Who ordered Acadians exiled?
Lafayette – The deportation of the Acadians, being hauled off by the thousands on small ships, is the popular recollection among today’s Cajuns. It’s the horrible death toll in the internment camps, the slave labor and other atrocities where, generations later, they develop amnesia. Laissez ca tranquil is the phrase many younger Cajuns who have lost their French language remember from their grandparents: “Leave that alone.” That amnesia wasn’t self induced, most Cajuns will say. “When they made us go to school, the teachers spanked us if we spoke French, they punished us,” says Lennis Romero, 81, of St. Martinville. That teacher, she was wrong, and she was very smart in English – but I was a lot smarter in French, so she couldn’t stop me.” Historian Carl Brasseaux of USL explains the amnesia as a refusal to give in to a victim’s attitude. “We’re thumbing our noses at those who tried to do us in,” Brasseaux said. “We’re still here, and they’re not. It’s open defiance.” But some aren’t l
