Description
From the Preface to Seeking an Acadian Nation:
In 2015, the executive committee of the Acadian Museum of Erath, Louisiana, had several meetings with representatives of the family of the late Sen. Dudley J. LeBlanc. The meetings dealt with the opening of a major new exhibit which would celebrate the museum’s 25th anniversary, The Life of Sen. Dudley J. LeBlance: Acadian to Cajun.
The exhibition committee’s chairman, Erath attorney Robert B. Vincent, invited the public to consider contributing objects to the exhibit related to LeBlanc’s personal life, political career, or products he marketed, including his iconic Hadacol tonic.
Vincent’s public plea was answered. Many items, some of them rare, were donated, such as a scale model of the LeBlanc house, product signage, photographs, a tea set from the Thibodeaux Benevolent Association (or TBA, his burial insurance company), the sash to an Evangeline Girl costume, the very last bottle of Hadacol ever produced, LeBlanc’s topcoat, and Corinne Broussard’s diary and scrapbook of the historic 1930 trip she took to Canada as one of LeBlanc’s Evangeline Girls. That diary was the inspiration for this book.
Sen. LeBlanc called the 17-day pilgrimage “The First Official Pilgrimage of Louisiana Acadians to Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia.” The trip culminated a 50-year period (1880-1930) during which the acknowledged leadership of the Acadians in the Canadian Maritime Provinces, New England, and Louisiana gradually sought to reunite – after 175 years of separation – into a nominal “Acadian Nation” (words first used in 1881 by Pascal Poirier, Canadian author, lawyer, and longest-serving senator).
The Acadian leaders sought to inspire this movement by stressing their peoples’ similar genealogy, religion, language, heritage, and history. In effect, they envisioned reunification not back to a physical place but as an Acadian race. To motivate the Acadians during their early conventions in the late 1800s, the leaders developed several now-iconic cultural symbols, such as a flag, a patroness, and a day of remembrance and placed them all beneath the protective and redemptive umbrella of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s fabulously popular epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847).
During the 17-day pilgrimage of LeBlanc’s group, a young woman named Corinne Broussard, dressed in an Evangeline girl costume, kept a diary noting their day-to-day progress, the people they met, and the things they did. Her diary in a way personifies the search for connection between the Cajun people of Louisiana and the Acadians of the Canadian Maritimes. This in turn became the inspiration for the title of our book, Seeking an Acadian Nation-the 1930 Diary of an Evangeline Girl.
The book is arranged in three parts:
- The attempt at Acadian reunification by forming une grande famille acadienne (a large Acadian family)
- The pilgrimage to Grand-Pré as reported by the annotated diary of Corinne Broussard; and
- The resulting and continuing Louisiana French Renaissance (1930-present).
Drawing on an intriguing comment made by Corinne in her diary, the Epilogue compares post-Deportation Louisiana with Nova Scotia. The book concludes with a Louisiana French History Timeline (1604-2019) and a bibliography.
In order to help the reader better understand the passages of the journal, we have reproduced the 12-page diary unedited (there are a few errors in the diary itself that we opted not to tamper with). After each day’s edited and annotated entry, we included materials from the scrapbook that Corinne kept along with the diary of her trip. The memorabilia include original photos, brochures, invitations, postcards, letters, and newspaper articles. There are also several photos taken of her throughout her impressive 104-year-long life. We hope this book of the whole Acadian timeline, with the insertion of the Evangeline Girl Story, will add a new understanding and appreciation of the Acadian experience.
Praise for Seeking an Acadian Nation
[I] found it so intriguing that I just couldn’t put it down until I’d read it in its entirety. What made it so interesting is that I’d visited many areas mentioned in the book, throughout Canada, US and France, including spending many weekends and summer holidays in Larry’s River, mentioned on the map on page 28. Given the research I’d done for my book, Getting To The Roots Of My Family Tree, I was familiar with most of your book’s story. However it was interesting seeing it all again from someone else’s point of view! Then being a former teacher, I ended up with ton of notes of particular interest to me.
Sandra Perro
Victoria, British Columbia