A Cajun Odyssey

In pursuit of a people and their identity
Winter 2003/2004

If you believe the 2000 census, within a decade about 90 percent of the Cajun population had apparently disappeared from the face of the planet. In the 1990 census, more than 400,000 people claimed they were Cajuns. A decade later, that number dropped to almost 45,000.

The Louisiana media questioned the census figures, and doubt was expressed as far away as New York City. In The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize- winning reporter Rick Bragg paid a visit to Don’s Seafood and Steak House in downtown Lafayette. The lunchtime crowd assured him they were not only Cajun, but they were still there.

In an unpublished manuscript titled “Where Have Cajuns of Yore Gone?” Jacques Henry, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette associate professor of sociology, speculates that three factors contributed to the abnormal census figures. The first factor involves a nationwide trend of fewer claims of ethnic ancestry. In Louisiana alone in 2000, there were 40 percent fewer claims of Irish ancestry than ten years earlier, 38 percent fewer claims of German ancestry, 32 percent fewer claims of French ancestry and a 30 percent decrease in English ancestry claims. Conversely, there was a 60 percent increase in claims of American ancestry in Louisiana and a 58 percent increase in the claim on a national level. Claims of French-Canadian ancestry grew by only 8 percent nationally, but by 55 percent in Louisiana.

Even with the shifts in ancestry claims, Henry believes there’s more to the story of the missing Cajuns. On the longer form of the census – which only 15 percent of the population receives – there is a black space for respondents to name their ancestry. Henry notes that when the word “Cajun” was included as an example on the form in 1990, claims of Cajun ethnicity grew by 1,935 percent, the largest growth of any ethnic group in the nation. On the 2000 census form, “Cajun” was omitted as an example, but French-Canadian was kept. The claims of Cajun ancestry dropped, while the claims of French-Canadian increased.

Henry says the answer to this debacle might not be known until the full ancestry data is finally released by the Census Bureau.

But the unresolved predicament leads to a few other questions: Who is a Cajun? How is that defined? And, what sets a Cajun apart from others?

DEBUNKING MYTHS

Shane K. Bernard was born in Lafayette. The son of swamp-pop legend Rod Bernard, he grew up with his Cajun buddies who, like himself, didn’t speak a lick of French, played with GI Joes and read comics. In the introduction of his latest book, The Cajuns: The Americanization of a People, Bernard says that although he’s Cajun, he was raised just like any other American kid.

Bernard is a historian and has worked for the McIlhenny Co., the makers of Tabasco sauce, as curator since 1993. In the spring of 1997, he began researching his dissertation for his doctorate in history, which would lay the groundwork for The Cajuns, a history of the Cajun people from the beginning of World War II to Sept. 11, 2001.

Bernard found that the common thread running through Cajun culture during those 60 years was the process of Americanization, or as he writes in his book, “the process of becoming like the Anglo- American establishment that has traditionally dominated the nation’s mainstream culture.”

While Bernard tells the story of the Cajuns, he debunks a few myths along the way, one of which deals with the origins of the word “Acadiana.” It’s generally accepted that KATC-TV/ Ch. 3 in Lafayette coined the name “Acadiana” in 1963. Bernard found that the Crowley Daily-Signal had used the word as early as 1956 in reference to Acadia Parish, even though KATC would later use the name heavily in its marketing. In 1970 the state Legislature made the name “Acadiana” official and defined it as a 22-parish region of southwest Louisiana.

Bernard also clears up some misunderstandings concerning the origins of the word “coonass.” In 1968, the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana was created to restore the use of French in Louisiana and to make the entire state bilingual by teaching French in the schools. James “Jimmy” Domengeaux was appointed chair of CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) by Gov. John McKeithen. Domengeaux claimed the word “coonass” was derived form the French word “conasse,” and meant either a stupid person or a prostitute without medical papers – in essence, a dirty whore. Domengeaux claimed the word was used by Frenchmen referring to Cajun GIs in France during WWII.

Bernard does not speculate on the origins of the word, but his research indicates that Domengeaux’s origin of the word is improbable. He writes, “The earliest known use of the word can be traced to April 1943, when U.S. military photographers in the South Pacific captured the image of a C-47 transport plane nicknamed the Cajun Coonass, more than a year before the first Cajun GIs landed in France on D-Day.”

The Cajuns also explore the revitalization of Cajun pride in the 1960s. Bernard contends that two parallel movements fostered a renewed interest in Cajun identity. One was led by Domengeaux and the efforts of CODOFIL, and the other was a grassroots movement, with its symbolic roots in the 1964 musical performance by Dewey Balfa at the Newport Folk Festival. At times, the two different camps clashed with one another, but the friction created a momentum that sustained the culture. While one camp organized French educational programs throughout the state, the other camp played and listened to traditional Cajun music and organized a festival to celebrate it. In the first Tribute to Cajun Music at the 8,000-seat Blackham Coliseum in Lafayette, 12,000 people showed up for the show.

After the Cajuns renewed their own interest in their heritage, the rest of the world’s curiosity was piqued. Tourism sparked economic growth and an interest by outsiders. Bernard contends that while the outsiders did not pose an immediate threat, they began a process, rooted in the tourism of the late 1950s, that slowly wore down the cultural wall between Cajuns and the outside world. While the revenues from tourism may have helped the economy in the short term, Bernard writes that “the tourism boom ultimately harmed Cajun culture by repackaging it in caricature for mass consumption.”

By the 1980s, Bernard writes, “Mainstream society had not only discovered Cajun culture but embraced it, usurped it and reshaped it almost beyond recognition into a highly marketable commodity.” For example, Popeye’s Famous Fried Chicken liberally uses the term Cajun in association with its advertising, even though the company originated in New Orleans and also frequently relies on the New Orleans connection in its ads as well.

And while tourists were buying plastic alligator souvenirs, the tourism industry did nothing to correct the misrepresentation of Cajuns. In fact, Bernard writes, “The tourism industry nonetheless successfully convinced the media and the public that New Orleans was veritably oozing with authentic Cajun culture.”

But while the culture was being packaged and marketed, money was being made, and the defining characteristic of the Cajuns was disappearing – the French language.

According to Bernard’s research, during World War II there was a 17 percent decline in Cajuns who spoke French. The declining trend has continued until today. He says if you measure CODOFIL’s efforts by its original intentions in 1968 to make all of Louisiana bilingual, then it has failed. “But,” he points out, “I think it’s probably true, if it were not for CODOFIL, even less people would speak French today than before.” He also says that CODOFIL has been successful in fostering ties with French interests and forging new economic ties, attracting tourists from French countries and, perhaps most importantly, acting as a media watchdog, insisting that Cajuns be portrayed in a positive light and not as knuckle-dragging, backwoods swamp-dwellers.

Even French immersion programs, Bernard says, won’t save Cajun French from extinction. He says while it’s certainly beneficial to learn another language, the French being taught is not the French of his forefathers. In 1940, Bernard says, a small, educated group of Cajuns spoke English as their first language and the mass of ordinary Cajuns spoke French. With the French immersion programs, the majority of Cajuns will continue to speak English as their first language and a small, educated group will speak French as well. He says, “French immersion, in a way, is helping to change the cultural landscape of Louisiana into something it wasn’t before.”

While Bernard provides a history of the Cajuns against the backdrop of mainstream American culture, he’s not willing to venture into predicting the future of his heritage. He says, “It’s not a historical thing to do to predict the future.”

In The Cajuns, he writes, “Ultimately, the future of the Cajun people remains unclear. They may succumb entirely to the process of Americanization or stagger along indefinitely on the edge of extinction, or they may rebound, flowering in a new Age of Ethnicity. Regardless, the almost instinctive ability of the Cajuns to swim in the mainstream will assure their survival for at least a few more generations.”

Bernard suggests that even though the Cajuns have lost pieces of their heritage during the last 60 years, they may be retaining some of their identity through symbolic ethnicity, a concept expressed by sociologist Herbert J. Gans. Cajuns will remain Cajun by participating in preservation groups, attending Festivals Acadiens, boiling crawfish and listening to or playing Cajun music, without practicing the daily folkways of their forefathers. Bernard points to the bilingual streets signs in Lafayette as an example of symbolic ethnicity. If the majority of Louisiana residents cannot speak or read French, then why are there signs in both languages? Bernard says that while they may not serve a practical purpose, they serve as a reminder that there is, however tenuous, still a connection to that French past.

“Maw Maw and Paw Paw didn’t go to Festivals Acadiens,” Bernard says. “They went to a house dance. Dancing and eating Cajun food and listening to Cajun music at Mulate’s is a staged cultural event. I’m not saying it’s good or bad. I’m just saying that it’s happened. In 1940, Cajuns didn’t do that. They didn’t go to restaurants and eat Cajun food and dance at the same time. If you wanted to dance, you’d go dance. If you wanted to go eat, you’d go eat.”

CULTURAL SUITCASE

Jacques Henry is also interested in the Cajun culture.

Born in Paris and educated at the Sorbonne, Henry’s relationship with Louisiana began in 1978 when he conducted field work here for his master’s thesis. He returned in 1984 for good. He was drawn to the culture and the people of southwest Louisiana. A big music fan, he remembers “being face to face” with Zachary Richard, the Neville Brothers and John Lee Hooker at Grant Street Dancehall in Lafayette. Now an associate professor of sociology at UL Lafayette, he has also served as CODOFIL’s director of communications and its executive director. He recently co-authored Blue Collar Bayou: Louisiana Cajuns in the New Economy of Ethnicity with Carl L. Bankston III, an associate professor of sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Henry and Bankston wanted to find out what had become of the descendants of the Acadian refugees since making Louisiana their home. They also wondered what continued to define the Cajuns as a distinctive group of people, not only in their own eyes, but also in the eyes of others as well. Henry says it’s a question he’s been struggling with for years. He jokes that he chooses “to accept the simplest form – people who say they are.” But the answer isn’t that simple. In his book, he asks the question, “… how does Cajun ethnicity endure when its ancestral roots are becoming more distant and its core cultural components are apparently waning?”

Like Bernard, Henry believes the decline of the French language is the largest factor contributing to the evolving Cajun identity. Cultural preservationists have long argued that without the French language, Cajun culture will die. Henry agrees that the culture willBut what his research suggests for the present and the near future is that even though Cajuns are assimilating into mainstream culture, they will remain Cajun by what they value. He says, “As long as they value this connection (with the French language), as long as they place an emphasis on this, they will continue to value the language and the folkways – that will probably be much weaker in the future than they are now – but they will still be alive in some way.”

Put another way, what will continue to define the Cajuns as a people will no longer be what they do or say, or even the language they say it in, but in their shared perception of who they are. Henry says, “If we think of culture in the old, traditional way – as some kind of suitcase full of things that generations pass on to one another – we’re not understanding culture right. It’s not something that’s packaged at one point and then passed on undisturbed; you just add a couple of stickers on it and it’s now yours. Culture is something that generations and groups – whether families, social groups or larger groups – are making to make sense of their circumstances to live with one another, to go through life. If we understand culture in this very dynamic way, then we can understand (how) a way of doing things disappears because it’s no longer adapted to one’s reality. We should not necessarily decry it or laminate this, because a new way is devised, a new approach is thought of, to make sense of a new reality.”

But how do the figures that the Cajun-French language is disappearing strike those who have worked so diligently to preserve the language and culture? What do they make of these two different books that draw the same conclusions from two different angles, that despite their efforts and good intentions, Cajun French is waning and the culture may not be far behind?

CAJUNS VS. FRANCE

CODOFIL President Warren Perrin doesn’t argue with the numbers that indicate a decline in the French language, and he says he believes that CODOFIL has helped to prolong the life of the Cajun culture by prolonging the life of French in Louisiana. Perrin also points to CODOFIL’s ability to keep French alive for “cultural, economic and tourist purposes.”

And meanwhile, there’s a new chapter of Cajun history being written. Amidst the current nationalistic fervor that generally coincides with a nation at war, France’s refusal to support the actions of the Bush administration has drawn criticism from some Americans. Even Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-Chackbay, jumped on the bandwagon when he removed the French version of his Web site to protest France’s lack of support for the war. His spokesman, Ken Johnson, says, “Billy throughout his life, has been fiercely proud of his French and Cajun heritage, but cleary at this time, he is disappointed with some of the decisions being made by his ancestors.”

Is it possibly, in the light of current events, that the Cajuns won’t want to be French anymore?

This article originally appeared in Louisiana Life.