In August of 1755 an extraordinary plan went into action along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, in what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. In village after village, all male householders were summoned to mandatory meetings with British authorities, where they were captured and imprisoned as hostages against the surrender of their homes and families. Houses were burned to the ground, livestock indiscriminately slaughtered, fields of crops laid waste. Those who resisted were beaten, and sometimes shot, while those who fled into the forests were hunted down like rabid animals.

...

These were the Acadians, a French-speaking hybrid people long cut off from their European origins who occupied a strange position on the margins of American history and in between the imperial ambitions of Britain and France. For 150 years they lived along the coastline of what are now the Maritime Provinces, forging extraordinarily warm relationships with their Indian neighbors and insisting on their own neutrality as sovereignty of the region swung back and forth between the great powers.

Ultimately, the Acadians' oddness and specialness would lead to their destruction. But while their culture lasted they seemed to represent an alternate vision of North American settlement, one based more on friendship, accommodation and cultural exchange than on conquest, war and extermination. As Yale historian John Mack Faragher documents in his major new history of the Acadians and their downfall, "A Great and Noble Scheme," this semi-literate fishing and farming people forged a prosperous, autonomous and nearly idyllic society that was unique in the Western world.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:22 PM  |