This wealthy old man was the father of “Greenwood LaFlore” who had partnered with Andrew Jackson to remove the Choctaw (of whom he had been an official chief and Congressional representative) to Oklahoma, and from which occurred the tragic “Trail of Tears” fiasco of American history; and to which man, the LaFleurs of Louisiana and Mississippi have historical and, obviously, Creole/Métis cultural ties.
They, along with their cousins from across the former Louisiana Purchase territory, converged to what is now Louisiana, the American State since 1812, at the end of the Seven Years War (French-Indian War against the British) in 1763; complete with a quasi-national Creole identity and shared non-French culture whose language and traditions would grow into a diverse and multi-ethnic North American Creole (or “locally-born/created) culture.1See the research of Dr. Carl Ekberg regarding the early ethnic population of the early Louisiana Purchase Territory.
Eventually, this North American Louisiana Creole culture would encompass the historical West African, Spanish-Cuban-Mexican and later German, Italian and Irish ethnic groups; groups all part of Louisiana’s consecutive cultural history, and whose cultural influences are so clearly evident in our culinary traditions.
The Amerindians, the Africans and the Spanish very evidently left their cultural fingerprints upon our two kindred linguistic traditions.
This particular cultural blending or creolization is unknown in Acadie, France, Africa, Spain or Mexico!
So, along with André Pénicaut, Bienville and Iberville and a few other Louisiana French colonial writers, Captain Jean Bernard Bossu provides us with another unexpected, but rich source of historical information which confirms our uniquely Louisiana-based and multi-ethnic creole cultural roots and unique evolution far beyond the mass marketed misinformation which reduces Louisiana’s larger book of history to a mythic three-page “Acadian-based” fable which cannot explain our diversity, nor the complexity of our rich historical, cultural and linguistic reality.
The great French colonial-era writers tell us a very different history from that of Dudley LeBlanc and Lafayette, Louisiana’s Cajun “storytellers.”
Copyright © 2016 John Lafleur II
References
| 1. | ↑ | See the research of Dr. Carl Ekberg regarding the early ethnic population of the early Louisiana Purchase Territory. |