et in Acadia ego sum
Mar. 1st, 2005 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonMany thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
contentlove for linking to this wonderful and fascinating interview with Yale historian John Mack Faragher in her LJ. It's about a piece of little-known and tragic history -- the first North American example of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing, conducted by the British against the French-speaking Acadians in Nova Scotia in 1755.
I had the opportunity to take a hiking, camping and music trip to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia last May (brrr and *ahhh*), and got a chance to explore some of the remnants of Acadian culture, language and music, but what was lost in the calculated destruction of the culture by the British sounds so tantalizingly like what could have been an alternative for our interactions with the indigenous cultures we encountered as we expanded across this continent. Still, what was built in Nova Scotia lasted for 100 years, but in the end, the very political neutrality and friendliness with the indigenous people that was so extraordinary among the Acadians was what came to be seen as a threat requiring a final military solution.
Will the more ignorant, brutal and violent always, in the end, overrun and destroy or scatter those with less vicious, less hierarchical, less controlling inclinations? An ancient question, and history is not exactly encouraging in this regard -- the Diggers, the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars, countless examples of pogroms and genocides usually for material gain sully history again and again. Still, I have to believe that a third road is possible, that oases of beauty, tolerance, egalitarianism, justice, can exist and thrive, at least for a time. History shows us that, too, even if it tends to come in brief flashes of light here and there.
No, there was no Golden Age, no paradise, no antediluvian utopia. Acadian culture certainly was not idyllic. But there are lessons there for us, messages that percolate and bubble up through history, via the tongues of dead and scattered people who fiercely believed that the world which was "normal" was not the world in which they wished to live, that coexistance and interdependance made more practical sense than engaging in an endless cycle of death, destruction, revenge, and, ultimately, genocide. If there is to be anything different, anything uncommon, extraordinary, contrary...we have to make it, here and now, with our own hands, though intentional acts, one choice at a time.
contentlove for linking to this wonderful and fascinating interview with Yale historian John Mack Faragher in her LJ. It's about a piece of little-known and tragic history -- the first North American example of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing, conducted by the British against the French-speaking Acadians in Nova Scotia in 1755. I had the opportunity to take a hiking, camping and music trip to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia last May (brrr and *ahhh*), and got a chance to explore some of the remnants of Acadian culture, language and music, but what was lost in the calculated destruction of the culture by the British sounds so tantalizingly like what could have been an alternative for our interactions with the indigenous cultures we encountered as we expanded across this continent. Still, what was built in Nova Scotia lasted for 100 years, but in the end, the very political neutrality and friendliness with the indigenous people that was so extraordinary among the Acadians was what came to be seen as a threat requiring a final military solution.
Will the more ignorant, brutal and violent always, in the end, overrun and destroy or scatter those with less vicious, less hierarchical, less controlling inclinations? An ancient question, and history is not exactly encouraging in this regard -- the Diggers, the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars, countless examples of pogroms and genocides usually for material gain sully history again and again. Still, I have to believe that a third road is possible, that oases of beauty, tolerance, egalitarianism, justice, can exist and thrive, at least for a time. History shows us that, too, even if it tends to come in brief flashes of light here and there.
No, there was no Golden Age, no paradise, no antediluvian utopia. Acadian culture certainly was not idyllic. But there are lessons there for us, messages that percolate and bubble up through history, via the tongues of dead and scattered people who fiercely believed that the world which was "normal" was not the world in which they wished to live, that coexistance and interdependance made more practical sense than engaging in an endless cycle of death, destruction, revenge, and, ultimately, genocide. If there is to be anything different, anything uncommon, extraordinary, contrary...we have to make it, here and now, with our own hands, though intentional acts, one choice at a time.
