Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, January 24, 1999

Ron Delhomme, St. Martin Bureau Editor

Lafayette - The deportation of the Acadians, being hauled off by the thousands on small ships, is the popular recollection among today's Cajuns. It's the horrible death toll in the internment camps, the slave labor and other atrocities where, generations later, they develop amnesia.

Laissez ca tranquil is the phrase many younger Cajuns who have lost their French language remember from their grandparents: "Leave that alone."

That amnesia wasn't self induced, most Cajuns will say.

"When they made us go to school, the teachers spanked us if we spoke French, they punished us," says Lennis Romero, 81, of St. Martinville. That teacher, she was wrong, and she was very smart in English - but I was a lot smarter in French, so she couldn't stop me."

Historian Carl Brasseaux of USL explains the amnesia as a refusal to give in to a victim's attitude.

"We're thumbing our noses at those who tried to do us in," Brasseaux said. "We're still here, and they're not. It's open defiance."

But some aren't leaving it alone.

Warren Perrin agrees it's likely few people still care who the real villain was in the deportation of 10,000 Acadians from Nova Scotia in the 1700s, an exile in which thousands died, families were separated and a culture destroyed - almost.

Perrin is the Lafayette lawyer who petitioned the queen of England nine years ago to demand an apology from the British.

The Crown has heard the petition, but has been equivocal at best.

Queen Elizabeth II has refused to consider the petition, variously saying that Nova Scotia is now part of Canada and all questions should be submitted to the Canadian government all the way to the notion that although "some imperial actions seem ... quite deplorable by modern standards, they may have appeared to be necessary at the time," in the words of Mark Norton, spokesman for the British High Commission in Ottawa.

Perrin says his legal battle is nothing compared to the strong beliefs of some Acadians living today in what was once old Acadie.

"You'll see some militants this year," he said, referring to the expected influx of visitors from the francophone world coming to Louisiana for FrancoFête '99. "They'll tell you we should invade Nova Scotia and take back the homeland."

But le grande derangement, as the diaspora is known, is "unquestionably the pivotal event of Acadian history," says Brasseaux.

An article in the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal on Friday, January 15, about a New England historian and author unearthed a discovering startling discovery - maybe we've been blaming the wrong guys after all.

In the preface to a historical treatise published three months ago by the Madawaska Historical Society in Madawaska, Maine, history professor Roger Paradis of the University of Maine at Fort Kent challenges the popular belief that the lieutenant governor of the colony, Charles Lawrence, was the instigator and mastermind of the expulsion and that he acted without the approval of King George II.

Paradis says historians have blamed others as well, including Massachusetts Gov. William Shirley and various other British officials in an attempt to keep from having to say, "Say it ain't so, George."

Paradis says it is.

"Lawrence was never more than a willing tool in this affair, the bete noire of the deportation," he is quoted as saying.

"To imagine that the lieutenant-governor of a province, a mere colonel in the army, would presumed to deport some 8,000 of the King's subjects on his own authority is patently absurd. Suffice it to say that Gov. Lawrence made the decision without approval of the British government."

Paradis cites letters from British courts refusing to order deportation without receiving instructions from King George, a memoir of British General Edward Braddock, who writes of a plan to reduce Acadians to "death and slavery," the cost of deportation to the Crown, which would have been twice the annual budget of the colony, and to several other documents preserved at his university.

His conclusion: the King did it.

But what if he did? Ask Brasseaux, himself an author of many treatises on Cajun and Creole history and an acknowledged leading expert in the field. He doesn't suffer from the collective Cajun amnesia, for he knows the details. Throughout the colonies, he writes, Acadian children were taken from their parents and indentured to local artisans, planners or businessmen, never to be seen again.

In Maryland, he writes, one group was "forced to exist, without shelter, in the frozen, snow covered countryside, huddling together for warmth, for several days before adequate shelter could be found."

But although he acknowledged that telling the history of Acadiana without telling of le grande derangement would be like writing about World War II and omitting the Holocaust, he says the current attitude of laissez ca tranquil is not a surrender, but the tendency of Cajuns not to dwell on victimization.

"Our community has a survivor attitude," Brasseaux said. " Give us lemons, we make lemonade."

In 1769, resistance fighter Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil wrote that only 1000 Acadians remained in Acadie. In Brasseaux's "Scattered to the Wind," published by the Center for Louisiana Studies at USL, he estimates that five years before the deportations began in 1755, they numbered more than 15,000, and possibly more.

That's genocide, Perrin says and, in his legal economy, which continues to gain support, that doesn't have a statute of limitations tacked on.

Perrin maintains that although all points are moot now, an apology from the Crown would be the civilized thing to do. To paraphrase a translation of a Cajun saying, it doesn't matter who held the feet; what matters who plucked the chicken.