Reflections on Visiting Acadie

It was supposed to be a trip for my mom.  I was going to be in Halifax for a meeting of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada. She had always wanted to visit Nova Scotia and see where the Acadians, her ancestors, once lived.  I never thought this trip would be for me, too.

Map of the settlement at Beaubassin

It hit me fully at the natural history museum in Halifax. We went there on a tip from the visitors center off the highway near Beaubassin.  Beaubassin was our first stop and the last site inhabited by the Arceneauxs (my mom’s family) before they were deported.  We had driven straight to Amherst from Halifax where I had picked my parents up.  On our first day of touring, we went to Beaubassin and saw the lands left with no buildings, no graveyard, nothing.  The only remnants of the Arceneauxs’ life were some archeological pits dug into the hillside and the land they had reclaimed from the marshes with levees.  When we asked, the staff at the visitor center told us the findings from the digs were on display in Halifax.

Acadian implements unearthed

Staring at those artifacts encased in glass, I had a taste of what the Tlingit, the descendants of slaves, and what American Jews must feel.  Seeing the possessions of my ancestors away from where they were once fashioned with sweat and care made me feel disconnected, angry, and like something had been stolen from me.

I don’t know why the Acadians were forced to leave the land they had settled.  And I don’t know why they didn’t fight for the land or why some of them hid out and stayed while my ancestors boarded the boats that would eventually land them in South Louisiana.  But I suspect their forced relocation had something to do with the rich lands they had reclaimed from the sea, and the bounty that they had enjoyed.

At Grand Pre I saw the museum and the church and the cross memorializing the Acadians, as told by Longfellow.  It seemed so pretty and quaint.  Then we drove among the plowed fields and saw the levees built by the hand of Acadians.  And there were large farm buildings, still reaping from the rich land, making someone else prosper, someone who benefited from the English army’s forced relocation of my people.

Levee built by the Acadians at Grand Pre

I know cruelty lives in all nations, all tribes.  We are all capable of unspeakable acts.  When the Acadians came to Nova Scotia in 1605, they took lands that had been home to the Mi’kmaq people for 13,000 years.  The interpretive signs said the Acadians and Mi’kmaq got along well and even dwelled in the same settlements together.  This is a nice thought, but I also know there must have been pain and loss felt by the Mi’kmaq as the lands they used for hunting and gathering where suddenly filled with fixed housing and farms, and as marshes once filled with rush of the tidal bore became silent wheat fields.  And I know that later, in Louisiana, my ancestors came into the lands of the Attakapas people, and even later benefited from those lands through the blood and sweat of the slaves that they owned.  

My mom looking out over the lands at Beaubassin

No people are innocent.  We are all marked by the sins of our fathers.  But that doesn’t make my anger or sense of loss, or my confusion go away. This is what it feels like to be dispossessed.  Let me be grateful for this new knowledge, and hopeful that it will help me look at the world through the eyes of others.