Acadians Erotic

Acadians are a French-speaking people of Canada's Atlantic coast whose identity was hammered into shape by a single catastrophe. Their ancestors came mostly from western France in the 1600s and settled around Port-Royal and the tidal marshes of the Bay of Fundy. There they did something unusual for colonists: rather than clear forest, they built earthen dikes fitted with wooden sluices called aboiteaux, holding back some of the highest tides on earth to farm the salt meadows behind them. Within a few generations they thought of themselves not as French settlers but as Acadians, with their own speech, tight family networks and close ties to their Mi'kmaq neighbors. That identity was tested once Britain took the mainland in 1713. Acadians tried to stay neutral between two empires and refused an unconditional oath of allegiance, and in 1755 British colonial authorities began deporting them. Over the next several years more than ten thousand people were put on ships and scattered through the Anglo-American colonies, England and France; families were split, and many died at sea or in exile. Acadians call it le Grand Dérangement. Some found their way back and rebuilt on thinner land in northeastern New Brunswick, western Prince Edward Island, the Magdalen Islands and corners of Nova Scotia. Others reached Louisiana, where their descendants became the Cajuns.

The language is Acadian French, a Romance tongue that keeps features of seventeenth-century western French speech that set it apart from both modern French and Quebec French, and around Moncton it mixes freely with English in a vernacular called Chiac. French rights here were fought for rather than handed down: New Brunswick became Canada's only officially bilingual province in 1969, and the Université de Moncton anchors Acadian intellectual life. Catholicism runs deep, long carried through the parish, the school and the convent, and it shaped the national symbols chosen in the 1880s: a French tricolor marked with a gold star for the Virgin Mary, and August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, as National Acadian Day. That day now brings the tintamarre, a street procession where people bang pots, blow horns and make as much racket as they can, a loud reminder that a people meant to vanish did not. Memory lives in the kitchen too, in grated-potato dishes like râpure and poutine râpée, and in fishing towns such as Caraquet and Shippagan that still work the Gulf of St. Lawrence for lobster and snow crab.