Edited by Azizi Powell
This is Part I of a two part pancocojams series on the ethnic and cultural differences between contemporary Louisiana Creoles and Cajuns.
This post presents one complete reprinted article and excerpts from two online articles about Louisiana Louisiana Creoles and Louisiana Cajuns.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2023/08/what-are-ethnic-cultural-differences_25.html for Part II of this pancocojams series. That post showcases two YouTube videos that address the subject of Creoles And Cajuns ethnicities and cultures. Selected comments from the discussion threads of those videos are also included in that post.
The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, and educational purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
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ARTICLE REPRINT
From https://explorehouma.com/about/cajun-vs-creole/ The Difference Between Cajuns & Creoles [no publication date cited; retrieved August 25, 2023]
"The term Creole can have many meanings, but during the early days of Louisiana, it meant that a person was born in the colony and was the descendant of French or Spanish parents. The term is a derivative of the word “criollo,” which means native or local, and was intended as a class distinction. In present Louisiana, Creole generally means a person or people of mixed colonial French, African American and Native American ancestry. The term Black Creole refers to freed slaves from Haiti and their descendants.
Still another class of Creole originates with the placage system in which white and creole men took on mixed-race mistresses in a lifelong arrangement, even if the men were married or married later. In this arrangement, the women had property, their children were educated and entitled to part of the man’s estate upon his death. In New Orleans, these people made up the artisan class and became wealthy and very influential.
“Cajun” is derived from “Acadian” which are the people the modern day Cajuns descend from. These were the French immigrants who were expelled from Nova Scotia, and eventually landed in Louisiana after decades of hardship and exile. Hearty folks from many backgrounds married into the culture, including Germans, Italians, Free People of Color, Cubans, Native Americans and Ango-Americans. French or patois, a rural dialect, was always spoken. Due to the isolation of the group in the southern locations of Louisiana, they have retained a strong culture to this day.
As to the difference in the cuisines, Creole can be defined as “city cooking” with influences from Spain, Africa, Germany, Italy and the West Indies combined with native ingredients. Cajun cooking is more of a home cooked style that is rich with the ingredients at hand in the new world the Acadians settled into. A one pot, hearty meal is typical in Cajun cooking."
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ARTICLE EXCERPT #1
From https://www.experienceneworleans.com/cajun.html Cajuns
and Creoles -- what's the difference? [no publishing date cited; retrieved August 25, 2023]
"This has been an ongoing debate among historians,
linguists and Louisianans for decades. It’s a complex and complicated story
that involves intercontinental wars, real estate transfers, politics,
economics, language and identity shifts that have occurred over the past 300
years.
All Cajuns are Creole by virtue of being descendants of Acadian exiles born in the colony, however not all Creoles are Cajun because many do not have Acadian ancestry....
Today, just like gumbo recipes, everyone has their own version of what it means to be Creole or Cajun. And just like Creole and Cajun, New Orleans remains mysterious and completely undefinable.
Still, we try our best to break it down for you below.
Cajuns
Cajuns are the French colonists who settled the Canadian
maritime provinces (Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) in the 1600s. The settlers
named their region "Acadia," and were known as “Acadians.”
In 1745, the British threatened to expel the Acadians unless
they pledged allegiance to the King of England. Unwilling to subject themselves
to the King who opposed the French and Catholics, Acadians refused. They also
did not want to join the British in fights against the Indians, who were their
allies and relatives. To dominate the
region without interference, the British expelled the Acadians. This eventually
became known as Le Grand Dèrangement or “Great Upheaval” of 1755.
The word “Cajun” is derived from the French pronunciation of “Acadien.” The French of noble ancestry would say, "les Acadiens", while some referred to the Acadians as, "le 'Cadiens", dropping the "A.”
Over a 21-year period from 1764-1785, approximately 3,000 Acadians found refuge in Louisiana with its strong French background and Catholic heritage. Over time, many existing elements of Creole culture fused with their own unique folklore, music and cuisine.
Cajuns retained a unique dialect of the French language(Cajun French) and are often depicted as a rustic people who make their living fishing, trapping, hunting and farming. However, Cajuns today primarily speak English and work in every imaginable profession."...
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ARTICLE EXCERPT #2
From https://www.hnoc.org/publications/first-draft/whats-difference-between-cajun-and-creole-or-there-one What's the difference between Cajun and Creole—or is there
one? published October 16, 2020 by Molly Cleaver, editor
"What do we mean when we talk about Cajun Country? The simple answer is that the term is synonymous with Acadiana, a 22-parish region settled in the mid-18th century by exiles from present-day Nova Scotia. About 3,000 Acadians arrived in South Louisiana from 1764 to around 1785, and now, more than 250 years later, their creolized name, Cajun (derived from the French Acadien), can be found everywhere: there’s the Ragin’ Cajuns, the athletic moniker of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL). There’s the Cajun Heartland State Fair, held annually (pre-COVID) on the grounds of the Cajundome. And countless small businesses, from Cajun Power to Cajun Fitness, Cajun Broadband, and Cajun Mart, use the term to ground their names in a sense of place.
South Louisiana’s reputation as Cajun Country …[is] actually a fairly recent phenomenon, the latest twist in a long story about Creole identity and United States race relations. … the region was only just beginning to be known as Cajun Country. For two centuries, “Creole” had been the dominant term used to describe the region’s people and culture; Cajuns existed, but prior to the 1960s they did not self-identify as such in large numbers. For Cajuns were—and are—a subset of Louisiana Creoles. Today, common understanding holds that Cajuns are white and Creoles are Black or mixed race; Creoles are from New Orleans, while Cajuns populate the rural parts of South Louisiana. In fact, the two cultures are far more related—historically, geographically, and genealogically—than most people realize….
Part of the Creole World
When the Acadians arrived in Louisiana, they were forced to
adapt to the new environment—starkly different from the cold climate and
British rule they had known in Canada. Part of that adaptation—building with
rot-resistant cypress, growing rice instead of wheat—meant interacting with
Native peoples and other inhabitants of the region. “A lot of people think the
Acadians were the first ones here, but they weren’t,” said historian Shane K.
Bernard, a curator for the McIlhenny Company and author of The Cajuns:
Americanization of a People.
By the mid-18th century, Louisiana Creole identity had been two generations in the making. Contrary to popular belief today, the term carried no racial designation—one could be of entirely European, entirely African, or of mixed ancestry and still be a Creole. It simply meant someone who was native to the colony and, generally, French-speaking and Catholic. “Right from the start it was a very diverse community when the Acadians arrived,” said Christophe Landry, a scholar of Creole Louisiana. “[The Acadian exiles] intermingled, mixed, and adopted local culture, including Creole identity, within the first two generations.”
Acadians, enslaved West Africans, Houma, Chitimacha, Choctaw, German immigrants, Canadian trappers, French and Spanish settlers—all contributed to a process now known as creolization. Fueled by European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, creolization occurred throughout the Latin Caribbean world: different populations, most of them in lands new to them, blended their native cultural practices—culinary, linguistic, musical—to create new cultural forms. Gumbo drew upon West African and Native American sources (okra and rice from the former; filé, or crushed sassafras leaves, from the latter) and French culinary techniques (roux). Creolized French—Kouri-Vini, also known as Louisiana Creole—was, by the 1800s, in wide practice, including among Acadian descendants. The accordion, a star feature of both Cajun and zydeco music, was brought to the colony by German settlers, and its use was popularized in part by the enslaved people working those plantations.
Creolization, Bernard said, “was the beginning of becoming Cajun. . . . But the fact is a lot of Cajuns today don’t think of themselves as Creole. It all gets back to self-identification.”
[…]
Part and parcel of Americanization in the early 20th century
was “its racial corollary,” Jim Crow segregation, Landry wrote in his 2015
doctoral thesis. Well established by the 1920s, Jim Crow separated white from
nonwhite, funneling the historically diverse Creole populace into a racial
binary at a time when its language traditions were under threat. The “one-drop
rule” of racial purity underpinning segregation chipped away at white Creoles’
comfort with the “Creole” label. “With some white Creoles, when they learned
the word could be connected to Blacks, they dropped the term,” said Herman
Fuselier, host of the popular Zydeco Stomp radio show on Lafayette’s KRVS-FM
and a specialist in Creole culture.
During the 1920s the hardening of the racial divide prompted
white historians and community leaders to valorize the period of the Acadian
expulsion, which is to say, before creolization. As Landry recounts in his
doctoral thesis, the dream of Acadie blossomed in the popular imagination:
Evangeline, the Longfellow poem from 1847, and two film adaptations of it
(1913, 1929) were held up as a Eurocentric Acadian ideal. Tourism to Nova
Scotia, based on interest in the Acadians, rose. Underpinning the Acadian
craze, Landry argues, was a desire by white Creoles to reach back in time “to a
romanticized, commodified, whitened Acadian identity.”
World War II was a turning point in the process of shifting Cajuns away from their Creole roots and toward the burgeoning American mainstream. Louisiana Creoles had kept a proud distance from Anglo-American culture going back to the colony’s transition to US territory in 1803, but after the war, “a lot of Cajuns came back . . . changed, very proud to be American,” Bernard said. “Even if you were on the home front, if you were the loved one of someone serving overseas, you felt swept up in the wartime fervor.” The introduction of television in the 1950s further solidified local ties to mainstream America.
By the 1960s, South Louisiana’s francophone heritage was due for a revival, after so many years of English-forward Americanization in the region. Although many whites still identified as Creole, segregation and the Acadian-focused heritage movement of the 1920s had conscripted white and nonwhite residents of South Louisiana into increasingly separate, racialized spheres—Acadian and Creole. The revival movement to come would separate those categories even further, turning Acadian into Cajun in the process.
[…]
the region’s growing pride in its Acadian heritage held tension
along white sociocultural lines, best exemplified by the 1968 establishment of
the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL). A
state-funded agency, the organization was founded to revive the French language
in the area. However, it approached the creolized French spoken over the
previous 200 years as an aberration: the council imported teachers from outside
the country to teach Continental French in local schools. Its membership and
patronage was overwhelmingly white and bourgeois; events were fancy
affairs—“balls and tuxedos and gowns and cigars and banquets,” Landry
said—where French opera was celebrated and traditional Cajun and Creole music
was treated as a sideshow.
[…]
As the 1970s progressed, ethnic-pride movements began to pop
up around the country, inspired by the successes of the civil rights era. The
groundswell of Cajun pride was increasingly at odds with CODOFIL’s tendency to
privilege “an elite, genteel Acadian minority,” as Bernard put it. Use of
“Cajun” and self-identification as such began to skyrocket. Many in the
“Acadian” camp objected to "Cajun," as it had a history of being used
as a slur, to mean poor and trashy. (As Herman Fuselier recalled of his youth
in the 1960s, “When a little white boy called me the n-word, the best comeback
I could come up with was to call him a Cajun.”) The Cajun revival reclaimed the
word, attaching it to the beloved food, music, and language of South
Louisiana.
[…]
In a 2018 article for the Journal of Cultural Geography,
Alexandra Giancarlo includes an image of an advertisement created in 2016 by
the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism: “Cajun 101,” it
reads, followed by the following list—“Gumbo, Zydeco, Fais Do-Do.”
The ad exemplifies the complicated tangle of history, identity, and racial politics surrounding the Cajun revival and its legacy. Gumbo, as discussed previously, is not solely Cajun but, more broadly, Creole. Zydeco is musically, racially, and culturally different from Cajun music—“zydeco was sharecropper’s music, Black poor people’s music,” Fuselier said—and conflation of the two related forms has long irked its practitioners. “Buckwheat Zydeco, he had in his contract that his music couldn’t be described as Cajun music, and if it was, the gig would be canceled,” Fuselier said.
This sensitivity to mislabeling is not simply about music; it’s part of the complicated racial subtext of “Cajunization,” to use the term coined in 1991 by cultural geographer Cécyle Trépanier. The lasting dominance of the Cajun revival, compounded by the flattening effect of tourism marketing, has largely erased small-town and rural Creoles of color from popular depictions of their own culture. Similarly, the contributions of Native Americans, African Americans, Vietnamese, and other significant historical populations have been overshadowed by the “Cajun” brand. While that brand was being built, in the 1960s and ’70s, Creoles of color were continuing to fight for basic equality as American citizens; they did not have the luxury or the systemic power to advocate for Creole identity alongside Cajun. “Only recently have they been able to shift their energies to the promotion of their unique identity,” said Giancarlo.
No longer known as Acadian Creoles, Cajuns remain the poster
children for all of Acadiana, but there have been recent attempts to diversify
representation of the region. In 2008, responding to the push for inclusivity,
Festivals Acadiens changed its name to Festivals Acadiens et Créoles. The
Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism has also created a
“Creole Country” map highlighting the art and history of Creoles of color. In
the academic world, Cajun and Creole are increasingly presented alongside each
other, twisted siblings of the racial- and cultural-identity wringer.…
This story appears in the Summer/Fall 2020 issue of The Historic New Orleans
Collection Quarterly.”…
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This concludes Part I of this two part pancocojams series.
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