Remembering the Cajun Past

Memory, Race, and the Politics of Public History in Louisiana

Marc David

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781625349194
  9781625349200
• eBook ISBN:
  9781685752002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring how public history creates collective memory of this white ethnic group through memorials
 
Cajuns arrived in southern Louisiana in the 18th century after the British exiled them from eastern Canada. Also known as Acadians, they retain a unique dialect of French, and their distinctive music, food, and other cultural traits characterized them as an ethnic group. Until the 1960s, authorities viewed them as a serious problem, allegedly blocking the state's progress as they clung to their antiquated ways. Few Cajun residents in the region remembered the remote past of their ancestors, but by the 1970s, organizations ranging from local non-profits to the National Park Service created sites that commemorated their history, such as the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, allowing Cajuns to connect their lives to their past and claim it as their own.
 
In Remembering the Cajun Past, anthropologist Marc David studies the cultural and political dynamics that reconfigured Cajun memory and identity. Focusing on St. Martinville and the Acadian Memorial, he explores how authorities changed their minds about Cajuns and demonstrates how Cajuns' historical memories took shape. Part ethnography and part history, David examines the racial aspects of the Memorial's creation in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and the growth of a new Cajun history, one through which individual Cajuns rejected the label's connotation of "white trash" and embraced belonging within a storied white ethnic group. Based on decades of fieldwork and deep engagement with public history practices, David explores how historical memory and the historic sites that foster it are intertwined with the politics of civic life.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Names and Cited Material
• Introduction: The Happy Minority?
• 1 “Like the Dog in the Manger”: History and the Trouble with Cajuns
• 2 The Past as a Civic Force: Historical Remembrance in St. Martinville
• 3 Forgetting Big Things in a Cursed Town
• 4 Where Cajuns Fit In, God Knows: Remembering White Ethnicity—or Not
• 5 Making the Happy Minority: Cajuns, History, and Projects of Governance since the 1960s
• 6 Knowing Their History for the First Time: Translation and the Civic Politics of Making the Acadian Memorial
• 7 From Cajun to Acadian: Moral Projects and Routes of Historical Remembrance
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index