November 29, 2009

ADVENT BLESSINGS

"This is the irrational season/
When love blooms bright and wild./
Had Mary been filled with reason/
There'd have been no room for the child."

From Madeleine L'Engle's poem "After Annunciation"

November 27, 2009

ACADIAN RESISTANCE FOUND IN DIARY



The officer's writings are mostly dry and technical - accounts of the weapons deployed and how many lashes were meted out for drinking.
But buried in the terse prose of Jeremiah Bancroft's journal, which goes on display today in Halifax, are new details of Acadian resistance to the 18th-century deportation. It's information that one community leader hopes will help erase a lingering feeling of helplessness.
"I have met several Acadians over the years who have experienced a sense of shame of not having done anything about it," said Victor Tétrault, executive director of the Société Promotion Grand-Pré. "That's what they gleaned from the history, but with this we can know that we did all we could."
Ensign Bancroft's writing offers an account of the 1755 British military efforts to remove Acadians from the Maritimes. It includes some acts of resistance not mentioned in the journal of expedition leader Lieutenant-Colonel John Winslow, the only other British officer whose account of this phase of the deportation has survived.
The original Bancroft journal is now lost, but in 1925 an amateur historian typed out what appears to be an accurate copy, going so far as to replicate archaisms such as "Munday ye 16th." Then it was filed away and sat forgotten for decades, until chanced upon by Jonathan Fowler, an historical archaeologist at Saint Mary's University in Halifax.
The pages will have their first public airing today at the university's Sobey School of Business, exhibited for one day only along with artifacts from the Grand-Pré site. There is the hope that the exposure could jog someone's memory and perhaps lead to the original journal resurfacing.
"There are only a few documents written by eyewitnesses, so this is very interesting," Prof. Fowler said. "Because the events of the deportation have such resonance today, any light that we can throw onto these events, that becomes significant."
The transcript notes the captives' "shame and confusion" when they learned their lands were forfeited and they would be deported. Later, though, Ensign Bancroft describes prisoners seizing weapons from the British and fleeing, captives slipping off ships and a man shot while trying to escape.
"It really humanizes the deportation, this cataclysm in the Acadian experience, because it shows us how messy it really was," Prof. Fowler said. "This is not a people that simply goes passively aboard ships and sink into the mists of history."

OLIVER MOORE
HALIFAX — From Thursday's Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/in-lost-diary-story-of-acadian-resistance-is-found/article1377945/

TO READ AND PRINT JOURNAL,

GO TO

 http://www.smu.ca/newsreleases/ 2009/26-11- 2009.html

and click at the bottom where it says VIEW 

November 09, 2009

LEST WE FORGET


Lest we forget

Lest we forget

To the editor,

Two hundred fifty years ago, several thousand Acadian men, women, and children were deported from their home; their property burned or confiscated the victims of crime against humanity.

This missive is to alert your readers of a series of interviews by the CBC on the subject of the Acadian deportation.

The first interviewee is Warren Perrin who will address the subject of an apology for the Crown for the deportation. It will be aired on November 10 at 7:15 in the morning.

Perrin is an attorney in Louisiana and the recent author of a biography on Acadian Redemption (copies at Acadian Village in V.B.) He is also President of CODOFIL in Louisiana. Perrin was a recent guest speaker at UMFK, at the invitation of History Professor Roger Paradis.

Perrin has been calling for des excuse de la Reine for over two decades, and, in a carefully researched document, cites numerous precedents for doing so.

David Le Gallant and myself will be interviewed on November 12 at the same time, in French and English.

Le Gallant is a graduate of Moncton University, with a degree in common law.

From there he went on to study at the European Institute for International Studies in France where he won first prize for an essay entitled, "La passion d'un voyage d'un Acadien errant.

He is also the past president of the Acadian Museum Association of P.E.I., and the Sr. Antoinette de Roches Historical Society.

Le Gallant is a man of the world several times over, and he has also endorsed Perrin's efforts to obtain an apology from the Queen for the so-called Grand Dérangement.

For myself I continue to labor in the Augean Stables of Acadian history, 1604-1763.

My interview will focus on the issue of genocide, and whether it is an apt description of the deportation.

Until a few years ago, historians were in agreement to blame colonial underlings for the Acadian tragedy; some even blamed the victims.

I followed the money trail and it led me George II. The Crown has since admitted responsiblility, but the apology lingers. Without this, there can be no healings, no closure.

Two hundred fifty years ago, in 1758, the Acadians on Ile Royale, (Cape Breton Island), and those on Ile Saint-Jean, now Prince Edward Island, were deported to France.

Of the 4,000 who were deported from Ile Saint-Jean, some fifty percent never reached their destination.

Many died from fever on the squalid and over crowded ships; the others went down to a watery grave. Two ships sank in mid Atlantic, and another broke up on a reef.

While the insular Acadians were being rounded up for deportation, General Jeffrey Amhurst ordered Colonel Robert Monckton to clear the St. John River of the unwanted Acadians.

Their settlements were torched and most, though not all, fled up river to the St. Lawrence where they found host families.

Weakened by exposure, hunger and fatigue, many succumbed to disease and were hastily buried in unmarked graves along the river.

For the very elderly and very young, the long trek to Québec was a death march. The few that were found hiding in the forest were ultimately deported.

Among the settlements that were destroyed was Sainte-Anne, the largest with some 250 inhabitants, located at present day Fredericton.

In 1759, the settlement was felled upon in the dead of a winter's night. Among the dead were women and children.

Many of the refugees would eventually find homes here in the upper St. John Valley.

This Thanksgiving, while we are enjoying the comforts of home and family, we may want to pause and reflect on the fate of those refugees, many of them our ancestors.

They were embarked on often-leaky tubs to cross 3,000 miles of ocean during the hurricane season.

This was the most dreadful time to sail the North Atlantic when ships braced against 30 and 40-foot waves, and huddled below deck were hundreds of terrified, filthy, hungry, feverish people, gasping for every breath of fetid air, whose groaning and weeping and screeching mingled with the whimper of the dying.

Gaze upon the river before you and witness the pitifully long line of distraught refugees as they went their way, in fair weather and foul, to face a grim future in a strange and distant land.

In war as in peace, the innocent always suffers more than the guilty. T'was at this time, this season, 250 years past that the light almost went out for the Acadians.

Lest we forget.

Roger Paradis

UMFK Professor

Fort Kent