Houma on Acadien Reveil

Cast off. Displaced. Uprooted. Deported. Exiled. Eradicated. Remembered.

The plight of Acadians is very much intertwined in the heritage and culture in the Bayou Region, even if some of the indicators no longer shine as brightly among its communities and continue to diminish.

A roaming band of Acadians, American, Canadian and European in nationalities, will trek across the southern quarter of the state next week to reignite awareness and celebrate their heritage as part of the 2011 Grand Reveil Acadien (GRA), or Great Acadian Awakening.

The gathering is not only an organized effort to raise Acadian awareness through celebration of contemporary lifestyle and inherited culture, but it is simultaneously a remembrance of lost lives and an exultation of ancestors’ survival, its organizers say.

Organized by Louisiane-Acadie, the event begins Friday with registration in New Orleans. The group will then embark on 10 days of tours and ceremonies across the state, stopping in Houma, Thibodaux, Lake Charles and Lafayette.

Brenda Comeaux Trahan is the president of programming for the 2011 GRA and a member of Louisiane-Acadie, over which her husband presides. An Acadian who has traced her heritage back to the first Comeaux on record, Trahan made the pilgrimage to New Brunswick’s Acadian Peninsula for the Acadian World Congress in 2004 and returned with pleasant surprise over how immersed the Canadians are in their heritage.

“We were amazed to see that they fought to keep their French language and no one speaks English there,” Trahan said. “It is a total, total French area. It was unbelievable and very emotional to see.

“What it took was a lot of work, and they did it. We hope our Acadian people, Cajun people, can look at something like that and come back and say, ‘Well, they fought and they fought for a long time. It’s time we wake up and start fighting as well.'”

The GRA won’t have the same gravity as the every-five-year World Congress, where Acadians converge on a location meaningful to their history (Louisiana hosted the ’99 event) and hold music concerts and academic conferences, in which Acadian social issues are debated.

But it is expected to draw at least two to three busloads alone for the Houma event, according to Sharon Alford, the Acadian executive director of the Houma Area Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. The international visitors and anyone else, regardless of heritage, who choose to attend will see the unveiling of a significant monument in Houma recognizing Cajun-ancestral plight, the location of which was determined by an international Acadian committee.

The Acadians are staking claim to their territory, their most trafficked areas after banishment from Nova Scotia, and Houma, Louisiana, has drawn the honor of being the first United States (and 10th worldwide) location, something Alford considers symbolic in developing Acadian traditions in the area.

“It’s something that the Canadians take very seriously,” Alford said. “This is very sacred to them and very solemn, because this is their history and this is their story. What we’re trying to do is introduce that same history here and build the same type of interest in it.

“I think many of us have always called ourselves Cajuns, but not all of us know the history involved and can really trace their Acadian roots and how our ancestors landed here in Louisiana.”

Louisiana wasn’t a major migrant destination during deportation, but Acadian families later moved to the Bayou Region when the Spanish government ruled the area. The Acadian designation has changed to Cajun and some traditions have evolved over time, but there remains a common thread between local people and the tourists who are preparing to come.

“It’s a sad thing, and I think there was such a trauma that occurred for the Acadian people that if anybody says, ‘I’m Acadian,’ it is an automatic bond,” Trahan said. “You don’t have to say anything more, because I believe the Deportation Pain lives in the cells and in the soul of the nation of Acadians.

“You can invite those people into your home and know that you are safe and know that they would appreciate who you are. It’s an amazing sense.”

Historians squabble over the details of the Acadian Deportation, the Grand Derangement. Some argue that it was religious and others contend possession of property was at the core. One of the uncontested details is the pride of Acadians, their refusal to sign a waiver of rights to a string of England’s governors that culminated in their banishment, which began in 1755.

In regard to the intensity of the event, one side will say it was de facto genocide, with about 10,000 people of threaded beliefs, traditions and mannerisms cast into the abyss of unknown, some of them sinking in faulty ships beneath the Atlantic Ocean and others dying of disease or famine in unfamiliar locations. The contrasting belief is the Grand Derangement was a tragic but typical-of-the-times deportation.

Like all that is modern, the central facts concerning Deportation, separation, homelessness, death, are understood while circumstances are embellished and massaged to suit one’s viewpoint. Whatever the details or interpretations of the event, almost frivolous considering the banishment’s truths, the fracturing of a civilized, successful colony continues to reverberate.

A unified settlement only exists now as a starting point, a blissful thought etched into consciousness that is 256 years detached from reality, the harshest of which indicates more dilution, further widening of the gap between people forever linked and persistently apart.

Time can only grow the fissure between the beginning, or end, and the present, and unawareness among the living threatens to expedite this process. It is with this forever in the minds of breathing Acadians, along with an authentic appreciation of their ancestors’ fraught livelihoods and a determination to preserve their customs that launches a medley of emotions whenever the “distant cousins” assemble.

“When you step out into the street and see the people in these areas, you start to see family resemblances, and you start to believe that you recognize people, that you know these people,” Alford said. “When you start to meet them, it’s like having another family member because it becomes so apparent that their values and interests are the same as ours, and there really is a tremendous shared heritage that you can feel, that you can actually feel.”

The scattering of the Acadian population has weakened the infrastructure of their culture, the French language, Acadian-Cajun music, the food and the lifestyle. It’s not absent, organizers say, but it is weakened and there is a fear that it will continue to subside.

“The further north (Cajuns) move, the less amount of French they’re going to speak,” said Ray Trahan, president of the GRA executive board and Louisiane-Acadie. “Sooner or later, they are going to be speaking more English than French. Therefore their grandchildren will grow up speaking more English than French; so we’re, eventually, whether we know it are not, are losing our French language.”

The Council for the Development of French in Louisiana was established in 1968 by the state legislature to “do any and all things necessary to accomplish the development, utilization, and preservation of the French language as found in Louisiana for the cultural, economic and touristic benefit of the state.”

CODOFIL holds several monthly sessions across the state to perpetuate the French language, including French table classes in Terrebonne and Lafourche (see sidebar).

While the Great Acadian Awakening of 2011 is geared to increase awareness inside state lines of the international population, it also intends to introduce visitors to Cajun variations and shed light on threats that could spread the population out even more.

One such threat is coastal erosion. As the southernmost reaches of the state disappear into the Gulf of Mexico, the population is shifting farther north and further splitting inherited lifestyles

Thomas Michot, a biology professor at the University of Louisiana Lafayette, in conjunction with Nicholls State University and the Barataria Terrebonne Natural Estuary Program, is directing GRA participation in a coastal restoration effort.

Locals and visitors of all ages are being invited to participate. Online registration at www.gra2011.org is required, and participation is free. Participants will depart from the Houma-Terrebonne Civic Center at 7 a.m. Monday morning and go to Grand Isle State Park to plant smooth cord grass and conduct a beach sweep.

Ray Trahan said a national Canadian journalist from Halifax would travel with the GRA and he believes the coastline’s omnipresent threat could make an impression among the Canadian population.

Michot said nearly 50 people have already signed up for the event, which aims to merge wetlands and cultural issues.

“It’s also tying in the wetlands issues with our cultural issues,” Michot said. “A lot of people, they’ve heard little things about our coastal wetlands and that we’re having some issues and that we’re losing some wetlands, but they don’t really understand that much about it.”

Mardi Gras is a French-based tradition not in jeopardy of disappearing in the Tri-parishes due to its widespread appeal, but Brenda Trahan said Acadians in Canada celebrate in similar fashion multiple times each year, including once at mid-Lent and other festivals that sprung from Acadians begging for food in their new homelands, quasi-declarations of freedom.

“Walking in the streets and shouting,” Trahan said. “We don’t have to be quiet anymore. We’re not afraid of anything. We’ve survived where the British wanted to get rid of us. We survived, and we actually can now profess it as loud as we want.”

The celebrations are but a part of Acadian symbolism. One of the most prominent in its tug on the Acadian heartstrings is the Deportation Cross. Erected in 1929 at the site of embarkation in Nova Scotia, the cross marks the spot where thousands of Acadians waited for their banishment.

Under the direction of the Societe Nationale de l’Acadie (SNA), replicas of the cross are being incorporated into monuments erected at 37 locations around the world where deported Acadians traversed.

The first such monument to be unveiled in the United States will be blessed at 11 a.m. Saturday at Houma’s Bayou Terrebonne Waterlife Museum.

The monument is an ode to the journey that separated people from the only land they’d known, in some cases splitting families apart, and scattered neighbors from Maine to Louisiana and into Europe. Its design, like the GRA celebration, incorporates various symbols in its aim to serve as a gathering site for the fluent and a preservation of history for unknowing and future generations.

A 12-foot bronze reproduction of the original Deportation Cross will emerge from a five-sided base resting on a star. Plaques will adorn the base’s five sides, and, in both English and French, will outline the Grand D/rangement and its local significance. Atop the base, a circular map of the Atlantic will depict the exiled Acadians’ destinations.

Nine more locations are planned in the U.S.; at least 13 will be unveiled in Atlantic Canada; five more in France and England; five in Quebec and four in the Caribbean.

The 37 monuments, if erected as planned, will create a trail of attractions.

“Houma having the first full monument in the United States, it will be a part of pilgrimage that will bring people from all over the world,” Trahan said. “The significance of tourism coming there is really strong.”

Although Lafayette is known as the state’s Cajun capital, Houma is a fitting location for the state’s monument because it is has an extensive Acadian history, said Tim Hebert, a local Acadian-Cajun genealogist and the author of a free online database of more than 100,000 Acadian ancestors.

Hebert said Houma is a centralized area in the Terrebonne where the bayous along which Acadians settled in the 1800s converge. He also pointed out that downtown Houma and the Waterlife museum were built on land granted to an Acadian and legislation to spilt Terrebonne from Lafourche Parish was authored by an Acadian legislator.

“It’s not very Cajun when you look at it on the surface, but it’s more like Houma represents the center of all these bayous that go up and down the parish,” Hebert said.

Tim Hebert will speak at the unveiling and again at the Civic Center at 1 p.m. Stephen White, a renowned genealogist at Moncton University in New Brunswick, will travel with the GRA and speak at every location.

White said he would discuss “Acadian history in a general fashion to more-or-less provide an introduction or a lead-up to the settlement of the Acadian refugees, specifically in the Houma area.”

The importance of Acadians gathering to commemorate and celebrate, White said, is in part to help achieve a sense of self.

“Everyone feels that they have a need to know something about their own history, their own background, the experiences of their family and so on,” White said. “It’s all part of the sense we have of who we are and how we belong in our community and so on. The interest in family background and history and general, one thing that has been driving the interest is the technology.”

The GRA was born from Louisiana’s failed bid at hosting the 2014 Acadian World Congress. The state’s delegation, consisting of the Acadiana parishes, put together a “strong bid,” but lost out to a deserving group representing Quebec, New Brunswick and Maine, Brenda Trahan said.

“When we didn’t get the bid, immediately, the press was in our faces, the people that were there from all over the world, they knew who we were,” said Trahan, who estimated that she receives 100 emails and inquiries each day from people excited about the GRA. “Our young people kept coming up to us and saying, ‘Oh, no, y’all have to do something. We can’t let all of this hard work go by the wayside.'”

She credited the support of Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and the Acadian legislative caucus for their assistance in funding the week-and-a-half-long GRA.

Dardenne said he sees the Grand Reveil as a table setter for Acadian tourism and, potentially, making Louisiana a more lucrative location for an Acadian World Congress.

“When I first heard about it, I felt it was a remarkable opportunity for us to connect with our francophone neighbors in Canada, encouraging them to visit Louisiana and spend money here,” Dardenne said. “It’s a very exciting program that I hope will lay the groundwork for us to one day host the (Acadian World Congress) in Louisiana.”

Everyone is invited to attend the GRA events (see sidebar for itinerary). Ceremonies will be conducted bilingually in order to emphasize the importance of keeping the French language alive.

“Anybody who comes to these events, they’ll see the importance and meet these Canadians and these French people, who most of them all speak French,” Ray Trahan said. “They’ll discover a whole new world of relatives and friends that they possibly didn’t know existed before, and they’ll discover that because of the French language.”

Although the state should see a rise in tourism now and in the future due to the event, the core purpose remains the enhancement of Acadian awareness, said Dardenne, who used the Deportation Cross monument as an example.

“The fact that we will be part of a worldwide pilgrimage is significant enough in itself, but just to have the state have this reminder of our heritage and of the significance of Louisiana as the destination for so many people, who not only were deported, but whose very existence was sought to end,” Dardenne said.

The unveiling and blessing of the Acadian Deportation Cross Monument is scheduled for 11 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 9 in the Bayou Terrebonne Waterlife Museum parking lot, 7910 Park Avenue. FILE PHOTO