Categories: Discrimination & Prejudice, Economy, Genealogy, History, Identity, Language, Law, Migrations

Since 1800, the United States federal government has mandated census demographics every ten years. Louisiana became a US territory in 1803, and remained so until 1812 when it officially entered the union of states.

The first American census in Louisiana was in 1810. Like all censuses, the 1810 one gives us a window into the demographics of Louisiana territorial counties and by extension, an understanding of the cultures at play in the development of local culture. 

Atacapas County was composed of the entire region known in the colonial period as the Attakapas Trading Post and Military District. It included present-day civil parishes of St. Martin, Iberia, St. Mary, Lafayette, Vermilion, and part of Cameron. St. Martinville was the colonial district seat, and it continued to serve that role during the American territorial period. Église Saint-Martin – now known as St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church – was the only Catholic church in the county in 1810. 

That year, census marshals enumerated 1,547 free persons and 1,834 slaves. Among the free inhabitants enumerated, 49% (155) owned slaves, and roughly half of those owners spoke French, Kouri-Vini, or/and Spanish.¹For more details on the 1810 census demographics at the Atacapas County, see http://www.mylhcv.com/1810-us-census-atacapas-county-compilation-annotation/

In total, there were 3,381 persons (free and slave) living in the Atacapas County in that census year. Fifty-six percent were slaves*. We know from succession records, newspapers, Catholic parochial, and other civil, religious, and popular records, that those slaves provided the labor for the region’s economic output (especially in sugar cane cultivation). Historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s groundbreaking work in 1995, shows that those slaves, overwhelmingly Louisiana Creoles (LC), with large numbers of Congos and increasingly Americans from the eastern seaboard, grew many of the vegetables and fruit that went into local food consumption, cooked food for the minority of slave holders, made and sold artisanal work, and openly sang and performed their respective and amalgamated cultural lore and music at Congo Square in New Orleans and in front of Église Saint-Martin on Sundays. They also gave Creole Louisiana its own indigenous language, Kouri-Vini, which had been more or less a lingua franca since the late first French colonial period.²Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1995). See also Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Midlo Hall and other historians demonstrate that slaves were not simply unnamed machines without identities, cultures, ethnicities, and memory, they were integral in the development of Louisiana Creole culture, identity which they shared with local “whites.” Their culinary imprint remains inextricable from Louisiana Creole cuisine in dishes like gumbo and okra. Their influence linguistically continues to be part and parcel of Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French both lexically, phonetically and morphologically. I infer in my academic work how those slaves and their descendants share genealogy and community with Acadians and their Louisiana Creole descendants.  The musical output people already know, present in Cajun, Zydeco and Jazz. In short, there was no point in the development of south Louisiana when slaves were not present, and since the early French colonial period, long before Acadians arrived in Louisiana, and even after, slaves represented a majority of the local population in districts/counties, with rare exceptions.

On August 13, two days ago, the Lafayette-based KATC news station opened a can of worms when it presented on Facebook a proposal and research of Dr. Rick Swanson, a professor at UL Lafayette. Swanson questioned the representativeness of the flag of Acadiana, adopted by the Louisiana Legislature in 1974. The heritage flag, designed by southwest Louisiana native Thomas J. Arceneaux, features 3 sections, one for Spanish Louisiana (the gold tower of Castille and Leon on red background), the second for French Louisiana (the 3 white fleurs de lys on blue background), and the last for Acadians (the gold star on white background). These elements were designed to represent the genealogical and cultural foundations of the 22 civil parishes recognized in 1971 by the Louisiana Legislature as “Acadiana.”

Swanson wonders whether the flag is a fair representative of the culture and genealogy of the region, as it excludes the cultures and genealogies of the slaves who, as we have seen above, have represented a majority of the local population since the colonial period. As a regional heritage flag, he proposed a simple change like changing the color of the star from gold to green, which is featured on the Senegalese national flag. Senegal seems like a good candidate, since Midlo Hall’s scholarship shows that Senegambians represented a majority of the slaves in Louisiana during the first French colonial period.

This proposal elicited a visceral reaction among local Cajuns, Cajunists (Cajun nationalists), and, it must be said, by many Louisiana Creoles. Their grievances tend to focus on 3 key issues: one, that the flag of Acadiana flag represents the Acadians and their descendants in Louisiana; two, that Acadians predate slavery in Louisiana; and three, that the Louisiana Creole flag, designed by Pete Bergéron in 1987, already includes African elements, in addition to the French and Spanish bits. As the flag, for many of the opponents, is the Acadian flag, upset Cajuns argue that changing the flag means rewriting Acadian history and effacing it and Acadians. 

Let’s unpack each of these grievances. First, there is an Acadian flag. It was adopted in 1884 at the second Acadian convention in Mascouche, Prince Edward Island, Canada. It looks identical to the French national tricolor, except it features a gold star on the left blue band called the stella martis, which the 19th century Acadians saw as supplicating guidance from the Virgin Mary, patron saint of the Acadians. Louisianians were not involved in the conception of the Acadian flag. Louisiana sent no delegation to that second convention, or to the first, either. Gallicité (Frenchness) is the single feature on the flag, in honor of the Acadians being overwhelmingly of French descent. The Acadian flag is conceptually, nationally, and culturally not the same flag as the flag of Acadiana. But Louisianians have conflated the two flags, and that conflation goes all the way to official bodies like tourism bureaux in Louisiana, the Canadian Broadcast Company (CBC) and innumerable popular websites on both sides of the Canado-American border. Part of this confusion stems from Cajun and Acadian being used synonymously today in Louisiana, and somewhat in Canada. This latter point requires no link or citation, because it is just common knowledge now.

The idea in popular memory is that Acadians established Louisiana. Louisiana’s francophone history begins in 1765 for many ordinary Louisianians, and because tourism bureaux fall short of representing actual Louisiana history, this became common sense for anyone visiting Louisiana as a tourist, too. This could not be further from the truth. I will show this in a separate post. But briefly, French language in Louisiana began in 1684 when my ancestor, Robert Talon, was born aboard a ship to a recently widowed Quebecer mother. His father had voyaged down the Mississippi with representatives of the French crown to open trade and claim some land along the way. Permanent settlement did not begin until 1699, however, and it accelerated after the founding of New Orleans in 1718. That year was when the official slave trade began, also. By the time the first group of Acadians arrived in New Orleans, in 1765, Louisiana already had a population of about 20,000, and this increased to about 40,000 by 1790, a couple years after the last of the 2,000 Acadians resettled in Louisiana. 

Second, if the flag represents Acadians and their descendants in Louisiana, as commenters insist on KATC’s Facebook post, and those descendants include literally thousands of people of color (black, mixed, and Native American), which I show in my own work – but it’s also everywhere – then why is their no representation of the additional genealogies those people brought to the table in the flag? Why include Spanish and French colonial symbolism if the flag is merely representative of Acadians in Louisiana and their descendants (who are apparently “pure” Acadians)? In other words, there is a conscious exclusion of certain elements that Cajuns, Cajunists, and some Louisiana Creoles, disclaim. It just so happens that all elements excluded would represent African and Native American peoples.³For descendants of color of Acadian descent, see the Louisiana Mixed Marriages Index and the Facebook group People of Color of Acadian Descent.

Finally, Acadians are not Louisianians. There were Acadians who ended up in Spanish colonial Louisiana, but they were dead by 1840-1850. Acadian variety of French is not Louisiana French. Acadian cuisine is not Louisiana Creole aka Cajun cuisine. Louisiana Creole architecture, aka Acadian houses, is not Acadian architecture. Acadian identity is as much linguistic as it is genealogical, unlike Cajun identity, which is based on an idea of a bucolic marginalized past for whites-only, expressed in English.⁴Thomas A. Klingler, “How Much Acadian is there in Cajun?,” in Ursula Mathia-Moser and Günter Bischoff, Acadians and Cajuns. The Politics and Culture of French Minorities in North America (Innsbruck, Austria: Innsbruck University Press, 1996): 91-103.

All this considered, the incoherence of the entire saga becomes apparent. It simply makes no historical, genealogical, or cultural sense. Culture is a loaded word, and in the United States “culture” is often synonymized with race. In the context, the grouping of culture/race does make sense, as Cajunité is a white-racialized reality. Of course, Cajunists will say that Cajunité has nothing to do with race; but they are the first to bark when proposals like Swanson’s come to the table. They’re happy to “celebrate” nonwhiteness at Zydecoes and other black-racialized local Louisiana Creole-labeled events. Conversely, they are the last to purchase Bergéron’s Creole flag, but are quite happy to celebrate the flag and Louisiana Creoles  as separate from “their” [Cajun] world.

As I have made clear in numerous articles, ordinary Cajuns understand the issues I raise, including the genealogy, history, and cultural sphere we all  share. They routinely inbox this to me but fear saying so publicly so as to avoid being ostracized as “supporting Negroes” (in the way that Midlo Hall describes her parents’ experience in Jim Crow New Orleans).

That social otherness in the United States is the driving force behind the very reason most people in the United States would prefer being labeled white instead of black, Hispanic, or Arab. It is the reason Cajun identity emerged in post-Vietnam Louisiana, also. Separate but equal. Similar but not the same. Rustic gumbo versus tomatoes in gumbo. Bourgeois versus poor. City versus Country. First cousins but not siblings. It is why Pierre Caliste Landry is presented as a black man or a Louisiana Creole rather than a Cajun; it is why Cajuns, Cajunists and Acadians do not claim him as one of “them.” Too close to the coloreds, and that still is demonstrably unacceptable in America in 2018.

In closing, I want to make clear that I do not support heritage flags, because they always will exclude some components, and those components depend on the prevailing received ideas of each generation rallying behind the heritage flag. I do, however, continue to believe that our historic Creole identity is more inclusive (even if it was indirectly rebranded as nonwhite in the 20th century during Jim Crow), placing primacy on local based culture, people, and history cohering around Louisiana’s 3 Latin-based languages (French, Kouri-Vini, Spanish) and Roman Catholicism.

– Christophe Landry