Book Review: The Acadians: In Search of a Homeland by James Laxer

I don't generally read a lot of history books, as a quick perusal of my past articles would make clear. As a student, history was a subject that I found frustrating. I had no problem understanding the sweeps of history, its themes and results, the way one thing followed another and led to what is here and now. I liked that part of history. That part of history was like story-telling. What I didn't like were the names (without characterization), the places (without a sense of scene) and the dates (when the events are so much more meaningful). So when I do read history, what I am looking for is a narrative arc that will bring me into the past, the same way I expect a novelist to bring me into the world of her made-up people and places. I want to enjoy the story, and learn something along the way.

James Laxer takes a more academic approach. In The Acadians: In Search of a Homeland (published by Random House Canda), he provides an overview of Acadian history, from the arrival of the first settlers to the reasons for the expulsion to slave-owning practices among the Cajuns to New Brunswick's status as Canada's only bilingual province. The Acadian story is an interesting one, one that has suggested itself to creative license.

Here, early Acadian life is described with a kind of hard-scrabble idealism. Acadian agricultural practices required a kind of communalism, because they reclaimed farm land from the sea. Also, unlike most North American settlers, they forged amiable ties with Native Peoples ("In Grand Pré and other settlements," Laxer notes, "Acadian children, Mi'kmaq children and children of mixed race all played together."). Though life was hard, the Acadians were industrious and optimistic. The ejection of the Acadians by the British — because they were unwilling to sign a loyalty oath that could require them to take up arms against the Mi'kmaq or the French — shattered this way of life and is discussed in the terms of a genocide.

The detailed plan for the expulsion, set down in the papers of British officials, in particular those of Governor Lawrence, is no less than an anatomy of British-style ethnic cleansing in the eighteenth century. All the mundane details are preserved. The expelled community was to lose everything it had worked to achieve over the previous century and more, and the deportees were, as much as possible, to pay for their own deportation. The record is dismal testimony to the proclivity of those who commit crimes against humanity to spell out their schemes in documents, noteworthy for their prosaic attention to detail and their lack of any shread of human feeling.

It's compelling stuff. Or, rather, it could be. I wanted it to be and I kept reading it in the hope that it would be. Sometimes, my perseverance was rewarded with interesting bits of trivia (like the fact that Pizza Delight is of Acadian origin) or truly compelling human stories (such as that of Noel Brassard, whose anti-English feelings led him to stalk and kill 28 English farmers, and many of the asides about modern New Brunswick figures such as Louis Robichaud), but most of the book felt like one of those dreaded history classes, a compilation of objective facts with all the humanity sucked right out of them.

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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