person of European descent is Cajun and any francophone of African descent is Creole—a false assumption that would not have been recognized in the nineteenth century. Some assert that "Creole" refers to aristocratic urbanites whereas "Cajuns" are agrarian members of the francophone working class, but this is another relatively recent distinction. Creoles may be of any race and live in any area, rural or urban. The Creole culture of Southwest Louisiana is thus more similar to the culture dominant in Acadiana than it is to the Creole culture of New Orleans. Though the land areas overlap around New Orleans and down river, Cajun/Creole culture and language extend westward all along the southern coast of Louisiana, concentrating in areas southwest of New Orleans around Lafayette, and as far as Crowley, Abbeville, and into the rice belt of Louisiana nearer Lake Charles and the Texas border.
File:Free Woman of Color with daughter NOLA Collage.jpg|thumb|Free woman of color with mixed-race daughter; late 18th-century collage painting, New Orleans
Louisiana Creoles historically spoke a variety of languages; today, the most prominent include Louisiana French and Louisiana Creole. Spoken creole is dying with continued 'Americanization' in the area. Most remaining Creole lexemes have drifted into popular culture. Traditional creole is spoken among those families determined to keep the language alive or in regions below New Orleans around St. James and St. John Parishes where German immigrants originally settled and cultivated the land, keeping the ill-equipped French Colonists from starvation during the Colonial Period and adopting commonly spoken French and creole as a language of trade.
Creoles are largely Roman Catholic and influenced by traditional French and Spanish culture left from the first Colonial Period, officially beginning in 1722 with the arrival of the Ursuline Nuns, who were preceded by another order, the sisters of the Sacred Heart, with whom they lived until their first convent could be built with monies from the French Crown.. The "fiery Latin temperament" described by early scholars on New Orleans culture made sweeping generalizations to accommodate Creoles of Spanish heritage as well as the original French. The mixed-race Creoles, descendants of mixing of European colonists, slaves, and Native Americans or sometimes Gens de Couleur, first appeared during the colonial periods with the arrival of slave populations. Most Creoles, regardless of race, generally consider themselves to share a collective culture. Non-Louisianans often fail to appreciate this and assume that all Creoles are of mixed race, which is historically inaccurate.
Louisiane Creoles were also referred to as criollos, a word from the Spanish language meaning "created" and used in the post-French governance period to distinguish the two groups of New Orleans area and down river Creoles. Both mixed race and European Creole groups share many traditions and language, but their socio-economic roots differed in the original period of Louisiana history. Actually, the French word Créole is derived from the Portuguese word Crioulo, which described people born in the Americas as opposed to Spain.
The term is often used to mean simply "pertaining to the New Orleans area," but this, too, is not historically accurate. People all across the Louisiana territory, including the pays des Illinois, identified as Creoles, as evidenced by the continued existence of the term Créole in the critically endangered Missouri French.