In the 17^Th century the Cajuns�pioneer ancestors founded a French colonie called Acadie in what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. While the Acadians prospered on the fertile farmland, France and Britain vied for control of the region. Britain won sovereignty in 1713; four decades later, at the start of the French and Indian War, security-conscious officials deported many Acadians. Scattered along Atlantic and Caribbean shores (Santo Domingo, Martinique, Cayenne in the French Guiana), some refugees found a final home in south Louisiana. As their settlements spread across bayous and prairies, neighbors shortened the French "Acadien" to "Cadien" and then "Cajun". Today 22 parishes, or counties, with a Cajun flavor make a triangular region known as Acadiana.

In most respects the main features of today�s Louisiana Cajun culture hardly go back at all to old Acadie; furthermore Cajun life differs sharply from that led by their now distants cousins in Canada. Some 300,000 people proudly calling themselves Acadian reside in Canada�s Maritime Provinces, mostly along the eastern shore of New Brunswick. Another 25,000, a special breed of American Acadians, live across the St. John River in Maine�s Madawaska region. They are separated fron the Louisiana�s 500,000 Cajuns in distance but not in spirit. But 200 years in Louisiana made the Cajuns there a separate people, bound to their northern kin more by sentiment than by substance.

Their food, with its cayenne pepper, roux, and mingled aromatic flavors of onions, celery, and bell pepper, owes more to the Indians, the Spanish, and the slaves cooks of the antebellumSouth than to the salted, oily foods of old Acadie. Rice is a Cajun staple, and well-loved ingredients. Rice is a Cajun staple, and well-loved ingredients like crawfish and alligator play a part in Louisiana as nowhere else. Only in the one-pot cooking style do the Cajuns share a culinary inheritance whith the Acadians-but a gumbo or a jumbalaya is a far different experience than the Acadian chicken-and-dumpling stew called fricot. Today�s favorite Acadian dishes are poutine and rappie pie.

Classic Cajun music owes its heart and soul to the fiddle and the diatonic accordion, something old Acadie never saw. Introduced to Acadiana by the Germans about 1850, it reshaped the old Cajun fiddle dance tunes, eliminating those that could not fit its limited range. Fore the most part, only waltzes and two steps survived. Today�s distinctive Cajun sound has few real counterparts in Canada.

When the Cajuns celebrate who they are, they mean who they have become. When the Acadians celebrate who they are, they mean who they have been.

La joie de vivre: It may be the richest nugget of wisdom at the core of Cajun being. Cajun author Trent Angers observation that " Joie de vivre is not a state of euphoria that can be induced by the consumption of alcohol but rather a way of looking at things, a condition of the mind and of the heart."

I learned all about the Acadians and the Cajuns from an article by Griffin Smith, Jr. He is a writer and lawyer in Little Rock Arkansas. All the article above belongs to him.

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