Eighty French settlers arrived on the shores of Saint-Croix Island in 1604, including French explorer Samuel de Champlain, and called their new country Acadie. Descendants of those original pioneers still reside in the French-speaking Cajun (Cadien) communities in Moncton and in Moncton’s sister city, Lafayette, LA.

There’s an estimated two million Acadians worldwide. Today, one-third of New Brunswick’s population is Acadian.

The old colony of Acadia may be gone, but its culture is alive and well, here on New Brunswick’s Acadian coast.

Acadian history and culture in New Brunswick

In the little town of Memramcook, just outside of Moncton, there’s an exhibit detailing the “Acadien Odyssey” at Monument Lefebvre, a national historic site.

In 1755, more than 14,000 Acadians were forced from their homes and rushed onto boats with few supplies or possessions, and then were, as the display so poignantly notes, “scattered to the four winds.”

The Acadian expulsion (Le Grand Derangement) was a horrific historical event. Acadian families had lived peacefully here for nearly 150 years, but when the British took control of the region and Acadians refused to pledge allegiance to the Crown, they were deported en masse.

The deportations started in Grand Pré, NS. Then, British soldiers moved on to Acadian communities in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Escaping Acadians were hunted and those captured were sent to England and France. Families were separated. Boats sank and disappeared. Nearly 5,000 Acadians were killed or died searching for a new home; some made it to safety in New France (Quebec), while others found refuge in the Catholic corners of rural Louisiana.

Some Acadian families fled into the forests around Memramcook, hiding for years with help from their Mi’Kmaq neighbours. And it’s here that many of those exiled Acadians returned years later to rebuild their communities.

Acadian leaders gathered in the old St. Joseph College in 1881 to declare August 15 the Acadian national holiday. Three years later during the second convention in Miscouche, PEI, they adopted a national anthem and a flag—the French tricolour with its single yellow star is the symbol still seen flapping in the sea breeze outside houses all along the Acadian shore.

Moncton is the first officially bilingual city in Canada; nearly 50 per cent of the population is fluent in English and French. I hear it immediately upon arriving at the airport; friends switching back and forth between languages in mid-sentence. It’s a jumbled Acadian dialect they call Chiac which, like Cajun French, includes smatterings of English slang and archaic French terms you’ll only hear in other Acadian enclaves.

It’s a subculture without a country, but this part of New Brunswick is still the Acadian homeland, and Caraquet, three hours north of Moncton, is considered its capital.

The roots of the culture run deep. Being Acadian is not just about a distant French heritage, a family name or even a unique dialect—it’s a distinct ethnic group that all Acadians can trace back to their resilient Maritime ancestors.

Acadians have thrived in the marshy coastal areas of Canada and the Louisiana bayous, inheriting the skills to drain coastal salt marshes for agriculture from their French forefathers. Acadians inherited similar religious, musical and culinary traditions, too. Whether it’s the masked Courier de Mardis Gras of rural Louisiana or the mi-Carême of Acadian Canadians, the Cajun crawfish or Atlantic lobster, a pork and rice boudin sausage or a pork and potato poutine rapées dumpling, a traditional fiddle or accordion tune, all Acadians share a common heritage.

But preserving that heritage required a colossal struggle, resulting in the kind of tenacity that remains at the heart of the Acadian psyche.

It’s a living culture with its own music, literature and art, from Dano LeBlanc’s Chiac-speaking comic book hero, Acadieman, to the iconic Acadian band 1755, long disbanded but still considered “the Beatles of Acadia.”

In the tidy town of Bouctouche, the play La Sagouine is a celebrated cultural icon.

Bouctouche native Antonine Maillet created La Sagouine and, at Le Pays de la Sagouine, a non-profit Acadian theme park devoted to her literature, actors bring her stories to life all summer long.

Acadians had to fight for French schools to maintain their unique language, so when Maillet wrote in the “improper” Acadian French dialect, she was virtually canonized here. She became the first foreigner to win France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt literary prize for Pélagie-la-Charrette, the story of an Acadian widow leading her people home from exile in the 1770s.

Le Pays de la Sagouine is a fantasy Acadian world where colourful houses on a tiny island are populated by Maillet’s characters. It’s fun to dance to the Acadian fiddle tunes or try la bagosse (moonshine) at a rollicking Acadian kitchen party.

“We portray the joie de vivre of the Acadians, a fishing village of the 1940s,” says Irene Maillet-Belley (playing the fictional Dorine). “Around the kitchen table with the parents, the grandparents, the 15 kids, we would spend the evenings there, and that’s how we got the language, culture, the music and folklore.”

Acadian cuisine

Through family and community is also how Acadians preserved their unique Acadian cuisine—simple dishes created from what they could raise, forage or grow.

“When we came back after the expulsion, we settled on the rocky land along the shoreline,” Maillet-Belley says, dishing out la poutine rapées, big boiled potato dumplings filled with salt pork, a homey chicken fricot (stew) and rappie pie, a layered casserole of crispy shredded potatoes filled with native bar clams.

Fish, game and wild plants foraged from the salt marshes have long been part of the Acadian diet, too, and there are hand-painted roadside signs all along our route advertising fresh crab and lobster.

These regional specialties are on co-owner and chef Karen Mersereau’s menu at the historic Hotel Paulin in Caraquet. While it’s not exactly Acadian-inspired, there are a few traditional dishes that have transcended into a more modern recipe like fiddlehead soup and locally-gathered cattail

shrimp salad.

When Champlain founded The Order of Good Cheer in 1606, encouraging his men to hold regular dinners as an antidote to their difficult conditions, he laid the foundations for the hospitality you’ll still find all along the Acadian coast.

“That’s why we Acadians love to party,” one young Acadian explains, clacking a pair of wooden spoons together to another toe-tapping Cajun fiddle tune. “It’s an order!”