As part of the French 2 feast, we read Au revoir l'Acadie. Should you be unfamiliar with this chapter of history, the Acadians were French settlers who established a unique, peaceful life in the maritime regions of Canada during the seventeenth century. However, beginning in 1755, during the French and Indian War, they were brutally expelled from their homelands by the British in a forced exile known as Le Grand Dérangement (The Great Upheaval).
In class, we discuss this (in French) and how it echoes other upheavals of people groups in history: the Native Americans, the Jewish people, the Great Migration in the South, the Irish during the potato famine, to name a few. We enrich our discussion with paintings such as the one above and one by Jacob Lawrence.
The story of the Acadians is closer to home than many realize. Cut off from their beautiful coastal valleys, families were scattered across the globe. Many found refuge along the upper St. John River in northern Maine, where their descendants proudly safeguard their ancestral culture to this day. Thousands of others were carried further south into Louisiana; there, under the warmth of the southern sun, the word Acadian shifted over time into Cajun, giving birth to a rich legacy of music, language, and cuisine.
To learn French is not merely to acquire vocabulary; it is to inherit a wider outlook and to care about the stories that shaped our own continent.
