Intergroup Relations, Group Maintenance, and Ethnic Commitment

The central fact of the Acadians’ existence is their status as a minority. Acadian leaders present a coherent vision which rejects assimilation and challenges the norms of the majority culture. It demands, indeed, that one of those norms, the belief in tolerance and diversity, receive priority over other, equally cherished, values.

During the last half of the twentieth century, relations between Acadians and other Maritimers have been characterized by mutual accommodation, albeit sometimes of a grudging variety. On occasion, however, the Acadians’ determination to survive as a people has aroused both anger and resentment. The recognition of francophone rights by the federal and provincial governments during the 1970s and 1980s led, in 1990, to the emergence of the Confederation of Regions Party (CORE) in New Brunswick. The main platform of this party is the abolition of New Brunswick’s bilingual status, established in 1982. In the provincial election of 1991 it obtained 20 percent of the popular vote and elected 8 members of the legislature.

From the Acadians’ perspective, the views represented by CORE have been a constant feature of the political landscape. Indeed, whether or not they are right to think so, Acadians remain firmly convinced that they have yet to be properly acknowledged as a distinct people by the broader community. This conviction has been best expressed by Antonine Maillet. In a telling passage from La Sagouine (1971) an Acadian tries to decide how to respond to demands that his people link themselves to some larger ethnicity: “‘Your nationality?’ they ask you. Citizenship and nationality. Hard to say. We live in America but we ain’t Americans. No, no, no. Americans, they work in them factories in the States, and in summer, they come around visiting our beaches in their white trousers and speaking English and they’re rich. Then Americans we ain’t. Us, we live in Canada, so we figure we must be Canadians. Well, that ain’t true neither, cause the Dysarts and Carols, the Jones, they just ain’t like us and they live in Canada, too. So if they’re Canadians, we sure can’t be the same, cause they’re English, and us, we’re French. No, no, no, no. We ain’t completely french, can’t say that. The French folks is the folks from France. Les français de France. Now for that matter we’re even less the français de France than we’re Americans. We’re more like French Canadians, they told us. Well, that ain’t true neither. French-Canadians are those that live in Quebec and they call themselves the Canadiens-Québécois. How can we be Québécois if we ain’t living in Quebec? Where do we live? In Acadie, we was told. We are supposed to be des Acadiens. So that’s the way we decided to answer the question about nationality. ‘Des Acadiens,’ we say to them. Now then we can be sure about one thing, we’re the only ones to have that name. Well then the censors didn’t want to write that word on their list. The way they see it, it seems L’Acadie ain’t a country and L’acadien ain’t nationality, cause of the fact that it ain’t written in geographies book. Sacre dieu. Well, after that we didn’t know what else to say. We told them to give us the nationality they wanted.”

A number of Acadian intellectuals believe in the possibility of working within federal and provincial institutions to preserve and promote their identity. Their optimism is based on the gradually increasing support that the Acadian cause has received from New Brunswick’s anglophone elite. After Hugh John Fleming became premier in 1952, the use of French in the legislature became commonplace. In 1955 Fleming approved a subvention of $20,000 for the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the expulsion of the Acadians. Other members of the government, such as Gordon Fairweather, a young Rothesay lawyer, began the push for French in English schools. During the four terms of Richard Hatfield’s tenure as premier, Acadians were recognized as a living and essential part of the New Brunswick polity. Hédard Robichaud was appointed as lieutenant governor of the province in 1971, a post he retained for eleven years. Hatfield’s government went on to support French cultural activities, including the establishment of the Acadian Historical Village near Caraquet. It was also during Hatfield’s period in office that the justice and education systems were reformed so as to take into account the rights of francophones.

As the century comes to a close, there remain tensions between francophones and anglophones in New Brunswick. People whose first language is English constitute 67 percent of the civil service of the province, and of these only approximately 8 percent consider themselves bilingual. In Fredericton, the nerve centre for services in health, education, and welfare, the proportion of English-language civil servants is even higher: 81 percent in 1989. At the same time, the emotions aroused by the debate over Quebec’s place within Confederation continue to trouble anglophone-francophone relations throughout the Maritimes. What place would Acadians occupy in any major reorganization of Canada? This is a question that many Acadians pose, and the arguments surrounding it place a strain on Acadian interaction with their neighbours.

As for the future of the Acadian community of the Maritimes, this subject continues to be a matter of debate among Acadians themselves. In some ways, their situation seems more hopeful than it has ever been. Since 1967, federal policies have had an enormous impact on the Acadians, mostly beneficial but sometimes not. The Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Act of 1961, which was aimed at moving farmers of marginal lands into other occupations, produced an Acadian migration to towns. In far too many cases, this resulted in families exchanging lives of independent poverty for ones of welfare and destitution. Other government projects, such as the establishment of the Kouchibougouc National Park, were carried out with so little appreciation of the Acadians’ interests that the economic advantages they brought could not overcome local hostility. But, on the whole, federal policies in the Maritimes over the last thirty years have greatly aided the emergence of Acadian self-sufficiency.

Of course, survival encompasses more than material well-being. The future of the Acadians as a distinct people was the theme of Que le tintamarre commence (1992), an open letter to Acadians by Jean-Marie Nadeau, a former activist in the Parti Acadien and the Societé Nationale des Acadiens. Nadeau stressed that the Acadians’ future depended on the forging of ties among all those throughout North America who had a claim to an Acadian heritage. The same view was expressed by many who attended the Congrès Mondial Acadien in Moncton in 1994.

For some, the bonds of kinship link together Acadians everywhere, regardless of where they live. However, for others, genealogy is of secondary importance. A far more vital question is how Acadians can preserve their heritage in a world where values seemed to be determined by economics and where little support exists for state expenditures on culture of any kind, let alone the culture of minority groups. Adding to their pessimism is the view that Acadian survival has been seriously threatened by the defeat of the Meech Lake and the Charlottetown constitutional accords.

Still others emphasize that the Acadian community cannot rely solely on political parties for the defence of their rights and the promotion of their interests. They maintain that New Brunswick’s Acadian community should aim for a decentralization of government services from the centre to the municipalities, and they call for a reawakening of regionalism to allow Acadian culture to flourish at the local level. In some respects, their position demonstrates a traditional Acadian sense of politics as the method by which accommodations are made between competing groups within a larger community. What is crucial in this perspective is the preservation of choice, not the actual method by which choice is preserved.

There is no doubt that some Acadians despair of the future of an Acadian identity. Writers such as Michel Roy believe that, unless political autonomy is obtained, Acadian culture will stagnate and perhaps even perish. For Antonine Maillet, however, the Acadians “don’t need a territory absolutely to be a people. We need a memory, a culture, a language, a soul, a mentality, an identity. Acadia has all that. If you define people as being either wolves or foxes, well, the people from Acadia, they are more on the fox side than on the wolf you know? and they are smart.” For Michel Roy, in other words, the established institutions of society represent the only way to preserve and develop an ethnic identity, whereas, for Antonine Maillet, it is the choices people make in their daily lives, not institutions, that create a community and maintain its distinctiveness. One is the vision of a people led by an elite: the other, a belief that a community gives life to its own leaders. In the final analysis, the continued existence of an Acadian identity will depend on whether enough people with an Acadian heritage value that heritage and work to preserve it. Past experience suggests that this will happen.