Acadie

fishing boat strewn with Acadian flags

Aug 26 2019

Acadie! Acadie!

The trip up the Acadian Coast has spectacular natural scenery, for sure.  But this time the journey offered something more for the eyes. Something that had to do with the soul of Acadie — buildings festooned with the Acadian flag, streamers. Lawn chairs, trees, old wringer washers and plows  decorated with red, white and blue and the yellow etoile of Acadie. (France’s flag with a  yellow star on the blue  is the flag of Acadie). Scenes of early Acadian life populated front lawns, complete with traditionally dressed mannequins wielding axes or churning butter. If I were a part of this great family, I would hang giant underpants on my clothesline, red, white and blue, the etoile on the bum of the blue pair.

Special signs on homes with the family names — Hache, Melanson, LeBlanc— announced to passerby’s “Here we are, come visit.  We are all connected and probably related. We are Acadians!” 

Child dressed with Acadian flag colour glasses

Seriously festooning

This  festooning  started to become intense  at Neguac. Something was up. A 30 foot Acadian flag hung on the great Catholic Church in the town. Acadie is a nation within a nation and all of these descendants of the “Grand Derangement” —the forced removal of the Acadians from their homes by the British in 1755 — were gearing up for the Congrès mondial acadien 2019, World Acadian Congress set to take place from August 10-24  and kicking off from Abrams Village on Prince Edward Island. It’s a combination of conferences, displays, art and cultural exhibits, educational events, family reunions and celebrations all rolled into one. 

 I have great respect and admiration for the Acadian people. I love hearing the French language. That’s one reason why we relocated to this part of New Brunswick. Acadian French is a more archaic form and my high school Parisian French doesn’t always jibe with it. 

man playing guitar for a farmers market crowd

Je me souviens

The Quebecois motto is “Je me souviens”, “I will remember”.  I don’t know if Acadians have a motto, but I think that it should be “J’attends.”  “I will wait.”, just like Evangeline waited for her lover Gabriel in the Longfellow poem.  Acadians have had a long struggle for equality and recognition. They are not pushy nor do they  complain much. Even Chiac, a version of French spoken mostly in Southeastern New Brunswick, blends both French and English. They adapt. 

They do like to celebrate, play music, decorate profusely and quietly  build their strength. New Brunswick is the only bilingual Province in Canada now, and I like it that way.  Like in the Beatles’ song “Blackbird”, the line,  “You have only waited for this moment to arise” comes to mind.

Acadians  (15,000 approximately) were  scattered to Maine, New England, the Atlantic States, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Louisiana  (think Cajun)  and to the Acadian peninsula during the “Grand Derangement”. In a way they have had the last word. They have built a culture on the beautiful Acadian Peninsula. They have the coast with the warmest waters north of the Carolinas.  They have a community that spans the continent.  

P.S.  I just read that the Acadian motto is “L’union fait la force”,  “Strength through unity”,  Well, that says it.

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man drinking coffee on a porch

Jun 6 2010

Finally, cottage season is here

If I came equipped with a pressure gauge you’d see the needle dropping almost immediately upon arrival at the cottage. Being there is like a really good drug. When I had kidney stones a few years ago they gave me Demerol and within seconds the pain was dissipating. That’s what being at the cottage is like. When we leave Moncton we’re wound up from our crazy week and don’t even know it and then we sit on the porch of the cottage and decompress. I’m surprised our eardrums don’t pop. We almost always say, with some surprise, “Wow, was I stressed.” Pressure tends to build imperceptibly.

Briefly we thought about moving to the cottage permanently but the real value of the cottage is in being somewhere else. A place isn’t somewhere else if you’re there all the time. Perspective is gained from seeing things from two slightly different angles — triangulation. Slipping out to the coast always provides that perspective and when we come back to the world we see things more vividly. If we moved there, we’d just have to find another place to help us maintain our sanity. We’d need some other refuge.

woman removing items from trunk of car in front of a cottage

The cottage is now paid off

Besides, this year we have a bonus because the place will be paid off and then even the loan payments won’t be an added stressor.

An even bigger bonus this year is that the long haul of doing an internship at CFB Gagetown is over. I loved it, but it’s over and I’m home again and we can whip out to the cottage during the week and commute to Moncton, it’s so close. Eighteen months of seeing each other only on weekends was enough. More than enough, really. School’s over. Time to get on with life.

Boat between two buildings

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Collège Saint-Joseph in Memramcook

Nov 20 2009

How 650 girls ended my Catholic education

I didn’t continue my Catholic education into high school at Scollard Hall in my hometown of North Bay, ON, for two reasons: first, it cost money to go there and we had none; and second, no girls. It was an all boys school and that was taking religion too far for me. Besides, a mile from my home and half the trip to Scollard Hall a brand new, ultra modern, mega school had just been built and we were to be the first full year class. There were 1,300 students which meant at least 650 girls which in turn meant my Catholic education came to an abrupt halt.

But that was in the bustling, booming, railroad centre, North Bay, ON. That wasn’t in a fishing community like Cocagne or Escuminac, NB, where a decent education wasn’t about choosing which of five high schools you wanted to attend, but about deciding to go to high school at all. And if you made the choice to be educated, you most certainly were going to be educated by priests or nuns within the Catholic religion.

The luxury of choice of schools

What I’m getting at here is that as a teenager I had choices ― lots of choices ― as to how I wanted to be educated and in what language and I didn’t have to leave home to do it. The worst case scenario was a 20 minute bus ride uptown. However, if I had been born twenty years earlier and 1,500 km east, things might have been different. Anything like higher education — namely, high school — meant leaving home, leaving your family and friends, impoverishing your family twice, once by the tuition and board and once by your not being there to help fish or farm.

headshot of older woman
Jeannette talked to us about life in the Cocagne area. She was especially adamant that edlucation is what changed everything for Acadians.

Education was biggest boost for Acadians

Lots has changed since then. Louis Robichaud, P’tit Louis,  New Brunswick’s premier during the sixties, made basic education for Acadians a reality. It sounds third world, I know, but when Elaine and I chatted with a friend of hers, Jeannette Deprés, who grew up near our cottage in Cocagne, she talked about the poverty of the Acadians in her time. 

When I asked what change most improved their lives she blurted out, “Education.” I, with my five high schools to choose from, thought I was listening to a turn of the century story but that story would have been mine had I grown up in the Acadian peninsula.

Now, everywhere you drive in Acadie you find large, modern schools for k-12 and now there are remote campuses of the community colleges as well as the University of Moncton. I work with a young woman who learned 3D-modelling  at the Campus de la Péninsule acadienne in Shippigan, traveling the 40 minutes from her home in Tracadie-Sheila every day. Incidentally, good roads was the second major factor Jeannette said improved the lives of Acadians in her time. She described going a lot of places by fishing boat.

I wonder how many young Acadians understand how far their people have come in such a short time. When I hear Acadians of the generation before mine talk about what they had to do to get an education, I know if I had been born here in Acadie, I probably would have gone to work at the railroad down the road like my father did.

Editor’s note: In 1985 Scollard Hall boys high school and St. Joseph’s girls school joined into one. 

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