Categories: History, Identity, Language, Maps

In April, we began placing Creoles and Francophones on the world, North American, United States, and Louisiana maps. A lack of resources on these corners of the Latin world failed to appear in any public market, and LHCV is committed to providing resources to become acquainted with, and also showcase these corners of the globe.

Maps are inherently political. We knew full well that people would question the content of our maps, a reason we based the regions in question on primary research. I wanted to flesh out some of our decisions, here.

The colonial era map of Louisiana takes present-day political borders of the state of Louisiana, with its civil parishes, and place them in the context of the trading posts and military districts from the French and Spanish colonial periods. Some folks knowledgeable about colonial Louisiana history have every right to call into question the borders we elected to use on the map. Maps from the colonial, even early national period, were imprecise because cartography was not as advanced as it is today. There was also the issue of neutral ground (like the area along the Sabine River, with Texas and Louisiana on opposite banks of the river), “disputed” areas, and posts/districts that traversed modern civil parish borders in complex ways over time. This inevitably makes it difficult for scholars today to map out these jurisdictions with any measure of precision. The continued changes also lead to confusion when displayed all on one map. So, our map gives the public a notion of the general areas of the colonial-era posts/districts. We are aware, for instance, that the Attakapas District cut a portion of Calcasieu and Cameron civil parishes, extending close to the border of Spanish Texas. Similarly, Donaldsonville served as the post for the Lafourche-des-Chétimachas, and is in present day lower Ascension Parish. Crucially, this map is not a map of Indian communities. Many of the colonial era trading posts and military districts were named for natives who were indigenous to the area. But this should not be understood as representing those communities. Many different Natives lived in all of these regions, whose names were not used for the official names of those civil and ecclesiastic jurisdictions.

The Map of the Francophone World was deliberately arranged in such a way to highlight areas where the French language emerged as a primary or indigenous language. Since so little is understood about Francophone North America, exception to Quebec, we consciously identified American states formerly part of colonial Louisiana, where French was spoken for some time. For American states, we use the Louisiana French names for those states, not France French. So, states named for Native American populations, like Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, in Louisiana French require a plural article, yielding Les Alibamons, Les Arcs, Les Missouris (although the latter is sometimes used with the singular article le). It was also important to show where Francophone communities emerged in colonial New England (e.g. Maine), which were sustained over time by more recent migrations from Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many of these Francophone communities no longer exist, but once did until the 20th century in varying degrees. That very recent, deeply rooted Francophone experience has survived in different ways in the communities since, so we point those out on the map in lime green. The same is true for the Canadian far-west, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, where small pockets of Francophones still exist (highlighted in tangerine). The regions in green represent more recent migrations of Francophone communities there. The group of nations in yellow are those whose governments are Francophile, with elite citizens who learn and speak French. Their governments belong to one or both of the most economically important global Francophone organizations, Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie (APF) and Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF). Louisiana has belonged to APF as an observer and associate since 1970, and efforts led by our colleague, Scott TILTON, are underway for her to become a member of OIF. The latter organizations have published maps of their members, but their member rosters do not include all Francophone regions of the world. This map therefore combines their maps with all regions where French has been spoken indigenously throughout the world by communities.¹For Francophone New England, see David Vermette’s A Distinct Alien Race … (Baraka Books, 2018). Retired Geographer Dean Louder, of the Université Laval, now deceased, published a bit on Francophone Upper Louisiana (the Great Plaines and Missouri) in his academic work, and blog. The blog can be accessed here.

For the Map of the Creole-speaking World, we took a stand in choosing how and who we mapped. Since the 1970s, western linguists (virtually all white) have set out to map out a Creolophone world. They have based their analysis, and mapping, on (always) peoples of color from various post-colonial societies in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia/Oceania. They claim that all these societies share common linguistic properties and colonial contact between Europeans and other colonizers, resulting in new language forms that are based in part on the language of the colonizer, and in part on that of the subjugated or colonized. These new linguistic forms, creolists (linguists specialized in Creole languages) have argued, constitute Creole languages. In the process, they have sometimes encouraged locals to see their language as Creoles, and other times encouraged those locals to identify as Creoles. We see this in Australia (among some Aborigines), Belize, Jamaica, and beyond. It is our position that subjectivity has played the most prominent role in their work. For instance, in all of these communities, white-identified locals speak the same language form, but they are not usually invited to the Creole table; only the nonwhite-identified are. Second, in these regions, locals have not historically self-identified as Creoles, and likewise have not identified their language as Creole. It was through the work of missionary linguists that have re-articulated and categorized their speech form as Creole. In places like Louisiana, Cuba, Haiti, the French Antilles, French Guyana, Colombia, Venezuela, the Mascarene Islands, and elsewhere, Creole identity is as deeply rooted as some of the local people are, spoken not only by peoples of color, but also by local whites, and they have historically also referred to their language as Creole. So, the identity and language share a key relationship in the colonial and post-colonial Latin world. They do not in other colonial and post-colonial worlds. Our map therefore, only presents Romance Creoles, languages deriving lexically in large part from Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese). If modern creolists are right in their observations, then all natural human languages are Creole languages, including all European languages. In Creolizing the nonwhite postcolonial world, Créolité loses its indigenous historicity. We are not interested in reshaping the historic Creolophone world based on weak academic, colorist arguments.

Helping to bring Kouri-Vini into the modern era, equipping Kouri-Vini-speakers and learners with the tools to understand, visualize, and speak of the world using modern language, we also published a World Map in Kouri-Vini. Most modern nations and many US states have no name in Kouri-Vini; speakers will tend to use the English name, in its place. So, we used our resources of speakers to create Kouri-Vini names for them, based on the linguistic patterns in Kouri-Vini. World maps already exist in French and are readily available for purchase all over the internet.

The final map is a Map of Modern Louisiana. It is available in Kouri-Vini and in French. It includes all civil parishes in either of the two languages. We deliberately showcase Latin Louisiana, where the French, Kouri-Vini, and/or Spanish languages are spoken indigenously by our community, and where they once were. For Latin Louisiana parishes, which appear in hibiscus pink (on the KV map) or light blue (on the LF map), we go a step further by identifying all major cities, towns, and communities where either or all of the 3 Latin-based languages are spoken, or once were. We use the Louisiana French or Kouri-Vini names for those places, not the France French names, and superscripted the appropriate articles for those places (where applicable) to assist learners of either of the two languages. As is the case for U.S. states named for Indian populations, cities in Louisiana named for Indians require the masculine plural article les in LF, and the prefix o or oz in KV (e.g. Les Opélousas, Ozopélousas). We included the interstates in Louisiana, to help non-Louisianians better locate and visualize locations of the communities on the map.

Thus far, 2 schools and 3 businesses in Louisiana, and over 100 individuals have purchased the maps. We have conditional orders for several more schools, as well.

On the map, where we’re supposed to be.

– Christophe Landry