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2.—— 1755 1763 _——_

Warren A. Perrin

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auusalfeêl! Emussmeÿa ‘ÉËSEÏWSiËaiLÆSËËs germination; ami Leggaey

In 2004, Acadians the world over celebrated the 400d“ anniversary of the genesis of our people and culture in North America. Our Acadian roots are in France, but it was only after 1604 that a people known as “les Acadiens” (and later as "Cadiens" or “Cajuns” in Louisiana) emerged. There can be no better time than the 250‘h anniversary of the Acadian Deportation in 2005 to revisit the role played by Ioseph dit Beausoleil Broussard (b. 1702-d. 1765) in the diaspora.

It is said that extraordinary times produce extraordinary people. That was certainly the case with Beausolcil. But to say that “Le Grand Dérange- ment” was an extraordinary time is a gross understatement. It is one of the darkest chapters in North American history in that it represents the first - and perhaps the only - example of ethnic cleansing of Neo-Europeans in the history of the continent. Beginning in 1755 and ending in 1763, British and New England militia cleared Acadia of Acadians. It is impossible to capture in words the agony, pain, suffering and humiliation of the Aca— dians during the years of expulsion. Thousands of Acadians died of disease and malnutrition on overcrowded and under-rationed British ships. Thou— sands more were imprisoned in Eng- land and Nova Scotia. Yet, despite insurmountable odds, the Acadians fought back with Beausoleil Broussard as the leader of their insurgency.

Centuries later, modemity would call Beausoleil’s tactics, "guerilla war— fare”. Beausoleil simply called it “la guerre”. He was a brave man, but the fighters - farmers, fishermen and trap- pers - armed with agricultural imple— ments, homemade knives, swords,

and an occasional rifle — were no match for the British Empire. Unlike many other Acadians who chose to accept their fate, that of forcible exile by the British, Beausoleil, who had learned much about aboriginal warfare tactics

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from his good friends the Mi’kmaq, decided to fight. As a result, he and his family suffered greatly and spent the last years of "Le Grand Dérangement” under heavy guard in Halifax’s Geor— ges Island prison. When the French and Indian War (American designa— tion for the “Seven Years War”) ended, and he and his family were released from prison, he led his people to a "New Acadia”. We do not know that the result of his efforts allowed the Acadian culture t0 continue develo- ping in a new environment. Beausoleil led many of his people to Louisiana’s bayou country, allowing those Aca- dians to live in peace and community once again and to maintain their cultural identity. This identity con— tinued to evolve as a vibrant part of the American mosaic.

For two centuries, the collective consciousness of the exiles pined for a grand hero, someone of their own cultural identification with the charis- matic stature of a Napoleon. In the beginning they had many heroes and knew them quite personally, but the distances of time and geography, continuous ethnic persecution by humiliation and fragmented isolation had eroded their history. There was also, apparently, a reluctance to re- member. Perhaps the past was just too painful, each successive present too tense with difficulty and the only goal for the future, one of simple survival. Whatever the cause, in Louisiana, where a large number of the émigrés settled, the paucity of written or oral history or even folksongs pertaining to the aftermath of the Deportation was astounding.

The beautiful depiction of Beausoleil by the Acadian Antonine Maillet in her excellent novel Pélagie—la—Charette (Pélagie of the cart), about the joumey of a motley group of Acadian exiles and others picked up along the way from Georgia back to Canada overland in the first years after the mid-eight-

eenth century deportations, is fictio- nal. The famous Acadian freedom fighter makes a cameo appearance in the narrative and Maillet blithely knocks at least twenty years off his age, ignores the man’s wife and numerous children, restores his sexual virility and remakes him into the lover of the protagonist. This is the way legends have been born across the ages.

The real Beausoleil appears to have been a colourful, enigmatic and charis— matic man, a revolutionary whom the British characterized as a rogue and an outlaw. To the Acadians, Beausolcil was revered as a patriot. His true cha— racter was somewhere in—between; that is, he was not necessarily always a righteous, upstanding pillar of the Acadian community, but neither was he the murderous blackguard the Bri- tish made him out to be. Although forbidden by British law to do so, as a young man Bcausolcil consorted with the Mi’kmaq of the area, with whom he was on good terms. In his early twenties, he was found to have fathered a child out of wedlock and was involved in various other civil and physical disputes with neigh- bours.

In Louisiana, we say "Lâche pas la patate" (Don’t drop the potato). Life may be a hot potato, but Cajuns feel they cannot drop it because it may tum out to be all they have to eat! Beausoleil had every opportunity to leam this. He was - and continues to be in the cultural consciousness — an example of a man who lost a war, a homeland and much of his extended family to death. Beausoleil was liter- ally destroyed by exile in a physical way. He was forced into an environ- ment where a disease (yellow fever) which was nonexistent in his home— land, provided him no natural resis— tance and periodically sliced through the countryside with the sickle of death. It was a horrid death, too.