People who once lived on cod and herring discovered shrimp and crawfish, making a compelling cuisine along the way. The 3000 or so Acadians who came from Nova Scotia to the lower Mississippi River Valley between 17 adapted to the new environment. The Acadians would play a crucial role in defining south Louisiana. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Other eighteenth-century population groups included German colonists, Spaniards, Islenos from the Canary Islands, and such Native American tribes as the Houma, Bayou Goula, and Choctaw.Ī big aligator, about 800 lbs. Domingue, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, adding a pronounced West Indian influence to south Louisiana seen in Creole cottages and shotgun houses, Caribbean rhythms in zydeco and jazz, and gumbo and red beans and rice. The Haitian rebellion brought 10,000 refugees from French sugar colony of St. The light-skinned descendants of the Creole planters (those claiming French-Spanish ancestry) and slaves became Creoles of Color. Planters imported almost 30,000 slaves from west Africa, through the French West Indies. Courtesy of Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, DC.Īfrica and the West Indies were major influences on south Louisiana in the colonial era. Map by François Gonsoulin and Charles Laveau Trudeau. Plan d'une partie du Vermillion District Attacapas,, Louisiana, ca.
Acadians soon moved out of these areas, into the upper Bayou Teche to the west and, later, onto the lower coast and into the Atchafalaya Swamp Basin to the southwest. The early Acadians became small farmers and fishermen, settling along the Mississippi River. Another major eighteenth-century settlement group was the Acadians, exiled from Nova Scotia and arriving in south Louisiana after 1765. French land grants helped bring settlers to an area that was part of a larger French West Indian plantation zone in the 1700s, and descendants of these early French landowners would become farmers and planters in the area, adapting sugar in the nineteenth century as the dominant plantation crop. The earliest European colonists to what would become Acadian Louisiana came in the 1600s, settling along the Mississippi River and the major bayous. While many people associate the southwest Louisiana home of the Cajuns with swamplands, its environment also consists of marshes, prairies, and wooded river areas. Courtesy of the Perry-Casañeda Map Collection, University of Texas. Louisiana (reference map), Louisiana Acadian region, 2002. Spitzer adds that it is north of, and connected to, the Caribbean. Paige Gutierrez describes the region as the South of the South, while folklorist Nicholas R. It is more popularly known as Cajun Louisiana. The television manager appreciated this striking new descriptor and popularized it, using it to describe the stations broadcast area.
The term Acadiana was inadvertently coined in the early 1963, by a Louisiana television station, owned by Acadian Television Corporation, which received an invoice in which the letter a had been added to Acadian to become Acadiana. In 1971, the Louisiana Legislature designated the twenty-two parishes of south Louisiana as Acadiana, acknowledging its distinctive French-based history and culture. It has also become one of the most resonant places in the national imagination. A complex ethnic and demographic history, combined with a striking topography compared to other places within the South, have made south Louisiana a distinctive place, one that observers often discuss as not fitting conventional expectations of the US South. No other area of the US South has so embraced a French heritage as a foundational and enduring part of its culture as south Louisiana. The essay emphasizes such topics as class struggles, religious practices, artistic developments, industry, agriculture, and politics in south Louisiana. It provides an overview of "Cajun" culture, both in terms of its historical origins and its contemporary vestiges. This essay investigates how a strong sense of French heritage has affected the development of the South Louisiana region.
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