Categories: Cuisine, Discrimination & Prejudice, Genealogy, History, Identity, Language, Latinité, Migrations, Mythology, Religion, Slavery

In 2010, writing for the St. Martinville-based Teche News, Jim Bradshaw published an article entitled “When ‘Cajun’ Was a Fightin Word.” Jim eloquently took readers on a journey down memory lane, specifically when Cajun was not yet a form of self-identification in Louisiana.¹Jim Bradshaw, “When ‘Cajun’ was a fightin’ word,” Teche News, St. Martinville, La., 8 July 2010.

The article seems to no longer be available online. So, briefly, Bradshaw reminded us of the evolution of identity in our community, from a Latin-based local Creole identity, to a whitened ethnic Cajun one. People born up to the 1960s remember the transition well. Old timers, especially, once spoke about it openly, but now do so in closed quarters. Speaking openly about this evolution leads to questions that, for the last 30 years, members of our community who are white-identified tend to be extremely sensitive about. The implication in discussing it, is the fact that Cajunizing Louisiana is recent, and if that is true, then “what were we before Cajun” is the inevitable question.

Cécyle Trépanier, a now-retired Canadian geographer, in 1991, offered direct responses from the mouths of members of our community. One respondent, from Breaux Bridge, gawked in Louisiana French “on s’appelait des Créoles avant cette affaire de Cadjin” [We identified as Creoles before this Cajun mess]. Another respondent in her fieldwork, from Edgar (St. John the Baptist Parish) observed “Ils s’appellent des Cadjins mais c’est tous des Créoles” [They call themselves Cajuns but they’re all Creole].” Why the shift, and clear uneasiness about the new identity? Well, Trépanier concluded in that article, which grew from her research in the Projet Louisiane project, that, among other reasons, the Civil Rights movement, and the ethnicization movements of the 1960s-1990s nationwide had further bifurcated Louisiana Creoles into bipolar racialized identities. Cajun became the best option for those wishing to benefit from white America. So, race, front and center. This is why so many now-Cajun-identified Louisiana Creoles are so reluctant to speak about “that time when we were all just Creoles.” It means some relation to “black people” (those who continued self-identifying as Creole). God forbid!²Cécyle Trépanier, “The Cajunization of French Louisiana: Forging a Regional Identity,” The Geographical Journal 157, No. 2 (July 1991): 161-171.

I have no concerns about self-determination. I support self-determination where and when populations feel it necessary. But my support ends when populations with new identities continue to practice the same culture as their family they consciously chose to break away from, then claim that culture as “theirs.” This happens all the time: we see it in Anglo-America, for instance, between white-identified Anglos and their African American family, fussin’ and fightin’ over who holds rights to claim certain culinary traditions. The Louisiana context is a bit unique, since racial segregation took so long to penetrate the heart of our community: for well into the 20th century, our people lived on the same land, as neighbors, and had for generations and generations, and our Roman Catholic churches often continued to serve all of our community members, even if within the church spaces there was class and semi-race-based segregated seating. I say semi, because in the back of the church, poor whitened Creoles sat alongside colorized Creoles, and also received the sacraments after more privileged whitened Creoles who could pay for pew rental. Anglo-Americans have had segregated housing and religion as far back as the 1780s! Not quite the same story.

Today, I read an article in the Dailey Comet, a paper based in Lafourche Parish, which sought to chart the emergence of crawfish as a delicacy in our community. There were a few historical issues I had with the article. The one that made me bristle the most was referring to Acadians as Cajuns. It reminded me that, for years, I have seen this play out in Louisiana in my community and academic work. Not always by academic historians, but mostly by ordinary people from our community. Why?³Andrea Mujica, “How the Crawfish Became an Icon in Louisiana Cooking,” Daily Comet, 4 June 2018.

Here’s the thing. There is no available research, to my knowledge, showing that Acadians identified as Cajun leading to 1765. There is a preponderance of evidence that children of Acadians in Louisiana, and their descendants, from Calcasieu Parish in the west to St James Parish in the east, identified as Louisiana Creoles. Cajun is a new identity, one that, like Black and Hispanic, reappropriated a class slur into an identity from the 1960s onward. Cajuns do not eat Acadian food. Cajuns do not speak the same French as Acadians. Cajuns do not do most things like Acadians. In short, the Cajun experience is a uniquely Louisiana Creole experience. It is also uniquely American. Most Cajuns, if not all, have ancestors from all over the world, including some from Africa. A large number of Cajuns have no Acadian ancestors, at all. Cajunité has clung to the Acadian story as a way to whiten, and to distance from the Louisiana Creole experience, the only experience that Cajuns know. Cajun reality is not Acadian reality. One is a 20th century reality, the other a colonial and post-colonial Canadian experience.

Rebranding Acadians as Cajuns, for me, is imposing the Louisiana Creole experience onto people who never lived that experience. It’s imposing imagined realities onto Canadians who have their own unique journey … all the way up in Canada. It’s consciously omitting the most upsetting, shameful, and joyful aspects of our history in Louisiana with slavery, Jim Crow, genealogical and cultural cross-pollination with Africans and their descendants. It’s omitting the very “things” that make us unique in North America. It’s the easy way out. It’s also the cowardly way out. We can claim our Acadian cousins in Canada (as we should), but if we claim one group (who never held a numerical dominance in colonial Louisiana, with the rare exception of St James Parish), then we should claim them all, including Sénégals, Wolofs, Bambara, Fulani, Fon, Kisi, and others. The latter have had just as much cultural and genealogical input into our blueprint as Acadians, if not more. Most importantly, we are not them, and they are not us. We’ve enough very close kin right next door, up the street, across the bayou, and on 23andme and Ancestry.com, that we share most in common with, that we desperately need to rediscover, reclaim, and with whom we need to continue working to forge a more perfect union, as we once had. If it was good enough for our family to do for 200 years, it is well worth revisiting and reintegrating today.

– Christophe Landry