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le Grand Dérangement
Sep. 7th, 2005 10:10 amThis past summer, the wombat-consort and I went to Nova Scotia for my aunt's memorial service, in the small town where she was born. Most of her family still lives nearby; it was one of the first places resettled by the displaced Acadians after the British allowed them to return from exile. They live near the shore, which is a poor place for agriculture-- in Vieille Acadie, their ancestors constructed complex systems of stone dikes and levees in the salt marshes, regularly opening them for the tide to wash through with fresh silt, but the British destroyed those as part of the war of attrition-- so most of them are independent commercial fishermen, with boats worth more than their houses.
Most of the Acadians, of course, never came back. Some of them were sent back to France, more than a century after their colony had been founded. Others eventually coalesced into large communities on the other side of the Bay of Fundy (most of the Francophones in New Brunswick are of Acadian origin rather than Quebecois) and far to the south in the Mississippi Delta, but in their initial expulsion, they were randomly scattered through the Atlantic provinces. I have no idea of the genealogical demographics of those directly affected by Katrina, but I still can't help being reminded of history now, in a strange blend of "Evangeline" and the Middle Passage.
(As a gratuitous anime reference, for those who remember Yumi's cryptic remark about the ship Maria Luz near the end of Rurouni Kenshin's Kyoto Arc, it involved a legal case against Peru, which had adjusted to the end of the African slave trade the same way as several other parts of the world, by filling the same labor roles with Chinese coolies who were nominally indentured but essentially enslaved. Many of them had been simply kidnapped from their homes. In Cuba, one worker on a sugar plantation left the words, "It is certain that for us, there will be neither coffin nor grave, and that our bones will be burnt with those of horses and oxen to be afterwards used to refine sugar, and that neither our sons nor our sons' sons will ever know what we have endured." [Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor] Not that I have a real point, I suppose, except for the traditional observation that People Suck.)
Most of the Acadians, of course, never came back. Some of them were sent back to France, more than a century after their colony had been founded. Others eventually coalesced into large communities on the other side of the Bay of Fundy (most of the Francophones in New Brunswick are of Acadian origin rather than Quebecois) and far to the south in the Mississippi Delta, but in their initial expulsion, they were randomly scattered through the Atlantic provinces. I have no idea of the genealogical demographics of those directly affected by Katrina, but I still can't help being reminded of history now, in a strange blend of "Evangeline" and the Middle Passage.
(As a gratuitous anime reference, for those who remember Yumi's cryptic remark about the ship Maria Luz near the end of Rurouni Kenshin's Kyoto Arc, it involved a legal case against Peru, which had adjusted to the end of the African slave trade the same way as several other parts of the world, by filling the same labor roles with Chinese coolies who were nominally indentured but essentially enslaved. Many of them had been simply kidnapped from their homes. In Cuba, one worker on a sugar plantation left the words, "It is certain that for us, there will be neither coffin nor grave, and that our bones will be burnt with those of horses and oxen to be afterwards used to refine sugar, and that neither our sons nor our sons' sons will ever know what we have endured." [Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor] Not that I have a real point, I suppose, except for the traditional observation that People Suck.)