Cajuns

For 75 years beginning in 1688, England and France engaged in a series of wars over the expansion of their overseas empires, a conflict that led to four confrontations in North America known collectively as the French and Indian War. After one of these conflicts, by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France ceded to Great Britain territories in Acadie (modern Nova Scotia), Newfoundland, and Hudson's Bay. Although the French residents were allowed to remain and to retain possession of any property they owned, over the next half-century many refused to sign oaths of allegiance to Britain while others openly joined pro-French militia units and aided the French forces in and around Fortress Louisbourg and Fort Beauséjour.

When war again broke out, the British became increasingly concerned about the questionable allegiance of les Acadiens. The result was a decision to expel the French population of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, an event known as the Great Expulsion, or le Grand Dérangement. Between 1755 and 1763 some 11,500 Acadians were forcibly deported. In American history, this event formed the basis for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem Evangeline.

Approximately 3,500 of those in the initial expulsion returned to France, but the rest were shipped to the United States. Many of these were resettled in rural communities in Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, but most soon moved to nearby urban areas where they formed distinctive French communities in cities like Baltimore, Maryland; Charleston, South Carolina; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In the second wave of expulsions, a sizable number who were destined for France elected to settle in Louisiana instead. The first group of about 200, led by Joseph Broussard, arrived in 1765. Others soon joined them, some lured from other French settlements in America by relatives and some coming from France or other French possessions in the Western Hemisphere, especially Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) during and in the wake of the Haitian revolution.

They initially settled along the lower Mississippi River, and then spread west into the Atchafalaya Basin and what is today known as Acadiana. Generally known as “Cajuns,” a corruption of the original French name Acadiens, by 2010 they numbered about 433,000 and lived primarily in the coastal areas of southern Louisiana, with another 56,000 in the adjoining areas of Texas to the west. They were accorded official U.S. government recognition as a discrete ethnic group following a Supreme Court decision in the case of Roach v. Dresser Industries Valve and Instrument Division in 1980.