Advancing Cajun culture comes down to economics

As a people, Acadians endured a brutal expulsion by the British in 1755. In the process and over the next 50 years, some exiles made their way back to France, while many others made their homes along both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

It was 250 years ago just last month that ancestors of local Cajuns docked in New Orleans and eventually made their way to what was known as the Attakapas region of the state, now Acadiana, to begin anew.

Then came the railroad, oil, roads and bridges and what would become the Americanization of a people; another forced, though not bloody, attempt at uprooting a culture without removing it from its own land.

The language took the first hit, sometimes literally, when a Cajun spoke French in school. Bending, but not breaking as their way of life, including food and music, was challenged and even ridiculed, the Cajuns held on; but not by much.

Determination and pride go a long way, but the 1968 founding of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana helped keep the culture afloat until Cajun music brought it ashore in the mid-1970s.

Today, Cajun music is heard at festivals at home and abroad and celebrated with dance, study and Grammys. Cajun food is on the world's palate and its chefs are in demand around the globe; and thanks to the French Immersion program, a language returns to a new generation.

But don't strike up a Cajun version of "Kumbaya" just yet. There's more to be done to secure and further the culture, and it comes down to a matter of economics.

"It just keeps evolving," said Warren Perrin, chairman of Acadian Museum in Erath and author. "One of the things on our plate is to expand making French a commercially viable product — just more products — more business and economic opportunities."

It's not new as CODOFIL's mission states, in part, to "do any and all things necessary to accomplish the development, utilization, and preservation of the French language as found in Louisiana for the cultural, economic and touristic benefit of the state."

And it continues to this day, as seen in CODOFIL's 2015 annual report sent to the governor that touches on its progress in international relations, education, community support and development, economic and tourism development.

"For a long while we couldn't prove where people had used their French in a career path," said Jean-Robert Frigault, exchange programs development manager at CODOFIL. "But now we have a guy who hires petroleum engineers and gives them $15,000 when they speak another language.

"We have tourism," he said. "Laura Plantation on the River added to their revenue 200,000 bucks a year with French tourists that no other plantation wants to do," said Frigault. "And French is becoming the No. 1 group of tourists that comes to Louisiana."

French at work, so to speak, can also be put to use with the National Guard, the health care field and law, too.

"Our native French speakers who are in the National Guard can be used in a special unit to respond to like Haiti and other countries where they need French-speaking soldiers to help them in cases of devastation," Perrin said.

"We're trying to do the same thing with health care," said Frigault. "I found out that there's a lot of MDs who do speak French. So if we could network with these guys and the nurses to help those old people who are reverting to French because that's what their mother tongue was. There are still some needs for our health care professionals to be sensitive to their needs."

The Loyola University New Orleans law school recently formed a French Club.

"They hired a French teacher from Loyola University to teach them a course in French in the law school for no credit," said Perrin. "So there's something happening."

Indeed. Later this month, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, and some 40 other French-speaking mayors are coming town.

"I think they want to make a statement that they do support us," Frigault said. "We just need to do what have to do."

It all may not have happened if not for the accordion, fiddle and t-fer.

"The one that I think really saved the day was music," said Frigault. "I don't think we'd be where we are right now without that having the big impact in the '80s and '90s when there was a resurgence of Cajun musicians. And to get to know what they were singing, they had to go and learn it somewhere else, unfortunately, but they did. Or they went through the process of French Immersion."

Barry Ancelet, Francophone studies department head at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, couldn't agree more.

"One of the main reasons why some young people have become interested in learning French is because the lyrics to Cajun music," Ancelet said. "I think if there were more opportunities, theater and interesting stuff to do, it would attract people to the language.

"There's two basic ways that language preservation or regeneration can happen and one of them is the legislative way," he said, explaining that Quebec made French its official language and had public signage in French. "Or the other way to do it is to produce stuff of such interest that people want to come to it. They're interested, they're attracted to it."

Ancelet said that in the 1970s, the Acadian Maritime Provinces realized that French language wasn't an end unto itself.

"They had to produce not only people who could speak French, but people who could repair televisions in French, talk on television in French and make films and fix pipes and everything," Ancelet said. "You had have the whole system able to operate in the language."

Not only did Quebec's citizens undertake French language classes, their classes in careers were in French, too.

"There's potentially an uncomfortable side of it if you're talking about selling out and speaking French like in a zoo," said Ancelet. "'Come pay to hear the French speakers.' That's not good, but there's the other side of it that's more functional and practical and actually quite healthy.

"You learn a language because it's useful. It communicates. It enables you to do things," he said. "Some of those things are art related, culture related — like music and theater — but some of them are business related."

The Cajun culture is on firm footing, but its lifeline is the language.

"Some of us are going where we need to be going," he said. "There's not enough of us going, and we're not going fast enough. But those are solvable problems. If we can succeed in having an immersion program in every school in every Acadiana parish, we would be making way more headway at a better clip and we would be approaching critical numbers.

"We're not there yet, but we're moving in critical numbers," said Ancelet. "People involved in this process have understood some years ago that immersion is our last and best hope. And it works. It absolutely actually works."