I have decided to do my Canadian History research on the Acadian Expulsion, and it’s one heck of a story.

It all started when the British won the Maritimes (or “Acadia”, as it used to be known) from the French. They didn’t like all my francophone ancestors, making them all nervous with their going around being French and Catholic and stuff. (The Crown was Protestant at the time).

So for 45 years, the British tried to convince the Acadians to sign an unconditional pledge of loyalty to the King. ^[1] And the Acadians would not sign. There are a lot of reasons for this to choose from. For one, they did not want to anger their Mik’maq neighbors, with whom they had peaceful relations, to think that they had joined up with the Brits and therefore supported them in the conflict over treaty rights and land ownership battle they were having with the Crown.

That kind of thing can get your towns and villages raised. Not good.

Another reason : They didn’t want their able-bodied young men conscripted to fight against the French. The Acadians has no deep love for Mother France – France had treated them very poorly, and that is why they had left in the first place. But they definitely did not want their young men to fight the French, either.

Really, they didn’t want their young men to fight any war. That was one of the things they liked about being away from Europe. No more soldiers taking all your food and molesting your daughters and ruining your crops with their encampments. No more young men dying pointless deaths because of some squabble between royals who couldn’t give less of a damn about people like the Acadians if we invented negative damns. No more chaos and strife.

They really just wanted to left alone to farm, fish, and fu…. er, have families.

There’s also a religious angle. The Acadians are a Catholic people, and the King of England was the head of the Church of England, so pledging unconditional loyalty would conflict with their loyalty to the Pope. It may seem like a trivial point, but that sort of thing means a lot to deeply religious people like these 18th century Acadians. ^[2]

And, to be frank (ish), some of them would not sign people they were vehemently anti-British.

So after 45 years of trying, the Brits finally got tired of these uppity Acadians and order a mass deportation. This happened in two distinct waves.

In the first wave, the deportees were sent to various places in the 13 Colonies. They were welcomed and treated well in Maryland and Connecticut, but in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Massachusetts, they were denied permission to disembark upon arrival, and left to rot on overcrowded boats where many of them died of disease and the cold.

Not cool, Virginia and Massachusetts!

In the second wave, after the Siege of Louisbourg, the Acadians who has escaped the first wave by fleeing to the Gaspe Penninsula, unsettled lands in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island (then Ile Saint Jean), and Cape Breton (then Ile Royal) were hunted down and captured by the Brits, and either imprisoned or deported to France. ^[3]

All in all, around 11,500 of the approximately 14,100 Acadians (81 percent) living in the Maritimes were deported. Thousands died in the bellies of overcrowded ships, either sunk by the British, left to rot by the Americans, or dying of disease and deprivation on the journeys between France and the New World. The area’s economy was shattered. It was an attempt to commit cultural genocide, to rid the world of Acadians by less than lethal methods, and it is a testament to the strength and values of the Acadian culture that they did not succeed.

Instead, wherever the Acadians were put, they found a way to thrive. And over the decades, many of them found a way to trickle back to the Maritimes, and today, Acadian culture is alive and kicking in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and on Prince Edward Island.

I consider myself Acadian. Je suis Acadien! Vive L’Acadie! Both of my maternal grandparents are Acadian, and so is my mother. My father is from Ontario, and that’s where his family resides. I don’t feel particularly close to them, nor do I particularly like them, and I grew up in the Maritimes, on Prince Edward Island, amongst a lot of other Acadians, and so that is the culture that I identify with.

Not that I have ever been much of a part of it. I have never been very close with my mother’s parents, though I loved them dearly and mourned their passing. And even if I had been close to them, well, nous somme assimile – we are assimilated. My mother spoke French as a small child but remembers none of it. My mother’s parents could find their French if they needed to in order to speak with their relatives, but other than that, never used it.

And me, I have only a little more French than the average Canadian, and that is only because I have retained a lot of the French we all learned in school while others seemed to have forgotten it as soon as they could. And even that has withered away over time. I have lost almost all my French vocabulary, and I don’t remember any of the complex grammar.

I don’t even remember how to put things in the past tense. Sad.

Still, je suis Acadien. if I have an ethnicity (besides Generic Anglo Canadian), that is it. A lot of people can’t understand what that means, to have a strong connection to an ethnic community despite barely being a part of it, but they are my people, and that is all there is to it.

Perhaps it’s just part of my hotblooded and emotional French nature.

Je vais vous parler des gens sympas demain.