Sean Walker
October 11th, 2016
Dr. Tracey Pennylight
HIST 1120
Reading Log #5
Acadians and Their Story
The Acadians have a really quite interesting history and story to tell us, and all it takes is a couple of google searches to find the right stuff. The Acadians were a people who were descended from the French but through generations of Acadians being born in New France started to develop their own culture and their own cultural identity that was separate from the French.
It was when Samuel De Champlain moved to Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal) in 1605, that really got the ball rolling for the development of the Acadian Cultural Identity. It is because of Champlain moving to Port Royal that caused a lot of what would become Acadian families to move to the countryside surrounding Port Royal, in just a few years Port Royal would become a major Acadian town. By the 1630’s The Acadians were already starting to develop a cultural identity centered around farming, hunting, and fishing. One of the main tenants of Acadian society is that they wanted to stay neutral in any wars between the French an the British, even though the Acadian lands changed ownership between the French and the British quite often.
When the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713 and the Spanish war of succession ended, all of Acadians on Nova Scotia were made into British citizens, while the Acadians who resided on Le royal (Cape Breton) and Le Saint Jean (Prince Edward Island) remained French. Although the Acadians were now separated by new national boundaries, that did not have as much impact on how they should think about their now “foreign” Countrymen.
While the Acadians have a long and often tragic history, their descendants, whether those descendants be the Cajuns of Louisiana or the various small Acadian settlements still present on present day Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, keep the traditions and the cultural values of their Ancestors thriving to this day
Bibliography
CBC. (2016, january 16). The Acadians. Retrieved from The Acadians: http://www.cbc.ca/acadian/index.html