Categories: Discrimination & Prejudice, History, Identity, Language, Migrations, Mythology, Native Americans, Slavery

The French and Indian War left many populations beset with difficulties. One of those populations lived in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The BROUSSARD dit Beausoleil and THIBAUDAU families had done well for themselves … so much so that they obtained a concession of land, owned mills, and Joseph BROUSSARD had risen to the ranks of militia captain of the community he came to lead on the Petitcodiac River. As retired historian Carl Brasseaux shows, Joseph had for years “defended Acadian homes against British incursions,” and “frequently harassed British patrols in the eastern Chignecto area.” When in 1764 local Brits and Anglo-Canadians rounded up or arrested Acadians, Joseph and the 600 Acadians he led, arranged for “vessels at their own expense,” ultimately ending up on the shores of Bayou Têche in Spring 1765. Perhaps more fortunate than their Acadian counterparts, the Broussard group arrived in Spanish New Orleans on a ship they funded and unsurprisingly with money to exchange for local currency (see image 2 below), testament of the mobility and prominence they had enjoyed in French Acadia and British Nova Scotia. Joseph did not live long enough to witness it, but his community on Bayou Têche quickly recovered from their displacement, with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren dying extremely well-off in south Louisiana. If his immediate descendants remembered him in south Louisiana, they rarely wrote about it in local papers before 1900.¹Warren A. Perrin, Acadian Redemption: From Beausoleil Broussard to the Queen’s Royal Proclamation (Andrepont Publishing, 2005), xiii, xv, 54; Carl A. Brasseaux, The Founding of New Acadia: the Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiane, 1765-1803 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1987), 28, 34, 102 n 17.

In 20^th century southwest Louisiana, Anglo-American Susan Walker Anding, a well known suffragist and activist from Opélousas, resurrected and commodified the dreamy Acadian story as imagined by Longfellow, and brought it to a national audience. Dudley Joseph Leblanc, from the area around Lake Peigneur in Iberia/Vermilion Parish, joined her. They took advantage of bourgeois white America’s hopes to stymie the effects of post-World War One America, when white women and Native Americans were enfranchized, began working on their own accord, and wearing clothing considered much too revealing for traditional Protestant American values. As a remedy to this progress, bourgeois white Americans concocted idyllic views of the past, when women were subservient to men, at home, and at the loom, in long, simple clothing. Longfellow’s 1847 epic poem, Evangeline, and Susan’s stunt work, hit right at home, and Dudley “authenticated” the Acadian story as a “direct descendant of René Leblanc,” who appears in Longfellow’s poem.²Christophe Landry, “A Creole Melting Pot: the Politics of Language, Race, and Identity in southwest Louisiana, 1918-45,” doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2016, pp. 58-101.

By the 1980s, Cajunists revived Joseph BROUSSARD dit Beausoleil’s name and constructed a particular memory of him that goes something like this: the 1960s and 1970s saw a sea change in attitudes across the United States. It was, for all intents and purposes, a second emancipatory era, when Jim Crow traditions legally fell and white-identified American citizens ran for the door to distance themselves from the role they had played in those traditions. They created ethnic movements, where they sought to redefine themselves as non-Anglo while still benefitting from the privileges that whiteness offered. They were “ethnic” whites. From this, we get the hyphenated-American identities that persist today – Irish-American, German-American, French-American, and so on. In so doing, they claimed that they came from marginalized groups like Negroes/Coloreds/Black people, and Anglos had also discriminated against them. Therefore, Black people could not accuse them of racism. In addition, they could prove their unangloness by using certain stock phrases from their community’s heritage languages, cooking and conducting themselves in a manner different from Americans (read: Anglo-Americans). Since Anglo-America readily consumed this brand of exotic whiteness, in grocery stores, festivals, and museums, ethnic whites escaped Anglo-America’s continued suspicion and fear of The Other. Rule of thumb: if you or things you do are commodifiable in America, you are accepted.

The Cajun identity and narrative emerged in this context, as did the folk-heroized Beausoleil. As Cajunists (Cajun nationalists) began to penetrate America’s ethnic revival with music, food and reconstructed memory, inside and outside of Louisiana, a small number attempted to re-gallicize south Louisiana Creoles. Entrenched classism, racism, and xenophobia in our community impaired the re-gallicization movement, however. In the end, food, music and re-articulated memory prevailed, with only shimmers of the language recovery project that James Domengeaux, James Broussard, Jules Daigle, and others, had envisioned. We can resist American assimilation by continuing to play Cajun music, cook Cajun food and refer to one another as shæ/cher. All this considered, it makes sense that Beausoleil would be elevated to the most important figure in the Cajun naissance …  superficially, anyways.

Beneath the surface, there is a problem. Most of the Beausoleilists today speak English and only English and do not fight for French-language public schooling in Louisiana for their children. They parade massive American flags on their vehicles and in their yards, and many are staunch Confederates. They also tend to be xenophobic.  Their cultural and identity allegiance is about as distant from Beausoleil’s as they come: the very flags, people and language they seek to belong to the most are the ones that Joseph fought against for decades in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. There are more than just a few of them roaming about in Louisiana, also. The irony. And therein lies the difference between Acadians and Cajunists/Beausoleilists: the former speak French and their identity is inextricably linked to resisting anglicization; the latter speaks English only, resist speaking French and also resist assimilating peoples of color or being assimilated by them.³Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: an Eighteenth Century History (Oxford University Press, 2012), 55.

Cajunists and Beausoleilists do not represent a plurality in our community. There are a large number of Cajuns (who I distinguish from the former 2) who get it, who have dignity, respect, and kindness in their hearts. But they sit back and let a few loud members of our community distort our history and Beausoleil’s experience and legacy.

President Teddy Roosevelt would have been proud of Cajunists and Beausoleilists, since their identity and attitudes fall squarely in line with his idea of “melting pot America.” How would the actual Beausoleil react if he were alive today?

– Christophe Landry