foreign to stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio [Music] hello and welcome to the podcast I'm Tracy V Wilson and I'm Holly Frye today we have one of those topics that uh listeners have been asking us to cover for our entire time hosting the show and when I say that our list of listener submitted suggestions is more than 1200 topics long this one is number 28 on there so one of the very first things stuck on there this um when I was reading this I was like I don't understand what that means because it made me realize that I don't do lists the way you do they don't chronologically add to the bottom they just get shoved wherever for me so I was like what does 28 mean did she weight it by number of requests no uh my short list is definitely stuff shoved wherever there's a hole because I'll delete something once I have uh have done the episode and then when I have another thing that goes on to the list it'll just go into that hole but yeah that particular list the most recent things are at the bottom as a side note uh we've been getting a lot of questions lately about how to suggest topics for that list and the answer is just drop it in an email you don't need to do a ton of research a couple of sentences saying who the person is probably or what the topic is probably helps but like we we don't need a ton of additional stuff besides that just drop it in an email anyway so we are finally going to talk about the expulsion of the acadians which acadians you refer to as La Grande or the great upheaval so the one sentence version of this is that starting in 1755 the British expelled the french-speaking acadians from what's now the maritime provinces of Canada and northern Maine particularly the area around Nova Scotia and a lot of them eventually wound up in Louisiana so that one sentence uh encapsulates the heart of a lot of basic write-ups about this but it really leaves out a lot and it's really normal for quick write-ups to leave out some Nuance like our episodes of this show are generally 30 to 40 minutes long they don't address every conceivable detail of a thing but in working on this I found some of the gaps between the quick write-up and the more thorough treatment to be particularly huge like the British a lot of the British with this were really colonists from Massachusetts they technically yes were British but that's not really what comes to mind when somebody says that the British did something brief summaries of all this also tend to mention the megama basically in passing just saying that they were the acadians Allies but Colonial officials attitudes toward the migma were a big part of this too so basically this was both a lot worse and a lot more complicated than a lot of the little one pagers on it really suggests and in a more dramatic way than I have usually encountered when working on the show The the Gap is large um so this region of Northeastern North America that came to be known as Acadia has been home to First Nations and Native American peoples for thousands of years this includes the Algonquian speaking peoples living in what's now Canada and northern Maine particularly the Nations that established the wabanaki Confederacy in about 1640 but in terms of European claims to this land that has been in dispute almost since the first Europeans arrived John Cabot claimed it for the English in 1498 and Jacques Cartier claimed it for the French in 1534. it's unclear who started calling this region Acadia and why in some accounts it was Giovanni de veranzo in 1524 and he was naming it after the pastoral poem Arcadia by jacobos and nazaro in others it came from a suffix in the megama language that means place of abundance and there are also some researchers who say that it might really be both the veranzo's Arcadia morphed into Acadia in English or akadi in French as Europeans started picking up words from a language that was already being spoken in the area European Fishers and Trappers started visiting Northeast North America long before establishing permanent colonies then in 1603 King Henry IV of France gave Pierre dagua de mole a monopoly over the Region's fur trade and named him governor of rkd the following year Samuel Champlain founded the colony of LA kedi on an island near the mouth of the San Juan river which today is on the border between the U.S and Canada this whole effort did not go very well of the 79 men who arrived on the island 65 developed scurvy during the first winter and 35 died some of the survivors of that first winter went back to France and the rest moved to what they named Port Royal on the Annapolis Basin in what's now Nova Scotia their Hope was that the winters would be milder there that probably did not help all that much but this did become one of the first permanent European settlements in North America more people started arriving from France in about 1610 and soon academ was growing into a distinctly separate colony from France's other Colonial ventures in Northeast North America a trade jargon had already developed thanks to those earlier Trappers and Fishers and that jargon Drew from French Bosque and Algonquian languages as well as signs and gestures The Colony also survived its earliest years thanks to the help of the indigenous people in the area particularly the migama the megama taught the colonists methods for Hunting Fishing and foraging and for using local natural resources which helped the colonists live through subsequent Winters the migoma also directly provided food and other support the migoma and the French colonists became trading partners and allies with the Myanmar calling on the French to Aid in their defense as early as 1607. since the vast majority of the French colonists were male most of the marriages that took place in the colony's earliest years were between Frenchmen and migama women English colonists from Virginia attacked the settlement at Port Royal and destroyed the settlement in 1613 but the colonists survived and they rebuilt it many of the colonists who arrived in Acadia in the 1620s were from Coastal France some of whom were fleeing unrest and violence that we're going to circle back to in just a bit they brought with them the knowledge of how to drain swamps and marshes to turn them into farmland and this turned out to be extremely useful around the Bay of Fundy which the French call Bay francaise the Bay of Fundy is known for its dramatically high tides and new arrivals from France started building a system of Dykes channels and gates at various places around the bay the water would drain out of the marsh during low tide and then these dikes and Gates would keep it from coming back in during high tide the system became known as abueto although originally that term described just the channels specifically this took an enormous amount of time-consuming collective work requiring the labor of essentially everyone in the colony to build maintain and expand that Collective work has been cited as one of the reasons why Acadian communities were particularly close-knit and it took years before Marsh would become a farmable land which obviously had its own ecological consequences however the end result was extremely productive fertile Farmland All Around The Bay in what's now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as well as in parts of Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of St Lawrence the acadians grew crops and planted Orchards and their apples in particular became renowned all through Northeastern North America in addition to making it possible for the call to really Thrive converting these Wetlands into Farmland meant that the acadians didn't have to clear a lot of Forest for that purpose over time they turned roughly 8 000 hectares of marsh into Farmland that's about 30 square miles or 80 square kilometers but they cut down only 200 hectares of forest that's less than one square mile or two square kilometers that meant that for the most part the acadians were using land that other people weren't so they weren't making huge encroachments into migma territory to try to build the colony this is one of the reasons that the relationship between the megaba and the acadians was generally one of mutual accommodation and trade rather than becoming something a lot more adversarial another was that in a lot of ways the acadians were left to their own devices many but not all of them were devoutly catholic and there were often Catholic missionaries who tried to convert the bingaman population most of the migoma converted to Catholicism in the first half of the 17th century but the Catholic Church as an institution just didn't have a lot of power or influence over people's everyday lives in the colony and there wasn't a huge focus on forcing migma religious observances to conform to Catholic standards from Europe also France used a scenario system to distribute land most people were tenants who Paid Dues to the senior who also allotted the land but in Acadia this often was not enforced very strictly at some points nobody was really collecting the rent or enforcing the Land Titles at all and this was especially true as the colony repeatedly switched from being under French to being under British control we'll get into the reasons for that shortly it really went back and forth between the two Nations over and over so in a lot of ways the colonists just had to work things out for themselves without a lot of oversight or bureaucracy or pressure from Colonial officials to dramatically expand the colony or change how they were dealing with their indigenous neighbors we should note though at times there were still violent conflicts between French colonists and Indigenous people including the migma and as was the case in the rest of the Americas European introduced diseases were absolutely devastating to the megama and the other First Nations and Native American peoples in what is now Canada and Maine especially in the 16th and 17th centuries so we mentioned at the top of the episode that Britain and France had each claimed this region long before any of these colonists arrived and disputes between these two Nations played a central role in the development of this Colony we will get to that after a quick sponsor break [Music] years ago we talked about the the frequency with which England and France were at War and two different listeners made two different websites to basically put in a year and find out whether England and France were at war with each other uh in terms of what we were talking about today a place we can start with that is that from 1627 to 1629 England and France were at War a lot of the fighting in this was playing out at Sea in Europe and during this the predominantly Protestant City of La Rochelle sided with England so France received to it that was one of the conflicts that drove people to leave Coastal France and go to North America instead this conflict spilled over into the colonies as well English forces started capturing French Colonial territory including Quebec in 1629 Scottish colonists who arrived in Acadia during all of this called it Nova Scotia or New Scotland New France was returned to French control two years later under the Treaty of San German only after this France started trying to build up the population of its colonies including Acadia which had the potential to act as a buffer between the rest of New France and the British colonies to the South it was during this wave of migration after the 1627-29 war that people from Coastal France really started arriving in Acadia in much larger numbers and draining more of the marshes into Farmland a lot of people arrived as indentured workers so they were paying for their passage with about five years of mandatory contracted labor to the Colony over time the new arrivals from Europe started including more women so the number of inner marriages between the colonists and the migoma slowly started declining but migumon knowledge and Customs continued to influence the culture of Acadia which was also bringing in influence from other newly arriving colonists mostly from France but also from England Ireland and Spain even as new colonists were arriving from France Acadia remained relatively isolated from Europe and from other French colonies in North America instead the acadian's biggest trading partner was Massachusetts which the acadians referred to as nosamil is enemy or our friends the enemy under the Treaty of Whitehall in 1686 also known as the Treaty of American neutrality England and France agreed that if they went to war quote their colonies in America should continue in peace and neutrality that did not last long though two years later England allied with the United provinces of the Netherlands and the Austrian habsburgs to go to war against France and what was known as The War of the Grand Alliance or the nine years war the American arm of this war was known as King William's War fought between the French colonies of Canada and the British colonies of New England and each of their indigenous allies in the United States this is sometimes called the first of the French and Indian Wars on May 9 1690 Sir William Phipps set sail from Boston for Acadia arriving 10 days later sacking Port Royal and demanding an oath of Allegiance from the French colonists he tried to do the same in Quebec but was not successful there meanwhile French colonists and their allies attacked parts of New York and Massachusetts as all this was happening Massachusetts increasingly saw the relationship between the acadians and the migma as a threat British colonists in New England thought that the trade with the acadians was strengthening the migma who they saw as their enemy and that together the migma and the acadians were a danger to British interests in the entirety of the Americas so in 1696 Massachusetts outlawed its trade with Acadia The Colony also passed legislation that empowered White Citizens to form companies to fight against the migoma and they set a bounty on migamas scalps King Williams war ended a year later with the Treaty of rizwick in 1697 that returned Acadia to France but once again this did not last long the war of the Spanish succession also known as Queen Anne's War started in 1701 and that lasted for the next 12 years even though Massachusetts had outlawed trade with Acadia that trade had continued illegally and by about 1704 there was less and less tolerance for it from Massachusetts one prominent figure in this illicit trade was Scottish Soldier Samuel fetch who was able to scout out the area in New France while on a diplomatic Mission from Boston to Quebec he was ultimately put on trial and convicted for his illegal trade with Acadia but while he was in England appealing his conviction he started promoting the idea that England should Conquer New France entirely including removing all the acadians from what the British were now calling Nova Scotia vet wrote a lengthy Treatise about all of this which was very well received in the court of Queen Anne British forces captured Port Royal again in 1710 the British changed its name to Annapolis Royal and vetch became its first governor a year later the wabanaki Confederacy and some Acadian allies lay Siege to the fort at Annapolis Royal now called Fort am the war of Spanish succession ended with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. under this treaty France ceded the Peninsular part of Acadia now called Nova Scotia to England France retained other parts of Acadia including what's now New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island under the Treaty of Utrecht the acadians had the option to relocate to French territory or to be considered British subjects this kind of treaty language really wasn't unusual when we've talked about the history of the southwestern U.S we have often talked about similar Provisions in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War most recently similar treaty Provisions were a big part of our episode on the Dreyfus Affair so while some acadians did move to French territory after all of this and the immediate aftermath of this war it just wasn't a huge priority to try to resettle everybody really for totally practical reasons it wasn't like the British authorities could just flip a switch and replace all of the French colonists with British ones and the British knew that their garrisons could not survive the winter if everybody just abandoned this colony and all the work that was associated with maintaining it the Acadian colonists were also the ones who knew how to operate and maintain all these dikes and canals that had transformed this region into fertile farmland so at first the french-speaking colonists who left Nova Scotia were primarily the ones who had the closest ties to France or to the French colonial government generally though most people just stayed put however British authorities in Nova Scotia wanted assurance that these french-speaking Catholics would be loyal to Protestant Britain lieutenant governor Thomas Caufield who was acting as Governor while vetch was away from the colony started trying to get the Acadian leaders to sign an oath stating that they would maintain quote a true allegiance to his majesty King George as long as they were in LA kedi or Nova Scotia the oath stated that they could leave at any time taking their household goods with them so like these treaty Provisions about how the colonists could either move to French territory or become British subjects these kinds of loyalty Oaths were also pretty typical for the time but this became a huge sticking point for the acadians for the most part the acadians who were remaining in Nova Scotia were willing to sign a loyalty oath to Britain they were not though willing to take up arms against the French or against their megama or other indigenous allies so for years British authorities kept pressing Acadian representatives to sign an unconditional loyalty oath and for years the acadians refused to do that Governor Richard Phillips arrived in Nova Scotia in 1720 and met with Acadian representatives to press this issue of the Loyalty oath at this point tensions were escalating between the British colonies and the migma and the acadians threatened to Ally with the migma although they didn't ultimately carry through with this threat in an official way the conflict between the New England colonies and the migama LED to an all-out war between the British and the wabanaki Confederacy from 1721 to 1725. as that was happening on August 1st 1722 Governor Phillips issued a proclamation for bidding contact between the acadians and the migma by 1730 which was 17 years after the Treaty of Utrecht British authorities and Nova Scotia still had not gotten the unconditional loyalty oath that they wanted and according to written accounts the governor finally agreed to just exempt the acadians quote from bearing arms and fighting in war against the French and the Indians and the said inhabitants have only accepted Allegiance on the promise never to take up arms but while other people documented this conversation this was not a formal commitment that the governor made to the colonists in writing even so around this time the British started referring to the acadians as the neutral French and this verbal agreement started off a decade of at least relative calm and prosperity for the colony and continued cooperation between the colonists and the migma that changed when you guessed it England and France went to war again and we're going to talk about that after we first pause for a sponsor break [Music] the war of the Austrian succession started in 1740. in North America it became known as King George's War with British colonies and their indigenous allies fighting French colonies and their allies from the wamanaki Confederacy France had established a port and a fortress at Louisburg in Cape Breton Island and that was to replace the port that had lost under the Treaty of Utrecht Britain lay Siege to this fort capturing it in 1745 and France considered this such a huge loss that in the negotiations for the Treaty of Ayla Chappelle in 1748. France ceded other territory to get Louisburg back this war also renewed concerns about the Loyalty of the acadians in both Nova Scotia and Massachusetts the acadians generally had very large families and comparatively very low infant mortality so they easily outnumbered British colonists in Nova Scotia this also renewed fears that the Acadian trade with the migma was strengthening the migma Fighting Force Who the British regarded as an enemy Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts found these connections between the acadians and the migoma to be particularly threatening he was convinced that the acadians were secretly still loyal to France and that at any moment they might Ally with the megaba and wage war against New England and although most of the acadians did try to remain neutral there were some who took up arms to fight with Branson with one of its first Nations allies I just reinforced Shirley's whole idea that all of the acadians were a huge threat on October 21st 1747 Shirley issued a proclamation saying that any acadians who remained loyal to Britain would be protected but anyone who colluded with England's enemies or assisted in attacks on New England troops would be prosecuted as traitors this war ended in 1748 and in 1749 Britain started trying to boost its population in Nova Scotia so the British colonists wouldn't keep being so heavily outnumbered by the neutral French at this point there were about 12 000 acadians scattered around British territory and as the British population increased some started to leave for places that were under French control this did not necessarily go well for them though French officials resettled many of them in forested areas that were totally unlike the land that they knew how to work and they didn't really want to make unconditional loyalty Oaths to France any more than they had to Britain Edward Cornwallis became governor of Nova Scotia in 1749. shortly after his arrival he established the city of Halifax he violated a treaty with the migoma to do this a lot of what he did honestly was violating treaties with the migma this fed into a war which was known as father La lutres war and that once again pitted Britain and France against one another each with their indigenous allies also as kind of a side note here Cornwallis had been an officer in the British army during the Jacobite rising of 1745 and a lot of the Scots who were in Nova Scotia had shown up there after the Highland clearances so like these two relocations of people are kind of connected together yeah in a way that crosses the whole Atlantic Ocean during this war that Tracy just referenced England built Fort Lawrence in Nova Scotia and France built for bozeur right across the river in New Brunswick Cornwallis offered a bounty on migama's scalps and some acadians allied with the megama against the British all of this bolstered the opinion of Massachusetts governor William Shirley that the French neutrals in Nova Scotia were threatening the British colonies as a whole Cornwallis had also been tasked with securing the acadian's unconditional loyalty as so many other Governors had tried to do before him but in 1751 the Massachusetts legislature petitioned the king to do something different which was completely removed the acadians from Nova Scotia the crown did not take up this proposal Cornwallis did not succeed in getting an unconditional loyalty oath and then eventually in 1754 Charles Lawrence was appointed governor of Nova Scotia and he and Shirley started working together to actively plan to remove the acadians that year he had another War Began between England and France with their colonies in North America once again going to war along with their indigenous allies this one is known as the French and Indian war or the Seven Years War even though it actually lasted for at least nine years it followed France's expansion of its colonies into the Ohio River Valley conflicting with British expansion into the same region yeah a lot of the words that we've already talked about are groups together collectively as the French and Indian Wars but this one specifically is also known as the French and Indian War so even though the acadians no longer outnumbered British colonists in Nova Scotia during the Seven Years War authorities in both England and New England regarded them as a serious threat this idea that they were secretly French and were going to become traitors was reinforced when Massachusetts troops under Colonel John Winslow took Fort bosazur and found about 250 Acadian militia there at least some of these were refugees who had taken shelter at the Fort and had been pressed into its defense but to the Massachusetts Force this was evidence that the acadians as a whole were just waiting for the right time to take up arms and fight for France working with Governor Shirley of Massachusetts governor Lawrence of Nova Scotia decided to deport all French neutrals from The Colony on July 28 1755. in his words the plan was quote to divide them among the colonies where they may be of some use as most of them are strong healthy people as they cannot easily collect themselves together again it will be out of their power to do any mischief on August 9th an anonymous person in Halifax wrote quote we are now upon a great and Noble scheme of sending the neutral French out of this province who have always been secret enemies and have encouraged our Savages to cut our throats if we affect their expulsion it will be one of the greatest things that ever the English did in America for buy all the accounts that part of the country they possess is as good land as any in the world in case therefore we could get some good English farmers in their room this province would abound with all kinds of Provisions I like how they give no credit to the people's knowledge and they're just like the land is great we'll go in and do great great things with it yeah Anonymous person in Halifax the land was already abound with all kinds of Provisions that the acadians grew yeah Governor Shirley raised a regiment to Aid Governor Lawrence later ordering them to quote take an eye for an eye in short a life for a life if the acadians fought back on September 5th 1755 Colonel John Winslow who was leading this regiment summoned all men from the region to Grand Prairie church with men including boys ages 10 and up once they were gathered he informed them that quote your land and tenements cattle of all kinds and livestocks of All Sorts are forfeited to the crown with all other your effects savings your money and household goods and you yourselves to be removed from this province British regulars and Massachusetts militia rounded up families at gunpoint and took them to transports that had been hired from Boston some of which were really slave ships they surrounded churches during Sunday services to capture everyone who was inside they burned homes and farms and settlements and broke through the dikes so that anybody who escaped would not have anything to return to this also meant that people had no way to support or feed themselves before the transports actually set sales so a lot of the people who were being expelled were malnourished before their Journey even started some of the acadians fought back aggressively against all this Joseph Broussard also known as bosole had been fighting against British incursions into Acadia for decades he and his brother Alexandra had become particularly famous or inFAMOUS depending on which side you were on during father Le lutra's war after escaping from Fort Boze Jour which the British had renamed Fort Cumberland beausoleil harassed the British around the Bay of Fundy from a small privateering vessel avoiding expulsion for years I read one account that said that they escaped from the fort by digging their way out with spoons and knives but I could not find that confirmed anywhere besides that one account regardless it seems like a pretty daring Escape transports started leaving Nova Scotia on October 13 1755 and so by that point some people have been on board the ships for weeks troops had also not put any effort into keeping families together so in many cases people had family aboard other transports that were Bound for other colonies and they just never saw them again since the whole idea was to break up the Acadian population into small enough groups that they would not be a threat transports made multiple stops all along the east coast dropping off a few hundred people at a time often local authorities had not been consulted about any of this and had no way to house or feed these people who were arriving with only what they could carry thousands of people died during the voyage or shortly after arriving at their destination they died due to starvation disease and even drowning many who survived wound up being forced into indentures to pay their way in a place that they had not even wanted to go in the first place all this happened really without a lot of oversight from the British government in London Governor Lawrence had written to the Board of Trade about the issue of the acadians and the board had been kind of vague in its response Lawrence did not send another communication on the matter until after he had started removing the acadians a letter from Sir Thomas Robinson in London that recommended a more moderate approach was also delayed in transit and it got to North America after the removal had already started this first phase of removal in 1755 involves less than half of the Acadian population in British territory but removals and deportations continued throughout the seven years war with acadians being dispersed through British territory or deported to France British forces captured Louisburg in 1758 and deported about 3 100 acadians but an estimated 1649 died of drowning or disease in 1762 the city of Boston turned away a transport that was carrying about 1500 acadians arguing that Massachusetts had already absorbed enough of the neutral French people also fled in the face of the removals making their way to French territory or taking Refuge with the migma or other indigenous people the Seven Years War ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and by that point an estimated 10 000 of about 15 000 acadians had been removed from what's now Canada but thousands of them had died as a direct result of the removal and many of those who died were infants and children it's unclear how many of the migama were killed during the Seven Years War but the deportation of the acadians and the end of a French Colonial presence in North America affected them as well since it meant that the migma lost a major trading partner and Ally along with other first nations in the region multiple bands of migama signed treaties with Britain in the 1760s those were known as the Halifax treaties migoma efforts to have the terms of those treaties enforced and respected have continued through to today yeah there were huge headlines about uh migoma efforts to keep to have their fishing rights respected like as recently as last year probably into this year it's also outside the scope of this podcast but obviously like the the migama then faced the same issues that the other indigenous people of Canada faced after Britain took control including things like the residential schools that we've talked about all of those types of things after the war was over acadians all over British territory and in France started petitioning for permission to return to Nova Scotia and some of them ultimately did but by the time they arrived colonists from New England including loyalists who had supported Britain during the American Revolution had mostly taken over all the Acadian farmland returning acadians generally wound up with less advantageous less further land that was farther away from the Bay of Fundy acadians also continued to migrate from the places they'd been removed to or deported to after the war was over they were trying to reunite with others or just find a place to settle into the early 19th century if you look at a map of the Acadian removal and the migrations that followed there are a lot of arrows leading from Nova Scotia down the east coast to the Caribbean South America and the Falkland Islands and back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean the most well-known population of Acadian descendants today is the Cajun population of Louisiana Louisiana had been under French control until 1762 and it still had a large population of French speakers although by the time most of the acadians started arriving there it had become Spanish territory most acadians arrived in Louisiana between 1765 and 1785 and that included about 1600 people who arrived from France after being deported to France so while there were some people that like made their way through the continental U.S to get to Louisiana a lot of people had traveled across oceans first beausolei and his family eventually arrived in Louisiana and they were welcomed as Heroes there today the Cajun ethnic group includes people who were descended from the acadians as well as people from other immigrant groups who assimilated with the occasions in and around Louisiana after arriving there the Acadian population of Canada's Maritime Provinces in northern Maine didn't start to approach its pre-removal levels until the 1830s and 40s the idea of Acadian as an ethnic identity really started to coalesce around this time when more acadians entering politics to represent Acadian interests and in 1847 poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow introduced the Acadian deportation to a lot of the rest of the English-speaking world who did not already know about it through his long poem Evangeline this poem was incredibly popular it also spread the awareness of this beyond the English-speaking world as it was translated into at least 13 different languages within about a decade of its first being published there were also multiple fully Illustrated editions of this poem although in general they were illustrated by people who had never been to Acadia and they didn't really know what it looked like or how acadians had historically dressed they sort of created an image of Acadia that was not really like that Evangeline tells the story of Two Lovers separated by the deportation it is very romanticized and as you probably guessed from Tracy describing the visual depictions it was also not in terms of wording particularly historically accurate but it did really establish the idea of who the acadians were in the popular Consciousness in places that had not been directly involved it was also adapted into plays and films including the 1913 Canadian film Evangeline which is cited as Canada's first feature-length film there are also multiple monuments to the Acadian deportation that incorporate a statue of the character of Evangeline and streets squares and other landmarks are made for her during the Acadian expulsion acadians face discrimination and persecution and hardship really regardless of where they were taken and that really continued for Acadian communities in the Northeast and for Cajun communities in Louisiana in the generations that follow colored this both Cajuns and acadians faced negative stereotypes including the idea that they were ignorant and then this was compounded by compulsory education laws including in both Louisiana and Maine that specified that schools be taught only in English when most of the children in these communities spoke French more recent efforts to encourage French speaking and bilingual education in these communities have unfortunately also focused more on French as it would probably be spoken in Paris rather than French as it is spoken in Acadian and cajun communities which are like two distinctly different dialects of French yeah I definitely have uh known Canadian friends who have referenced their Parisian French class by that wording like it is it is not our colloquial French it's Parisian French uh in the United States some of the perception of Cajun started to shift after World War II about 25 000 Cajuns in the U.S served in either the military or the civil service including as translators this led to increasing awareness of Cajun cuisine and culture and although there were still plenty of stereotypes the level of stigma decreased somewhat in 1955 the first feature film was produced that had an Acadian script and that was called lesabwato on December 9 2003 Queen Elizabeth II issued a Royal Proclamation marking July 28th of each year starting in 2005 as quote a day of commemoration of the great upheaval this statement acknowledged that thousands of people had died but it was not an apology and it noted that the proclamation did not quote constitute a recognition of legal or financial responsibility by the crown this followed more than a decade of campaigning spearheaded by Warren Perrin of Louisiana uh Tracy did not find any real acknowledgment from Massachusetts in any of her research no and the idea that Massachusetts this was a big part of this something I found fairly late in my research and I was like what gym excuse [Laughter] um I'm so glad you did this one ah thanks I'm glad it took such a long time it's a lot to unravel because there are one kajillion conflicts some of which all have the same name and there hasn't always been the most honest accounting of how things played out which I know when I have tried to look at this history before I have gotten very frustrated by it just been like I'm closing this book and moving on uh so It's Tricky yeah we'll probably talk more about that on Friday till then have listener mail from Bethany Bethany wrote hi Holly and Tracy I just wanted to pop in and say hi I live in Central North Carolina and I pass Kudzu literally every day I'm so desensitized to it I didn't realize how much I see every day until listening to this episode I was telling my husband about the episode he's from Michigan and the villainous reputation and he agreed that one of the first things they heard about when they came here were the horrors of kudzu and why it should be avoided he said there could be dead bodies in there I'm intrigued by all the positive uses for Kudzu and keep mentioning tidbits of knowledge to my co-workers and family they're all surprised that there is some good in Kudzu I even have kudzu bugs occasionally I live in a small subdivision that backs up to the woods so every once in a while the back porch columns are covered in the tiny little guys we only moved into this house in January 2020 and I had to Google these tiny Critters even though I only moved a few miles from my previous home Tracy I think I live in the same general area where you grew up I also do not like the taste of fresh green beans and prefer canned any day although eyes now suffer through them coated in balsamic vinegar or some other sauce in an effort to get my kiddo to eat them Bethany thank you so much Bethany for folks who were like what is she talking about with the green beans I think it was soon in our episode on canning I talked about how we grew and home cans pretty much all of our vegetables when I was a kid and I consequently overwhelmingly the green beans that I ate were canned and when I was presented with fresh green beans during the growing season I was like I don't this does not taste right to me I do not like it I would say since doing that episode I have found some creative ways to eat fresh green beans but if I'm still just gonna have regular green beans as a side dish I probably want them to come out of a can fascinating so thank you again Bethany for sending that email if you would like to write to us we are at History Podcast iheartradio.com and you'll also find us on social media at Mist in history that's where you'll find our Facebook Twitter Pinterest and Instagram and uh you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or apple podcasts or anywhere else that you like to get your podcasts stuff you missed in history class is a production of I heart radio for more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows [Music]