Abstract
National recognition of the soulful, raucous music of Southwest Louisiana prompted a new regard in Louisiana for the paramount importance of the French language in the state’s history and culture. But because the movement to restore French in Louisiana’s public life was modeled after French Canadian efforts to protect a minority language in a majority English-speaking nation, when the state of Louisiana began to try to reestablish the French language, its efforts focused on the history of French Canadian migrants to Louisiana, and Creoles, who were ancestrally French Caribbean Africans, dropped out of the state’s narrative. The band was broken up. The story was fractured.
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Notes
- 1.
Jeffrey Robert Rosner, “Francophonie” as a Pan-Movement: The Politics of Cultural Affinity (Ph.D. diss., The John Hopkins University, 1969), 46.
- 2.
Aonghas St-Hilaire, “North America and the Francophonie: Local and Transnational Movements for the Survival of French-Speaking North America,” Language Sciences, Volume 19, Issue 4 (October 1997): 372.
- 3.
Rosner, “Francophonie,” 46.
- 4.
Shane K. Bernard, “Acadian Pride, Anglo Conformism: The Acadian Bicentennial Celebration of 1955,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Spring 2000): 163.
- 5.
Bernard, “Acadian Pride,” 165–166.
- 6.
Rosner, “Francophonie,” 73.
- 7.
Bernard, “Acadian Pride,” 162.
- 8.
St-Hilaire, “North America and the Francophonie,” 374.
- 9.
Rosner, “Francophonie,” 71.
- 10.
Times-Picayune, March 6, 1970, 49.
- 11.
Rosner, “Francophonie,” 94.
- 12.
Roger K. Ward, “The French Language in Louisiana Law and Legal Education: A Requiem,” Louisiana Law Review, Volume 57, Number 4 (Summer 1997): 1284–1285.
- 13.
“L’Avenir de la Langue Française en Louisiane,” Pioneer of Assumption Newspaper, July, 1879.
- 14.
The Opelousas Courier, May 6, 1893.
- 15.
Lawrence E. Estaville, Jr., “The Louisiana French,” Journal of Historical Geography,” 14, 4 (1998): 353.
- 16.
Ward, “The French Language in Louisiana,” 1298.
- 17.
Estaville, “Louisiana French,” 347.
- 18.
Natsis, “Legislation and Language,” 326.
- 19.
Dewey W. Grantham, Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 334.
- 20.
Howard C. Hill, “The Americanization Movement,” The American Journal of Sociology, Volume XXIV, Number 6 (May 1919): 612.
- 21.
Americanization Bill: Hearings Before the Committee on Education and Labor, United States Senate, Sixty-ninth Congress, First session on S.17, September 11, 1919, transcript, 6.
- 22.
Hill, “The Americanization Movement,” 631.
- 23.
Americanization Bill, hearings, transcript, 27–28.
- 24.
Hill, “The Americanization Movement,” 633.
- 25.
Americanization hearings, Exhibit C, 25.
- 26.
Constitution of the State of Louisiana Adopted in Convention at the City of Baton Rouge. Louisiana, 1921.
- 27.
Bernard, The Cajuns, 27.
- 28.
Bernard, The Cajuns, 34; 66.
- 29.
St-Hilaire, “North America and the Francophonie,” 377.
- 30.
Marie Diane Rodgers, “The French Heritage in Acadiana: The Fundamental Course of Action Necessary to Preserve the French Language,” May, 1968, 17.
- 31.
Phillips, “Spoken French,” 174–177.
- 32.
Dorice Tentchoff, “Ethnic Survival under Anglo-American Hegemony: The Louisiana Cajuns, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Oct., 1980): 236–237.
- 33.
Gabriel Debien, trans. Glen Conrad, “The Acadians in Santo Domingo: 1764–1789,” in The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1978), 21.
- 34.
James Domengeaux interview by Barry Ancelet, April 23, 1972. AN1.052. The Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Audio recording.
- 35.
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “La Reveil de la Louisiane: Memory and Acadian Identity, 1920–1960,” Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 281–282.
- 36.
Domengeaux interview, AN1.166, archives of the University of Lafayette. Audio recording.
- 37.
“Agreement Between the Government of Quebec and the State of Louisiana on Cultural Co-operation.” University Archives & Manuscript Collections, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
- 38.
James Domengeaux, Speech to the Louisiana Association of Fairs and Festivals, February 10, 1968, transcript, 4. University Archives & Manuscript Collections, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
- 39.
Bernard, The Cajuns, 89.
- 40.
Jacques Henry, “The Louisiana French Movement, Actors and Actions in Social Change” in French and Creole in Louisiana, ed. Albert Valdman (New York: Plenum Press, 1997), 185–186.
- 41.
Bernard, The Cajuns, 83.
- 42.
Rodgers, “The French Heritage,” 13–21.
- 43.
James Domengeaux, Speech as Council Chairman, October 17, 1968, transcript, 2. University Archives & Manuscript Collections, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
- 44.
“The New Louisiana Story,” 93rd Congress, Second Session, Congressional Record, Volume 2, Part 5 (March 7, 1974, to March 18, 1974), 5417–5422.
- 45.
James J. Natsis, “Legislation and Language: The Politics of Speaking French in Louisiana,” The French Review, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Dec., 1999): 326.
- 46.
Natsis, “Legislation and Language,” 326.
- 47.
The Acadian Museum, Erath, Louisiana, exhibit.
- 48.
Natsis, “Legislation and Language,” 326.
- 49.
Reed, Lâche Pas, 30.
- 50.
Reed, Lâche Pas, 30.
- 51.
Natsis, “Legislation and Language,” 327.
- 52.
Bernard, The Cajuns, 84.
- 53.
Natsis, “Legislation and Language,” 328.
- 54.
Joshua A. Fishman, “Mother-Tongue Claiming in the United States Since 1960: Trends and Correlates,” in The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival: Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity, ed. Joshua Fishman, et al (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1985), 129.
- 55.
Fishman, “Epilogue,” The Rise and Fall, 489.
- 56.
Fishman, “Epilogue,” The Rise and Fall, 509.
- 57.
Fishman, “Epilogue,” The Rise and Fall, 510–511.
- 58.
Dewey Balfa in Alan Lomax’s Cajun Country, DVD.
- 59.
Fishman, “Mother-Tongue Claiming,” The Rise and Fall, 134.
- 60.
Gertner, et al, “Language and Ethnicity” in The Rise and Fall, 309–314.
- 61.
Wolfgang W. Moelleken, “Language Maintenance and Language Shift in Pennsylvania German: A Comparative Investigation,” Monatshefte, Vol. 75, No. 2 (1983): 172–182.
- 62.
Henry, “The Louisiana French Movement, Actors and Actions in Social Change,” 189.
- 63.
Ancelet has been one of the most activist figures in the language preservation movement in Southwest Louisiana. These remarks appear in in Pat Mire’s Mon Cher Comrade.
- 64.
Rodgers, “The French Heritage,” 2–5.
- 65.
Dorice Tentchoff, “Ethnic Survival under Anglo-American Hegemony: The Louisiana Cajuns,” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Oct., 1980): 238.
- 66.
Bernard, The Cajuns, 53.
- 67.
Domengeaux, Fairs and Festivals speech, transcript, 3.
- 68.
Bernard, The Cajuns, 81–82.
- 69.
Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 124.
- 70.
Melissa Hartmann, “Le cri du bayou: the status and promotion of the French language and Cajun music in Louisiana” (M.A. thesis, Colorado State University, 2012): 6.
- 71.
Améde Ardoin, “Louisiana Cajun Music Vol. 6: Amadé Ardoin—The First Black Zydeco Recording Artist (1928–1938).” Old-Timey Records, LP 124, 1983; Bois Sec Ardoin and Canray Fontenot, “La Musique Creole.” Arhoolie Records, CD 445, 1996, compact disc.
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Peknik, P. (2019). Utter Strangers: The English and French Language Movements. In: French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97424-8_7
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