Acadie, and the Coming of an Idea!

It began with a book.  Actually, it began with my never-spoken-of heritage.  As I toured the historic sites in the region the idea germinated.  The idea.

Painting - Acadie - Dan Brown

I have always been interested in my Acadien roots, and in the reasons why my mother chose to close the door on this aspect of my family history.  I was raised in a Loyalist city, educated in English schools, though accessibility to a French school was entirely possible.  I remember my grandmother's excessively broken English, as she would occasionally revert to the more natural rhythms of French out of frustration.  I remember numerous trips to Quebec when I was a child and my mother stubbornly refusing to respond in the language of the province, though this language was her very own. 

The 60s and 70s in Canada rife with multi-various cultural biases; some toward minorities, others English toward French, and as I would come to know - Quebec-French toward the french of L'Acadie.  These biases still exist to this day, the stagnant remnants of an old and nullifying cultural elitism.  Living in Quebec in the 60s and 70s, my mother and father fully endured this cultural ostracizing and low level abuse, a kind specific to Acadiens. For my mother, it would ultimately manifest as a rejection of her Acadien heritage, a rejection that did not dissipate after returning to New Brunswick.  It was a reaction I never understood.

Familial dysfunctions aside, I would carry this cultural void with me.  As I discovered my skill with the pen I knew one day I would somehow use it, as any writer worth his salt will utilize dysfunction for creativity.  It is from these places that ideas are born.

Then I got my hands on a copy of  John Mack Faragher's 'A Great and Noble Scheme'.   

For the past couple of years I have been trying to tour all of the Acadien historic sites, military forts, locations of landings and historic villages in Atlantic Canada. I explored, asked questions and shivered on the verge of a worthy project that has eluded me for some time.

I can see through the creative fog a potential and topical story.  It is an abundant and adventurous history of discovery and loss, of hardship and oppression, of traitors and heroes alike.  The story speaks of independence against pan-continental political intrigue.  It is of a people who crossed an ocean to start over in a new, untamed land, befriended the Mi'Kmaq nation, inter-married and went on to develop a unique and prosperous culture.  Then suddenly, crushed by the political machinations of an imperial and haughty nation of conquest against a nation which forgot its relocated children, this new culture was nearly snuffed from existence by the earliest documented act of ethnic cleansing on any Continental soil.

However, they endured - to this very day.   Peppered along the East coast of Canada and the U.S. they continue and prosper.

Some forty years ago the "Quiet Revolution" portrayed in the documentary, 'Acadie, Acadie' is a reminder of the type of battle still fought by this resilient people.  They remain an indelible and unique slice of one of Canada's two solitudes.

Photo - Madelaine Pearson

But about 'ideas'.

L'Acadie is a piece of my history.  It was untapped in my upbringing, smothered by an Anglo-Loyalist educational system which quite simply ignored this historical embarrassment - the systematic dismantling and removal in 1755 of a nascent, culturally distinct community.

The ideas come.

Writers dig for them constantly and unconsciously, and here I think I have found such a one.  I'll continue to dig through Acadien history, perusing the drama, pondering real and fictional characters, and then I will sew it together into.., into something.

And this is how it starts.  A writer's golden nugget, or clump of rock - depending on the outcome.  An idea, grounded in some kind of reality, in this case a personal and cultural one.  Then we write.  And write.  And see what kind of world transcends the ink on the pages.

An idea.   A wonderful thing.  I wonder where it will go?