HDP HIST Blacks and Acadians

Henri-Dominique Paratte B00564762 December 16 , 2019 Essay for course HIST 2280 Dr. Afua Cooper Blacks and French-Acadians in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick: how similar is their situation? For every research project, we need a hypothesis. The hypothesis, in this case, stems from a personal experience (going back to the 1980s), the memory of which was triggered by a recent article in Le Journal de Montréal, which devoted some space to a particular administrative measure that joined Acadians and Blacks from Nova Scotia in a specific judicial-legal approach to an electoral question. Suddenly, it looked like two minorities in Nova Scotia were facing a similar problem, and – at least as far as politics was concerned – the solution seemed to be the same: bring back specifically designated electoral districts, one for Black Nova Scotians, three for Acadians, as it was before the New Democratic Party while in power (between 2009 and 2013) decided it was undemocratic to have specific electoral districts for anyone (Agence QMI, 2018). So the hypothesis was: is it possible to consider joint moves for the Black minority in Nova Scotia (mostly) and for the Acadian minority (although it is impossible to completely sever it from Acadians in New Brunswick and PEI)? This led inevitably to the question: how similar, or dissimilar, are those two ‘minorities’, which certainly view themselves as communities with a strong sense of identity going back centuries? A quick search led to very little as far as comparing them was concerned. So this is an attempt, which grew longer as the research encompassed more unexpected dimensions, at covering most areas where some similarities seem to bring those two communities with a minority status together. The situation evoked earlier, however – possible similarity at a political level - only brought to the fore one possible dimension of what turns out to be a complex relationship between two groups that have a history going back hundreds of years not only on North American soil, but also in the vast space of the Atlantic ocean. It is not simply a matter to look at ‘Acadians’ as a local minority, or ‘blacks’ as another one. Times change; minorities may have been identified up to a certain point in history with a specific area or a clearly delineated rural region; they may have been associated with a specific socio-economic status; all this may also have changed considerably over time, and particularly with minorities being part of an increasingly urban environment calling for more complex, innovative solutions. The black community in Nova Scotia is not made today solely of descendants from the Black Refugees of the early 19th century or the Black Loyalists of the late 18th, although these two groups (especially the first one) have given it a very specific identity. The Acadian community, more appropriately the French-Acadian community, is not made solely of descendants of the early settlers having come to Acadie before 1713, although this group clearly defines a specific identity as well. We do not only have to look at the situation of minorities, but also at their prospects for development, and challenges in maintaining their identity while trying to survive as equals. Challenges are not the same for every human community; the situation of a group as a minority does not by itself justify a comparison. On a broader scale, though, there are many times when black and French-Acadian history in Nova Scotia intersect and have an impact on one another. This is true, of course, of the period when, from the 16th to the 18th centuries in particular, Acadian settlers and Black slaves were brought to the shores of North America from either Europe (for the first group) or Africa (for the second) – the first group mostly as indentured workers, the second as slaves. This did not mean, however, that there were not over time many other “transatlantic” encounters between Acadian and Black realities after that period. For instance, when “in the spring of 1920, Joseph Brooms bid farewell to his mother Hazel as he sailed from Seawell, Barbados on the Caraquet, destined for Canada” (Bonner, 2017), in order to find work in the Cape Breton steel industry, the name of the ship may have been the first contact for him between a black reality and an Acadian one, since that name was a direct reference to the small NB city now considering itself ‘la capitale de l’Acadie’, Caraquet. Acadians would, by that time, have made their “Grand Dérangement”(1), a genocidal deportation after 1755 under the British colonial government of Charles Lawrence (during which a huge percentage of children died, an event now commemorated by December 13th as Acadian Memorial Day throughout the Maritimes) part of their collective memory within the Canadian context – although it would involve not only one, but at least two or three criss-crossings of the Atlantic space before the very existence of Caraquet (or any other) as an Acadian town could be confirmed for a durable period within the context of a changing Canadian dominion, in which Catholics and particularly French-speaking Acadians were gradually allowed to exist as better than indentured workers and third-class citizens. Acadians who had been back to France during the Grand Dérangement stayed in Nantes for a number of years; this particular French port was, with Bordeaux, the main center where profits from the triangular trade involving trading black Africans for sugar and coffee enriched the local middle-class – a social class which Acadians, exiles waiting to go back across the Atlantic ocean between 1775 and 1785 (CEFAN, 2019) were not part much more than black slaves were, although these were unwillingly the source of the local merchants’ fortunes but not necessarily present in the French harbor. From Nantes, a number of Acadians who did not want to remain in France went to several places associated with black cultures, often for a short transition period on their way back to North America: Saint Domingue, Guyane, among others – and some even think today that there may have been some Acadians who remained in what was to become Haiti (one of the many areas of Acadian history that has been looked at more carefully during the last decade). Former Governor General and Executive director of the Francophonie Michaëlle Jean, herself a mulatto from Haiti, declared in front of the provincial legislature of New Brunswick in 2018: ‘Moi, arrière-arrière-petite-fille de Célia Leblanc, dont le père, Canjé Leblanc, est arrivé avec ses parents lors du Grand Dérangement, en bateau [en 1763], à Saint-Domingue, aujourd'hui Haïti, mon pays natal.’ (Radio-Canada, 2015) [I, great-great-grand-daughter of Célia Leblanc, whose father, Canjé Leblanc, arrived with his parents during the Great Upheaval, by boat [in 1763], in Santo Domingo, today Haiti, my native country]. Genealogists did not embrace with unrestricted glee that unexpected statement, which obviously linked mulattoes and Acadians, but neither did they discard the very real possibility that there might have been, through the movement of Acadians on the soil of what is now Haiti, some Acadian heritage passed to generations beyond the 18th century – there is, however, except for family memories or narratives, very little to confirm it. The question, of course, may be how you can define ‘Acadian’ based solely on a partial genetic heritage when it has become over time a cultural environment as much as an ethnic or genetic one – a cultural environment any stray branches of the Acadian tree may not share at all (that cultural question is at the heart of current problems in teacher hiring in New Brunswick, for instance (2)). The situation is also complicated by the big difference in Haiti between a mulatto ruling class and a large black majority, not to mention that although there are connections between Haiti and the Maritimes and Nova Scotia, there is not in Nova Scotia, contrary to Quebec, a sizable Haitian immigrant community of either blacks or mulattoes or both. Whatever their differences, Black and Acadian historical narratives share some common traits: primarily oral traditions, difficulty of retracing steps except through family memories and DNA samples, lack in many cases of written documents that have until recently been seen as the difference between history(which, in European style, was to be based solely on written documents) and fantasy (based on a loose patchwork of narratives unconfirmed by any written sources). Acadian settlers of the 17th and 18th centuries were mostly illiterate, like the large majority of French people then, which means that they lived their lives within an oral culture made of family traditions, experience gathered from oral transmission of knowledge and practical training, and all that makes an oral culture function. The same could be said, of course, about black Africans brought to the Caribbean and to North America, except that slavery tried hard to eradicate as much of their individual cultures as possible, since in the eyes of slavers slaves were nothing but inferior humans to be handled as domestic property. The removal of Acadians from their land in the second half of the 18th century, to some extent, mirrors that trauma: just like African people, Acadians – those people born and raised on what they considered their lands in Acadie – were considered expendable by the mix of military and commercial European-based interests that viewed itself as the potential ruler of the Americas, supposedly a ‘terra nullius’, a ‘new world’ where they could impose their rule. Having no military power to speak of (except as guerilla fighters in a few cases, which would have them labelled ‘terrorists’ when under British rule) Acadians were simply not seen as anything but an encumbrance to be rid of – in a way, they might be compared to the ‘Maroons’ who came to Nova Scotia late in the 18th century because they were unruly guerilla fighters, originally brought from Africa as plantation workers, and who ended up, among other things, building the Halifax citadel. In a striking parallel, Acadians would, for a group of exiles after 1755, contribute to the rebuilding of Savannah, Georgia, as white slaves – and the British authorities had consistently viewed them as ‘vermin’ because of their refusal to (supposedly) blindly obey colonial orders. The fate of Acadie was not sealed by negotiations between Acadians or even their Mi’kmaq neighbors and allies (at least according to European writers) but by negotiations between the French, the British, and the Spanish governments….in Europe. The fate of black people taken out of Africa during the slave trade of the 18th century was decided by French, Dutch, British and Spanish elites with the support of their governing administrations. Acadians then, under British then Canadian rule, had very little to say about their fate for quite a number of years. They had really no control over public schools which governments in the Maritimes wanted deliberately to use as a tool to ‘anglicize’ and assimilate them. Until the 1860s they had no political representation, and until 1884 no common goal to strive for in education, language rights, or economy. In many instances, Acadians working as company workers had no freedom whatsoever to decide their fate, linked to the companies that always made sure they would be in debt and forced to go on working – companies that belonged to the only classes with open credit lines in the Maritimes (people of British or Jersian origins in particular). It may be said, however, that there was a fundamental difference: Acadians had originally crossed the ocean more or less freely, looking for better living conditions than the ones of feudal Europe – particularly since the first colonists in Acadie were connected with Huguenots and this was a time during which ‘wars of religion’ had been raging in France - whereas Blacks were taken from Africa against their will, sold or kidnapped to go and toil for free for others. Acadians, particularly after the coming of Louis XIVth to power, were closely connected with Catholicism – Africans were, if not Muslim (a faith most of them would have to forget for Baptist, Methodist or Anglican ones after coming to America, at least until the late 20th century revival of ‘Black Islam’ in the USA) coming from the background of a totally different spiritual world even though they would fuse it with some Christian faiths (Methodist and Baptist in particular, although in Fredericton they were accepted, exceptionally, by the Anglican church). Sure, Acadians were still officially subjected to the feudal system while in Acadie, whether under the French or the British systems; the very title of one of the earliest studies of Acadie, Une Colonie Féodale en Amérique (1877) by French historian Rameau de Saint-Père, indicates that there was not a ‘special system’ that would officially have changed the system in France to a different one in Acadie. If it wasn’t official, though, in practice censuses under the French regime in Acadie until 1713 (an unusual practice at the time but quite useful for today’s historians) list households and their goods as though each family head was the actual owner of his land and buildings – a good indication whether there were slaves or not (in the French system at the time, slaves would also have been listed as property, a property regulated over time by the ‘Code Noir’). Rameau de Saint-Père, who came to the Maritimes in the 1870s,, encountered quite a number of blacks, to his utter amazement, which he of course refers to, in the terminology of the times, as ‘nègres’ or ‘Africains’ or even ‘cafres’. They were mostly around Digby and quite probably descendants of Black Refugees of the early 19th century or a few Black Loyalists who had stayed from the late 18th century, who had come to Canada to escape slavery in the United States. When Rameau came, though, slavery had been abolished, and he did not see blacks in the Acadian areas where former French settlers had relocated. This raises a question: were there any Acadians owners of slaves, given that the Transatlantic slave trade has racialized the notion of slavery, turning every black person into a potential slave? The feudal question is an important one to start making a distinction between French and Acadian – an important distinction: who had slaves under the French régime in Nova Scotia, before the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 transferred most of the colony to Britain, and the treaty of Paris in 1763 confirmed the ownership of all of the former Acadie – except for the islands of Saint Pierre et Miquelon – to Britain for good? European French administrators? European French settlers? Acadian settlers of original European stock? We know many British aristocrats and affluent middle-class Loyalists had slaves, so how about the French? France being a feudal society, with most of the important administrative or military positions occupied either by rich middle-class business people or by aristocrats until the 1789 French Revolution (after which the merchant middle-class grabbed the wheels of government, like the lobby from the Caribbean planters that got Napoleon Ist to reinstate slavery and fight against Haitian independence) usually through Royal support, the names we usually associate with the founding of the Acadian colony are names of those aristocrats who either led expeditions or were literate enough to leave us memoirs or other documents (particularly maps which were essential for military purposes and international negotiations) : du Gua de Monts, de Champlain, de Biencourt, de Poutrincourt, and so on. People who financed expeditions to the ‘New World’ belonged to the same social class; everyone else was a hired hand, or, in many cases, indentured workers brought to Acadie because of their professional skills as needed. Historians of the early Acadie (17th-18th centuries) are careful to distinguish between the founding of L’Acadie in 1604 and the beginning of Les Acadiens (or in 19th century terms ‘le peuple acadien’) in 1632 and subsequent years. After 1800 the history is mostly the progress of a people from total exclusion to gradual inclusion into the political, social, cultural and economic life of the Maritimes – with the major problem of defending and developing against all odds an identity based upon a different language – a problem blacks do not have since most blacks who came to Canada, be they loyalists or refugees, had become mostly English-speaking even though they may have retained African traditions including a few linguistic ones (3). L’Acadie was therefore a colony where the richest and the noblest had servants, and, in some cases, indentured workers and slaves. To some extent, the first Black man usually mentioned in the region, Mathieu da Costa (1589-1619) was a servant to expeditions that hired him for his linguistic and administrative talents. He combined quite nicely a ‘pre-Acadian’ and ‘Black’ identity within the same person, as he chose to work with French aristocrats like Du Gua de Monts (as attested by contracts) rather than with Dutch or British colonists, although he had been involved with Portugal to start with, possibly as an African-Portuguese métis. There is no indication that there were descendants of Mathieu da Costa in Acadie, although nothing is impossible (we may certainly imagine, for instance, a child from the union of a Mi’kmaq woman and Mathieu da Costa, a filiation that DNA use today would possibly enable us to follow). So, when we say that there were black slaves in Louisbourg, for instance – and there may well have been slaves in Port-Royal, among other places – these usually belonged to affluent French families either of the merchant class or of the administrator class. Some are quite well-attested to and certainly formed the nucleus of a pre-Loyalist black community in Nova Scotia, whether in Acadie under the French flag or a new colony under the British flag. In his study of blacks on the territory of what is now New Brunswick, W. A. Spray indicates the presence of black slaves in the French system as early as the founding of Acadie: ‘There is no doubt that the French settlers who lived in Acadia, of which the French considered New Brunswick to be a part, also owned slaves. However, there were probably far fewer slaves in Acadia than there were in New France. One Black man was reported to have died at Port Royal in 1606. This was the settlement founded by Champlain after his first disastrous attempt to form a settlement on St. Croix Island in the Bay of Fundy. In 1608, the year Champlain founded his settlement at Quebec, the French governor at Port Royal had a Black servant. This evidence shows that Black people were in Canada in the years when the first permanent settlements were established in Quebec and Nova Scotia.’ (Spray, 13) Acadians were, for the most part, craftspeople or farmers, with a few of them possibly becoming lower middle-class landowners or administrators during the French regime (like Mathieu Martin, the ‘lord’ of Cobequid, or the notary LeBlanc who became famous because he was quoted in Longfellow’s 19th-century poem Evangeline, although he is portrayed there in much more positive terms than he was actually worth). We know quite well who these slaves were. Looking at Maritime culture in French as being part of Franco-Acadian culture today, they are part of both the black and the French-Acadian heritage we share, whoever their owners were: ‘Most of the slaves in Ile Royale were involved in some sort of domestic service. The women among them performed a wide range of (domestic) duties..The men, like Charles (property of Pierre Benoist) performed many outdoor functions. They tended gardens, fed animals, cleaned stables, carried water and cut firewood. Thus, for those who could afford it, purchasing a slave brought higher status and improved living conditions. Since they could not write, slaves in 18th-century Cape Breton left few records of the kind that are wusually used by scholars. Yet the Louisbourg archives contain evidence that relates to the African presence on the island. Few in numbers, the slaves in Ile Royale would have known each other, and there is evidence theygathered together on occasions such as slave baptisms and weddings. Of the slaves whose birthplaces are known, 28 individuals were born in Louisbourg, 21 were from the French West Indies and another 12 were natives of French West Africa. Most of these people, with different backgrounds, but a common experience as slaves, would have spoken French, and had a variety of occupations. On Ile Royale they became servants, gardeners, bakers, tavern keepers, stone masons, musicians, laundry workers, soldiers, sailors, fishermen, hospital workers, ferry men, executioners and nursemaids. Most important, the enslaved people of this society became mothers and fathers; they were part of an evolving African-French colonial culture…’ (Donovan ) Some would leave a name as freed business people, like tavern owner Marie-Marguerite Rose. Her life and possessions are studied in detail in a chapter of the book on Viola Desmond’s Canada. There does not, however, seem to have been an obvius posterity to those slaves. Unless there are some deeply hidden secrets in some Cape Breton Acadian genealogies that may yet surface as being ‘black’ becomes more acceptable - the way having some Mi’kmaq ancestry has done over the years. One question may be asked: could any of that small elite have become slaveowners? Would the ordinary Acadians, farmers or craftspeople, have been possible slaveowners? This sounds like the hypothetical questions historians never ask, but curiously there is an answer to it. When after 1755 a number of Acadians were expelled from Nova Scotia, most were very badly treated in many New England states where their Catholic faith made them second-class people, their general poverty giving them few choices but to become beggars or indentured workers to survive; some, however, prospered, in particular in Maryland or in Georgia, and among that number a few quickly became slave-owners, a reality identified not only by Monique LeBlanc in her 2016 movie Acadie Black et Blanc but also in articles by Clint Bruce for instance: Constant Melançon whose parents were deported from Nova Scotia marked his higher social status by having Toussaint as a slave, for instance (Bruce 2018). That dimension, as the talk today is often, with the Congrès Mondial Acadien, of an “Acadie du Nord” (Maritimes and Qiebec) and “Acadie du Sud” (Louisiana and Texas), is an added element to the cross currents of Acadian and Black cultures, North and South : “Commonly perceived as being beautiful and simple, he believes that Acadian history is that of an oppressed people who suffered an injustice and then moved to other regions before being reborn from their ashes in Louisiana. "Using a kindling wood that was black slavery, and that is undeniable". Simplified in turn, the Louisiana culture exported around the world is often devoid of its subtleties. "Cajun culture does not come from a self-developed Acadian settlement, it's really the result of contact, especially with Africans and descendants of Africans," says Bruce. (Castonguay 2018) Clint Bruce adds: “Refugees in this Creole colony that will become an American state, many Acadians and their descendants were quick to adopt slavery. If history is known, it is not part of the Acadian collective narrative in Canada or even in Louisiana, where the Acadian experience founded the Cajun identity claimed by Zachary Richard and many others.” (Bruce 2018) Carl Brasseaux had already mentioned that unsavory but very real dimension of the Cajun way of life, not to be separated from the fact Cajuns (and New Orleans Creoles ( i.e white settlers born in Lousiana) fully supported the Confederacy, not only because it was in defense of their country, but also because it was the defense of a certain economic system based upon slavery that even poor whites were in agreement with since their livelihood was connected with it, although not directly (they wouldn’t have owned slaves themselves). The studies by Carl Brasseaux, and their elaboration by Clint Bruce, shed a light on the complex relationship in Louisiana between Blacks and Cajuns that is an important part of the broader Acadian saga – and of the large African diasporic saga. This, of course, was not the case in the Acadie du Nord. Acadians there were more concerned about their own enslavement to companies. Blacks, seen as very strange people, would not necessarily have been welcome among Acadians – the rural Acadie of the 19th century was not always welcoming strangers with open arms. It is hard from the travel notes of Rameau de Saint-Père as he goes through Nova Scotia in 1860 and 1861 to determine the mindset of the Acadian elite of the time about blacks, because the numerous racist remarks he makes about ‘les nègres’, particularly when speaking of the Digby area (which he compares to Africa) are only matched by his deeply seated racism against the British and his prejudices against the drunken Irish. In this sense, Rameau de Saint-Père (1820-1899), a rather conservative Frenchman, is probably more conservative than the Acadian elite of the time (which at least lived in North America) but his opinion cannot be discarded as not being representative, since his book La France aux colonies : études sur le développement de la race française hors de l'Europe ( 1859) is one of several of his supporting Acadian political and cultural revival, including the national conventions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that defined collective action in numerous directions. Catholic and conservative, very unhappy about seeing too many nègres around Digby, having nearly proposed to an Acadian girl, he certainly represented the trend which would have viewed the ‘French’ (including Acadians) as a ‘race’ – certainly not to be compared with blacks! Whether or not this view was possibly shared in Acadie at the time would have to be researched in greater detail, possibly in diaries, letters and personal memoirs when available. So: yes, Acadians could have had slaves, and in some cases when they were transplanted to an environment where slavery could be seen as normal, some at least adjusted to it and shared its values. Most, quite probably, however, could not, or chose not to. I still shudder, though, having been in a Cajun parish during the 1992 US presidential election, to have seen that at the local level there was in Breaux-Bridge (Pont-Breaux) quite a lot of visible support for David Duke, white supremacist ideologue and former KKK grand wizard, in his bid to become governor or Louisiana (he failed although Edwards, the Cajun elected then, ended up in jail for corruption later). Let us come back now to the personal recollection that triggered this desire to compare Blacks and Acadians in Nova Scotia and in the Maritimes. In the 1980s, I was working with the Fédération Acadienne de la Nouvelle-Écosse. At that time, it was seen by many in the Acadian community as a somewhat left-wing organization, basically an advocacy group for Acadian rights throughout the province, although its leader, Father Léger Comeau, was not quite a revolutionary, but more of a peacekeeper (with the aura of a Catholic priest) with middle-of-the-road and, in some cases, very conservative ideas. Most Acadians according to the definition of the Fane were living in rural areas – more or less at the two ends of the province – and those who came to town – particularly the Halifax-Dartmouth area – for work did not consider as a whole that this was in any way an ‘Acadian region’ with an ‘Acadian identity’ at the time – despite an attested presence by the French in the region from the early 17th century and the attested existence of a small French community in French landing, on the Bedford basin, which can be compared in a way with Africville founded in the 19th century on the same shores, and a Mi’kmaq community(Birch Cove) that would be there until 1917 – curiously enough, the three minorities that had been displaced by the founding of Halifax and Dartmouth. However, an important question had by then, in the 1970s, already become clearer. Most Acadians were leaving rural areas – where to some extent language, family traditions, and community support had made preservation of a more or less ‘traditional’ way of life possible – and were coming in greater numbers to urban environments, and particularly, in Nova Scotia, to Halifax-Darmouth. A similar phenomenon took place in all Francophone communities across Canada. People used to the support of a community were suddenly finding themselves lost in a city where the presence of French, not even to mention an identifiable French-speaking community, was simply not visible; there were no French schools anyway, and when there were some French institutions they were often geared towards non-Acadians with different cultural interests and often a very different type of French language (military from Quebec or Ontario, immigrants from France or Belgium, for instance). A poet of the early 2010s would even coin the word “Génocideville” (5) Genocide city, to indicate what she thought about growing up French-Acadian in Halifax – although there have been many significant changes from the situation at the time of the report Les Héritiers de Lord Durham, which portrayed in tragic terms the fact French-speaking communities in Canada outside Quebec had basically no country supporting their identity. Looking today, after the Canadian constitution of 1982 and particularly the Charter of Rights, at that document which had as its goal to make sure French-minorities around Canada would stop feeling isolated and would start claiming some rights to be recognized as part of our other official language community, leaves a strange feeling – there was so little protection for minorities then. Most figures in the document insist on the increase in linguistic assimilation from French to English which reaches staggering proportions, in particular because of a serious lack of support for linguistic minorities in English-speaking urban environments – the rates of linguistic ‘assimilation’ into the ‘anglo’ majority amounted pretty muchn to ‘cultural genocide (or ethnocide)’ for future generations. The notion of official language does not depend on numbers: the French-speaking community in Canada, as far as its language was concerned, was equally ‘an official language community’ as the English-speaking community. This had become even more obvious as, since 1968, the notion of ‘official languages’ had moved from the BNA Act (where it was recognized as a reality in the province of Quebec and some federal institutions) to the Official Languages act, with many recommendations for its implementation. Most of the goals of the Acadian Federation were of a political nature: there were at that time very few politicians in Nova Scotia even of Acadian origin (not to mention French-speaking) and there was no educational system in first-language French anywhere in the province. It would take several years and the repatriation of the Canadian constitution with its Charter of Rights to finally have not only schools but the control of those schools and of their programmes. It would take two decades to have some Acadian politicians sensitive to the needs of the communities and some civil servants and judges able to sort out what a minority needed. However, this could not be achieved at the federal level only; it had to be dealt with at a provincial level as well. Blacks would have with Mayann Francis a lieutenant-governor before the Acadian community would have one with former judge Leblanc, if the symbolic position of Queen’s representative in Nova Scotia is seen as a litmus test for the importance granted to minorities by the provincial and federal governments (which vet the nominations to that position). We may note in passing, because our comparison is more geared towards Nova Scotia, that in New Brunswick there had been several Acadian lieutenant-governors starting with Gilbert Finn, and there had been some even earlier in PEI. In the 1980s, Nova Scotia blacks had in a way problems similar to Acadians, although their problems were not of a linguistic nature since they were part of the English-speaking majority, however much they were discriminated against in many ways. The problem was in their case both a North American one and a specifically Nova Scotian one. Blacks had no more representation in the Provincial legislature than French-Acadians did; they had been systematically discriminated against as far as the school system was concerned; they were, numerically, even a smaller minority. The Black United Front was part of a more active reaction to their situation than the more traditional black organizations – a difference in the way different generations perceived problems and possible solutions which was also present in the Acadian community. Wayne Adams, the first Black MLA from Preston, was elected in 1993, to be followed by Yvonne Atwell in 1998: before, however much they may have been called in to support a candidate or another, blacks were not represented in the Provincial assembly in Nova Scotia. It was, therefore, hard not to imagine that there might have been, if not similar goals, at least a similar approach to problems: the three obvious minorities in Nova Scotia – Franco-Acadians, blacks, and Mi’kmaq – might have had a common interest in getting things to change, particularly in getting structures more adjusted to their specific needs. In practice, though, did this amount to possible cooperation, or were differences between communities too great for common action? We can measure today the progress in greater awareness by society in general – starting with governmental structures – by looking at what was done for the three main minorities in Nova Scotia (one visible – the Black community -, one visible and linguistic – the Mi’kmaq – one linguistic –the French-Acadian community). There has been since early in this century a minister of Acadian affairs, which is increasingly now responsible for our relations at all levels with la francophonie internationale (the position is currently held by the Hon. Lena Diab, herself of Lebanese descent); there has been for more than a decade a minister of Afro-Nova Scotian affairs, a position currently held by Tony Ince, himself a black MLA; and results of the Truth and Reconciliation commission have certainly started to produce more awareness of the situation of Mi’kmaq people in their own country and on their own land, even though it may take decades to reverse the disastrous effects of residential schools and the treatment on reserves by the Indian act. The major scandal of Residential schools, which were used by the federal government and the provinces as an instrument to assimilate ‘Indians’ and turn their children into white settlers – thus gradually eliminating the need to consider any special ‘status’ for indigenous people – is now behind us, although the last one closed only in 1996 in Saskatchewan. It is matched by the scandalous situation of the Nova Scotia home for colored children, which operated from 1921 to 1980, and has been denounced by both minister Ince and Premier MacNeil this Spring 2019, after receiving tragic reports from commissions looking into abuse and racism. It took until 1991 for the French-Acadian minority to finally have not only schools for its children in their language and culture, but also the control of those schools (a right granted not by the province, but by the Charter of Rights, although education is of provincial jurisdiction). In the late 1970s, all these were yet in the future. So here I was , going into the offices of the Black United Front, somewhere down from Grand Parade, to see if there is any connection that we might reasonably consider working with. I was met with charm by some young girls, and to this day I cannot remember if I did come out of that office with any notes or not – but it did not seem obvious to me that there could be a connection at that time beyond the fact we were all agitating and activating against powers that simply did not want to recognize our existence as different. I was a bit disappointed, though. I had not been welcomed with open arms. Acadian support for black causes did not seem to be high on the list for the BUF. Wasn’t I, after all, a poet and intellectual of the generation that shared not only the books by Pierre Vallières where he considered us as the Black Niggers of America, les Nègres Blancs d’Amérique, as the title he had chosen for his 1968 book? Didn’t I share what Michèle Lalonde, the blonde poetess from Montréal, had exemplified in her most famous poem – a very oral poem – Speak White – that the fight of Quebec youth – you didn’t talk much about Acadian youth by then - against exploitation, assimilation, haughtiness by ‘Anglo-American’ capitalist lobbies was in a way close to the will of blacks in the United States for civil rights, to the fight of African countries for independence from European business and colonial interests? Years later, there may be less idealism, but it is difficult not to quote the poem in its oral, intense entirety; even though the author is montréalaise, the mention of .Longfellow leaves no doubt that her call also includes Acadians. For any French-Canadian, the expression ‘Speak white’ had been encountered numerous times, as soon as some members of the Anglo majority discovered you were not quite speaking what they considered ‘a Christian language’: Giving orders Setting the time for working yourself to death And for the pause that refreshes And invigorates the dollar Speak white Tell us that God is a great big shot And that we're paid to trust him Speak white Talk to us about production profits and percentages Speak white It's a rich language For buying But for selling But for selling your soul But for selling out Ah! Speak white Big deal But to tell you about The eternity of a day on strike To tell the story of How a race of servants live But for us to come home at night At the time that the sun snuffs itself out over the backstreets But to tell you yes that the sun is setting yes Every day of our lives to the east of your empires There's nothing to match a language of swearwords Our none-too-clean parlure Greasy and oil-stained. Speak white Be easy in your words We're a race that holds grudges But let's not criticize anyone For having a monopoly On correcting language In Shakespeare's soft tongue With the accent of Longfellow Speak a pure and atrociously white French Like in Vietnam, like in the Congo Speak impeccable German A yellow star between your teeth Speak Russian speak call to order speak repression Speak white It is a universal language We were born to understand it With its teargas words With its nightstick words Speak white Tell us again about Freedom and Democracy We know that liberty is a black word Just as poverty is black And just as blood mixes with dust in the streets of Algiers And Little Rock Speak white From Westminster to Washington take it in turn Speak white like they do on Wall Street White like they do in Watts Be civilized And understand us when we speak of circumstances When you ask us politely How do you do And we hear you say We're doing all right We're doing fine We Are not alone We know That we are not alone (Michèle Lalonde, 1970, translated Albert Herring, 2001–2012) So, where are we today with some convergence between Blacks and Franco-Acadians, after all that? Cooperation and convergence – and not only for specific political goals – seems to be increasingly the norm. In a surprising South-North reversal of the ‘missionary’ situation of past centuries, several priests in Acadian parishes are coming from Africa, but it has more to do with the fact there are fewer and fewer priests coming from the Acadian community (and other francophones are not particularly religious) than with any kind of tradition. However, a number of those priests feel quite at home in Acadie, although in some urban environments they may face the fact they do not know much about Acadian culture and traditions (a problem the diocese of Bathurst is trying to remedy by having some of them take courses in French and Acadian culture prior to their involvement in parish work). This also applies to Louisiana, although of course the rift between communities caused by slavery is much longer to erase: some Blacks see themselves as Cajun as well, thanks to gatherings based on family names for instance, despite the inevitable amount of racism that Monique LeBlanc brought out in her movie (like the Kajun Klan Song or the color test at the Aristocrat Club, for instance) and some room for equality seems to have become more obvious; on the Website ’64 Parishes’ a long interview with Nigerian priest Moussa Sadou, a 20-year resident of Louisiana, starts with the sentence ‘I feel at home here’ (‘Je me sens chez moi ici en Louisiane’) – the same expression used by a priest from Congo who has worked for years on PEI. The same is true of African journalists working in some weeklies in particular, and African academics at Maritime universities, and not only at the Université de Moncton, which also welcomes students from various African countries as well as Haitian students – with a few well-known Haitian professors. When you talk about Haitians in Canada, though, the line between mulattoes (usually a well-off political and economic elite) and blacks (usually poorer and with little power except under the presidency of a few blacks which quickly turned dictators for various reasons) is still quite present: it is not because a minority is a minority that divisions and differences within that minority disappear. So there is a difference, for instance, in the outlook of people like the political science professor…… and his daughter, who served as Canadian ambassador, and a professor like Dr. Gérard Etienne, who found himself caught between a number of contradictions not only within his Québécoise-Acadian-Haitian identity, but also by his choice of becoming Jewish (the quintessentially discriminated minority in the Christian world) to espouse the identity of his wife, Nathania Feuerwerker. This double identity is the topic of a lyrical chant with two voices, Natania ( ) written after the founder of the journalism programme at the Université de Moncton left the Maritimes for Montréal where he died. At the Salon du Livre in Dieppe (NB) in we had the opportunity to reevaluate for the first time the importance Dr. Etienne had for the Acadian community. This however did not translate – except for the durable journalism programme – into a group movement: his hopes in of being named Haitian consul to the Maritimes (an enthusiasm I shared with him) never happened, nor did his desire to possibly become Haitian minister of education; his growing opposition to Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (for moral and personal reasons as much as for ideological ones, which can be seen in theatre form in the play for a Montreal theatre Monsieur le Président), his surprising contacts with the junta that kicked Aristide out, and his subsequent series of pamphlets and editorials in ….. against Aristide, created a major void around him in the Haitian community, while the Acadian community more or less chose to forget a man who had been a major defender of French-speaking developments in Acadie (which he compared to a colonized society along the lines of Haiti) for more than thirty years, had contributed considerably to develop Acadian literature with Les Éditions d’Acadie in Moncton, scholarship with his stewardship as editor-in-chief of La Revue de l’Université de Moncton, communications with the journalism (called .information-communication.) programme at the Université de Moncton, and been a driving force in making Acadian writers of the 1970s to the 1990s known to the Québec literary milieu and its media. His status as Haitian writer is secured by his presence in the records of the…….. (centre haitien à Montréal); his role in Acadie as a pioneer is still, except for the presentation at the Dieppe salon du Livre in…. mentioned above, quite limited. The only point of convergence in Gérard Etienne’s (and Natania Feuerwerker-Etienne’s) legacy in Halifax is the fact his son, Joel, now an immigration lawyer in Ontario, married a woman from the Jewish community in Halifax., but neither parents nor children live in the Maritimes. His older children from a first marriage, and his daughter Mikhaela as well live in Quebec and in Ontario. Gérard Étienne appears in retrospect like a bright literary star whose impact was mostly with inspiring writers and journalists from the 1970s to the early 21st century. As the French say, Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps, but with the development of relations between the Maritimes and Haiti at many levels (from policemen sent to train Haitian police, like the former chief of Halifax police, to economic exchanges) it is likely that sooner or later the contribution of Gérard Etienne to Acadie, however sour it turned at the end for reasons which will likely never be disclosed, will be recognized as important. Then there are people who may face similar hardships. We may be on different wavelengths nationally – but on similar ones provincially. When the NDP government came to power in Nova Scotia, it was preceded by many political rallies for years, and young people among Acadians and Blacks were quite elated – several of them had been candidates for the ‘third party’ in the past. For Blacks, wasn’t the presence of Percy Paris, who would be not only a black MLA but a minister in government, an important step, despite the fact he was often the only black politician in both positions? It is true that there were not many Acadian politicians belonging to the NDP, but still there was obvious support in many places for the party. Things, however, turned sour. Percy Paris, for many reasons, ended his political career disappointingly. The NDP decided to end electoral districts for blacks and Acadians. The very situation that needed redressing, as the quote from the Journal De Montréal at the beginning of this research made clear. There is however a challenge for Afro-Canadian immigrants who want to join the Acadian community, and it goes beyond the problem of language. In Nova Scotia, they are trapped in a difficult situation: the large majority of black people in Halifax, for instance, are English-speaking; little attention is paid by them to what they see as a limited number of recent immigrants when problems for the English-speaking majority of the black minority are pressing and need to be addressed. A tourism conference a few years ago left very little room to French-speaking blacks , when in fact the majority of French speakers worldwide in 2050 will be Africans. When the first Black Film Festival took place here in 2018, even though the founder and manager, Fabienne Colas, was a Montreal-based French-speaking Haitian, she was convinced there was no French cultural life in Halifax. Her perception was corrected, to some extent, in 2019 (when I interviewed her for French community radio Oui98.5 FM and covered the main festival). Francophone communities are certainly more open now than in the past but the number of black immigrants is still very limited – and priests are not a category of people who are going to foster a natural development in children and future generations. And yet: the development of the French-Acadian community throughout the Maritimes depends on immigration, a large portion of that immigration may well come from French-speaking Africa, and this may well mean that the historical identity of a broad black community going back to Mathieu da Costa and the slaves in Louisbourg, distinct from English speaking Black Loyalists and Black Refugees, will need to be taken increasingly into account. Africadian, Atlantic…but in French, not just in English. So let me come back to my emic experience of looking, at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, when one thing became obvious for the Francophone community in Halifax in particular – since in other regions at the time an old ethnic Acadian identity was basically the fundamental identity factor. Whereas the report Les Héritiers de Lord Durham emphasized the inequality of French communities across Canada not only with the anglophone majority in Canada but with the anglophone minority in Quebec, French people in the country being members of an official language minority, it became obvious that within the province(s) the status of French communities had to be considered with a number of differences; first of all was the fact that, however much there were numerous individual or regional or even ethnic differences within the ‘anglo’ settler majority, there were in Nova Scotia three specific minorities that could be identified not by the same traits, but by the fact they had, at one point or another, been discriminated against by the ruling elites of originally British stock. They were the black, Mi’kmaq, and Acadian minorities. They could even be identified at a biological level: the fetal assessment unit at the main Halifax hospital suggested fetal monitoring of potentially genetic defects to parents from any of those groups (my own emic experience with the fetal assessment unit). They did not face the same problems, they may even have had major disagreements in the way to approach problems, but there was one element that all might have had in common, which was a the time hinted at but has since become the focus of more specific academic studies: what can be defined broadly as inter-generational trauma. Intergenerational trauma has been the topic of several serious studies on black communities in the United States, Jewish communities in North America and in Europe, and in Canada indigenous communities; one of the important specialists of the impact of inter-generational trauma in indigenous communities in Canada (looking in particular at residential schools.) is Dr. Amy Bombay, at Dalhousie university, also working with the Indigenous Group in Medical Sciences (IGMS) and the Atlantic Aboriginal Health Research Program (AAHRC): her work concludes that inter-generational trauma is a reality, although not studied enough, partly because the effects of intergenerational trauma, particularly for minorities, can only be perceived and understood after three generations. In the article Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology (A. Bombay; K. Matheson; H. Anisman, 2013) she draws a number of examples for intergenerational trauma from studies on Jewish minorities in the USA and black communities in the USA as well. Trauma is a common link between Acadians (the genocidal Grand Dérangement of 1755 – 1800), Blacks (slavery and the following discrimination from the 17th to the 20th century), Indigenous nations (genocidal colonization by European settler societies with genocidal policies long into the 20th century). Dr. Bombay considers that the degree of trauma is linked with the perceived ethnic identity centrality: in other words, all three groups here (plus Jewish minorities) are feeling the trauma more over generations because their identity as minorities remains central to their feeling part of a special community which is their basic culture; that feeling is reinforced among Acadians and francophones in Canada by the use of a different language than English, among blacks by skin color and different cultural codes including body language, among indigenous people by language and physical appearance (or perceived physical appearance because of white prejudice). In other, simpler words, the more minorities assert their identity, the more they feel the effect of the intergenerational trauma – however, there is little alternative: the less they assert their identity, the more the situation turns out to be for many a variant of the social problems the extreme of which can be found in the legacy of the Residential schools for Mikmaq people, in the difficulties faced by the black community after the destruction of Africville, and in the inferiority complex and various strategies used by Acadians to change their names (Leblanc to White) and claim anglo IDs in order to get jobs and not be considered hicks from some backward rural area filled with illiterates and inbred cousins. There lies probably a way to connect those minorities. No, we didn’t succeed in bringing all of them together in the 1980s, but the fact that the Journal de Montréal in 2019 still linked political representation for Acadians and Blacks is proof enough that there are points of convergence worth looking into in greater detail, at all levels. We may not necessarily go as far as Quebec black journalist Boucar Diouf who considers himself ‘Acadien’ because he is supporting all minorities fighting against linguistic assimilation (Boucar Diouf is known for tongue-in-cheek pronouncements on a number of topics) but we may feel that there is, after 400 years of crisscrossing the same spaces, some points on which Blacks and Acadians may find common ground for joint future development. It may not be purely a matter of chance if the last two Canadian parliamentary poet laureates have been a male black poet from Nova Scotia (George Eliot Clarke) followed by a female white Acadjonne poet from Nova Scotia (Georgette Leblanc). When the translation of the iconic play La Sagouine by Antonine Maillet was done by Luis de Cespedes a few decades ago, the translator’s choice was to use black urban slang to translate the type of literary vernacular created by Antonine Maillet (somewhat along the lines of what Michel Tremblay did for oral Quebec speech). This was around the same time as Speak White and my foray in the offices of the Black United Front in Halifax. After all, since French-Canadians in general and Acadians in particular were also the victims of the overarching power of white Anglo-American Liberal capitalism, was there not an immediate kinship between black lingo, although urban, and Acadian parlure (rural vernacular) or even chiac (urban mixed-code slang) – all being the oral expression of the socio-eonomic status of an exploited, dominated, discriminated community? In his thesis about the translation of Amédé by Georgette Leblanc – the story of a black musician from Texas written by an Acadian-Cajun writer – Eric Dow(himself a singer with the Acadian group Cy) puts the problem even more clearly: ‘the use of non-standard linguistic features in Acadian literature has played an important role in helping to demark Acadian authors from their literary contemporaries within the Canadian and international francophonie, as evidenced by the growing critical and institutional interest in authors such as LeBlanc. Furthermore, LeBlanc’s Amédé is a prime example of the liberating effect of this growing interest in the literary use of vernacular: As seen above, LeBlanc ample use of the various lexical and morphosyntactic particularities of BSMAF throughout her oeuvre plays an important role in the creation of metadiscursive content and could be described as one of the text’s primary strengths. With all this in mind, it is my view that in order to adequately render the metadiscursive function of LeBlanc’s use of a literary sociolect, the exploitation of a parallel, analogous sociolect should therefore play a central role in our reconstruction of the source text in its new language culture. In failing to do so, I believe that a central aspect of the source text would simply be lost in translation. Having taken this decision, the question then becomes the following: Which English sociolect would be best suited a reconstruction of BSMAF in the context of our translation?’(Dow, 2018, 32) Eric Dow even quotes the notion of ‘Africadian’ made popular by George Eliot Clarke (although the term is not necessarily in common Black or Acadian use beyond the identification of GEC himself) : “I use the term “Africadian”, a word I have minted from “Africa” and “Acadia” (the old name for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick), to denote the Black populations of the Maritimes and especially of Nova Scotia. Other appellations – “Afro-Nova Scotian, Black Nova Scotian”, etc. – are unwieldy. Moreover, if Africadians constitute a state, let it be titled Africadia.” George Elliott Clarke (Dow, 2018, 25) Aware that the idea of having an equivalence between Acadian vernacular and Black slang might imply a close similarity between the two groups, Eric Dow quickly indicates that this does not mean similarity but some kind of convergence: ‘That being said, it is important to stress that the objective of this mise en rapport is not to establish an absolute equivalency between Acadian and Africadian language cultures; two groups who, despite 29 their similar experiences, have evolved in different cultural and racial contexts. However, in analyzing both language cultures and their relationships with their respective French and English literary systems, the goal is to establish a structural parallel of the type “A is to X what B is to Y” by underscoring through translation the parallel historical, sociolinguistic and literary elements that make of Africadian English such an interesting avenue for the translation of Acadian French (Buzelin 2002:125).’ (Dow 2018, 28-29) Maybe there is, according to Boucar Diouf, a way for blacks to ‘speak white’ that is the whiteness of those who faced problems not dissimilar to the hurdles faced by blacks and by indigenous nations: ‘Moi, je suis solidaire de tous les francophones du Canada qui preferent la cohabitation côte à côte à l’anglicisation coast to coast. Voilà pourquoi je suis Acadien.’ (Diouf, 2016). Maybe there was some intuition of that in my trip to the Black United Front offices, after all. Yes, we are part of a space where much in common can be used at many levels – political and cultural to start with. Notes Note on the choice of terms: ‘Grand Dérangement’ (‘major upheaval’) is the term commonly used by Acadians to indicate the events from 1755 to 1800 that saw them uprooted, expelled from what is now the Maritimes, with a high rate of children’s and adult’s deaths for some communities and lasting consequences for all. If, like Moncton historian Maurice Basque, I personally do not consider the term ‘genocide’ appropriate although there are genocidal aspects to it, the terms traditionally used in English, like expulsion, deportation, or relocation, are euphemistic in nature and definitely not accurate. Hiring teachers for francophone New Brunswick schools who may not have the required knowledge about Acadian culture and heritage seems to be a problem today since many teachers are hired from abroad mostly on a linguistic basis. This is of course part of a broader question since many francophone immigrants coming to redress demographic imbalances in the French community of the Maritimes are simply not ‘Acadian’ at all. Two broadcasts by Société Radio-Canada for New Brunswick indicate the difficult situation in recruiting enough teachers (‘Une rentrée scolaire marquee par une pénurie de personnel’ Sept. 23, 2019: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1284187/rentree-scolaire-nouveau-brunswick-manque-suppleants-chauffeurs) but finding it difficult to hire teachers with a satisfactory understanding of the Acadian cultural context (Saint-Pierre, Rose, ‘Pénurie d’Enseignants: les nouveaux arrivants dénoncent un paradoxe’ Société Radio-Canada – Acadie Nouvelle, 11 décembre 2019: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1427396/immigration-integration-economique-acadie-enseignement). The problem of immigrant workers in cultural fields (teaching, church, arts, literature, journalism) is made more complex today because the majority of French immigrants and foreign students (who may possibly stay and work after completing their degree) in the French communities in the Maritimes are of non-European origin (mainly subSaharan Africa and Northern Africa). The whole question is of course broader as well, since the majority of Francophones worldwide by 2050 will be in Africa (although Africans have a very different relationship to French however it has remained their international or national language of choice after the end of colonization in the 1960s) but it is unlikely black immigrants will become a majority as Acadie is increasingly asserting its identity in all cultural areas. There are quite a number of time-lines for Acadian history online, although most are not necessarily logical in their selection of dates. Since the pattern is easily followed from 16th to 18th century (settlement followed by destruction), 19th and 20th centuries (reconstruction) and 21st century (developmental challenges) one can read through the following: echo.franco.ca/hieracadie/index-Voir=menu&Repertoire_No=2137987417&M=1330.cfm.html or https://www.ccgh.ca/centredelafrancophonie (bilingual). In the first century l’Acadie was not exclusively French-speaking but the lingua franca was a mix of French, Basque, Portuguese, English, with gradually more words borrowed from Mi’kmaq. The poem ‘Génocideville’ by Céleste Godin can be found at http://kindofinteressant.weebly.com/blog/genocideville. It can be read along with this blog in Astheure: https://astheure.com/2016/06/30/mon-assimilation-mon-exil-celeste-godin/ Céleste Godin is now living in Moncton, New Brunswick. Her views match sections of a movie by Phil Comeau around the same time (Zachary Richard, Toujours Batailleur, 2016, part of which is shot in Halifax). Sources On blacks and Acadians being similar: Diouf, Boucar, ‘Je suis Acadien’, Montréal : La Presse, 14 mai 2016, available at http://plus.lapresse.ca/screens/26209198-6dc2-4637-a4ba-41b154f1797a__7C___0.html On being a ‘métis’ and either black or Acadian: http://afrometis.ca/indigenous-blacks-an-irreconcilable-identity/ Acadians and other French https://www.saltscapes.com/roots-folks/1447-not-all-acadians.html On possible conflicts involving land: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/blacks-acadians-politics-legislature-diversity-representation-1.4281288 On black history with mention of Acadians: http://blackhalifax.com/time-line/ Black refugees and Acadians The peculiar case of blacks in Little Tracadie http://blackloyalist.com/cdc/communities/tracadie.htm Acadians, Cajuns, and relations with African Americans Thomas, Leanna I A Fractured Foundation: Discontinuities in Acadian Resettlement in Louisiana, 1755-1803, Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Spring 2014), pp. 198-227 (30 pages), published by: Louisiana Historical Association. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/24396379?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents Whole text available as PDF at https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/24396379.pdf?casa_token=qyG0pT-s_5sAAAAA:8OCisAAwgy9OxA_TZgRStMIG_faaH9D4DPHhoB8ouhvMWkEEo3a9JSXKOxT5y9R_sHqG-s-GghRAyyHfKvd00n8IXBnRis7g1X4f5zHl9spBQjB4-rM On political representation: Journaldemontreal.com/2018/03/27/une-loi-pour-favoriser-la-representation-des-noirs-et-des-acadiens-en-nouvelle-ecosse (Agence QMI, 27 mars 2018) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/blacks-acadians-politics-legislature-diversity-representation-1.4281288 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/blacks-acadians-politics-legislature-diversity-representation-1.4281288 On being a ‘métis’ and either black or Acadian: http://afrometis.ca/indigenous-blacks-an-irreconcilable-identity/ On Rameau de Saint-Père : Une colonie féodale en Amérique (l'Acadie, 1604-1710) Paris : Didier et Co., 1877 A copy can be found at http://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.12359/5?r=0&s=1 The diary of Rameau from the manuscript pages of his travels through the Maritimes: Leblanc, Ronnie-Gilles (ed) Voyage de Rameau de Saint-Père en Acadie (Le) 1860, Montréal : Éditions du Septentrion 2018 https://www.septentrion.qc.ca/catalogue/voyage-de-rameau-de-saint-pere-en-acadie-le Slaves in Louisbourg Donovan, Kenneth, ‘Slaves and Their Owners in Ile Royale’, 1713-1760: Acadiensis 1995 http://www.mwlandry.ca/ref/acadiensisesclavesileroyale1713_1760.pdf http://www.fortressrum.com/the-ledger/19-years-a-slave-the-story-of-marie-marguerite-rose/ There is a lot of information published on the Blacks in Nova Scotia and slavery in the province. There are some sources for Blacks in New Brunswick, particularly around the Fredericton area (where an interesting integration of blacks and whites took place in an Anglican church). This may include some information on the relationship of blacks and Acadians but none seemed obvious beyond the mention of Raymond and some possible blacks at the beginning of the French régime and some slaves attached to French administrators. Consult for instance https://mynewbrunswick.ca/black-history-of-new-brunswick/ based upon Spray, W.A., The Blacks in New Brunswick: Brunswick Press, 1972, available as .pdf at https://preserve.lib.unb.ca/wayback/20141205155416/http://atlanticportal.hil.unb.ca/acva/blackloyalists/en/context/articles/spray.pdf Interestingly, in the list of Black Refugees arriving in New Brunswick in 1836 we have someone named ‘John Frenchman’ (Spray, 49) Viola Desmond’s Canada has a whole chapter devoted to Louise Marie Rose. On African missionaries: https://fr.aleteia.org/2019/09/19/des-missionnaires-africains-a-la-rescousse-des-acadiens/ On Moussa Sadou : https://www.facebook.com/64Parishes/ Perkyns, Marguerite, Mick, Matt “Je me sens chez moi ici en Louisiane” Nigerien Moussa Sadou makes a home for himself in Louisiana https://64parishes.org/je-me-sens-chez-moi-ici-en-louisiane?fbclid=IwAR1iFJL-Q_1ji5qHNJDcXR2nTvfCS0ojuRAWdKaPg4VI5Gb-JyY8ZuPcK-4 En Acadie du NB (Saint Quentin) Le père Crépin Khondo , Acadie Nouvelle, 2015 https://www.acadienouvelle.com/actualites/2015/03/08/un-pretre-africain-pour-saint-quentin/ Boisvert, Jean-François, Prètres de l’étranger, une solution inévitable https://www.acadienouvelle.com/actualites/2015/03/08/pretres-de-letranger-une-solution-inevitable/ Guigou, Claire, Des missionnaires africains à la rescousse des Acadiens, Oeuvres Pontificales Missionnaires | 19 septembre 2019 https://fr.aleteia.org/2019/09/19/des-missionnaires-africains-a-la-rescousse-des-acadiens/ History of Blacks from the Congo in New Brunswick https://ici.radio-canada.ca/premiere/emissions/l-heure-de-pointe-acadie/segments/reportage/57438/mois-histoire-noirs-moncton On Blacks in Cape Breton: Industrial Island – African-Caribbean Migration to Cape Breton, Canada, 1900-1930 by Claudine Bonner Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia September 2017 On the article by Clint Bruce: https://archives.francopresse.ca/2018/03/30/de-deporte-a-esclavagiste/ Castonguay, Pascale, « Comprendre l’Acadie au-delà de ses frontières », 9 août 2018 (Le professeur Clint Bruce s’emploie à documenter certains volets de l’histoire du peuple acadien grâce au prisme de sa diaspora). https://www.affairesuniversitaires.ca/actualites/actualites-article/comprendre-lacadie-au-dela-de-ses-frontieres/ Bruce, Clint Par tous les moyens nécessaires : l’assassinat de Constant Melançon, Acadien louisianais, par Toussaint, son esclave et camarade d’enfance, HistoireEngagée.ca, 29 mars 2018 https://histoireengagee.ca/category/collaborateurs/clint-bruce/ Lalonde, Michèle Speak White (1970) English translation by Albert Herring (2001-2002) https://umaine.edu/teachingcanada/wp-content/uploads/sites/176/2015/06/1-Speak-Whiteen.pdf Structures d’accueil immigrants africains http://www.immigrationfrancophonene.ca/ (Nouvelle-Écosse, IFNÉ) Alexandre Boudreau, ‘Le Nouveau-Brunswick vise 7500 nouveaux immigrants par année’, L’Acadie Nouvelle, 27 août 2019 https://www.acadienouvelle.com/actualites/2019/08/27/croissance-demographique-le-n-b-vise-7500-nouveaux-immigrants-par-annee/ On intergenerational trauma in minorities: Bombay, A., Matheson, K., & Anisman, H. (2013, July 8). Appraisals of Discriminatory Events Among Adult Offspring of Indian Residential School Survivors: The Influences of Identity Centrality and Past Perceptions of Discrimination. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0033352 About Acadian Memorial Day https://www.facebook.com/notes/soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9-nationale-de-lacadie/jour-du-souvenir-acadien-lacadie-se-recueille/2661754180537359/ Acadie Black et Blanc (movie, French with subtitles) The movie Acadie Black et Blanc by Monique LeBlanc can be seen through several websites, including this one: https://www.rcinet.ca/mhn-fr/2016/02/09/acadie-black-et-blanc-lesclavagisme-pratique-par-les-acadiens-de-la-louisiane/ Les Héritiers de Lord Durham : The full document (a report prepared by the FCFA, the umbrella organization for all francophone associations of Canada outside Quebec) can be found at: À https://fcfa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/heritiers-de-lord-durham.pdf About the Office of African Affairs in Nova Scotia: https://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/unclear-mandates-at-the-office-of-african-nova-scotian-affairs/Content?oid=17025898 The question of the home for colored children: https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/ince-moved-to-tears-as-he-delivers-interim-report-on-n-s-home-for-colored-children-1.4367746 On political representation: journaldemontreal.com/2018/03/27/une-loi-pour-favoriser-la-representation-des-noirs-et-des-acadiens-en-nouvelle-ecosse https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/blacks-acadians-politics-legislature-diversity-representation-1.4281288 On Georgette Leblanc http://nsmasterworks.ca/alma-and-amede-2010/ On translation of Acadian text: Dow, Eric, From Acadian to Africadian Translation and Analysis of Georgette LeBlanc’s Amédé: A Case Study in Translating Sociolect , MA theis, School of Translation and Interpretation, University of Ottawa, 2018. Available at: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/37605/3/Dow_Eric_2018_thesis.pdf On the Halifax Black Film Festival and Fabienne Colas: https://halifaxblackfilm.com/ 45