Posted on 08/27/2015 2:26:34 AM PDT by goldstategop
More than a football field of land disappears every hour. As the land erodes, people in coastal communities move "up the bayou" - inland to bigger towns and cities. But as the smaller coastal communities are dispersed, traditional ways of life are under threat.
"I am the last generation of fluent speakers of French here," say Cheramie, before launching into a demonstration of the Cajun dialect. "I think French culture is lost."
It's not just the language that he sees disappearing.
"Our culture of fishing and hunting and trapping, appreciating the marsh - nobody else has what we have here, eventually it's gonna be gone. That's what I'm scared's gonna happen."
Where you lose land you lose people and culture Roland Cheramie, Cajun musician
One place Cajun French does survive is in song lyrics. Roland Cheramie (no relation) works in a car dealership, but his real love is traditional Cajun music.
"It's music that was written by my ancestors, it tells our story," he says. As the sun sets, he plays me some tunes on his fiddle, singing about Bayou Lafourche with a raw, heartfelt intensity.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
As in the haunting songs about the region:
Si tu voudrais mon cher bébé, reviens avec mon
Reviens avec mon à Bayou LaFourche
Mon j'irais pour te chercher là-bas éou t'as été
Pour rester dans mes bras pour toujours
Mon j'croyais que tu m'aimais mais ton coeur a tout changé
J'sus tout seule après pleurer à Bayou Lafourche
Quo'faire toi, tu t'en reviens pas et rester dans mes bras
Pour finir nos jours ensemble à Bayou Lafourche
And:
De bonne heure tous les matins,
J’peux voir les bons cadiens,
Partir (z)à la pêche dessus la mer.
Dessus le Bayou Lafourche,
On va tous les dimanche
A l’église du bon dieu pour prier.
Y en a pas qu’est si riche,
Y en a pas qu’est si pauvre,
De ces bons acadiens pour faire une vie.
Moi je m’en va chère chérie,
Un de ces jours,
Sur l’écore du beau Bayou Lafourche.
I’m Creole from south Louisiana, my family is mostly from Acadia parish and most had the French beat out of them, literally. My grandparents were native Creole speakers and were whipped un grade school for speaking French. They refused to teach their children French because they thought it would hold them back.
Thanks GoldStateGOP.
I hadn’t heard about this until now.
Begins with Gorebull Warming crappola
Goodbye Joe
Me gotta go
Me-o my-o
The wife has one side where she is Acadian or L’Acadien as the say in Canada. We spent some time tracing her Nova Scotia roots prior to their displacement to Quebec.
Some interesting history that wasn’t written about at the time.
The ethnic cleansing of the Maritimes still is a relatively obscure piece of history (despite the fact that it gave us much of the Cajun culture in Louisiana). The simplest way to preserve any culture is by having children and passing it on.
I am part French Canadian from my mother’s side, via nothern Maine. Very interesting article.
Cultures have been disappearing for thousands of years as they have no longer been useful.
It is the lefts propaganda that we have to save them and is in their plan to destroy this country.
By dividing and destroying the American way.
Interesting story, but I’m not not sure I’m buying the “football field of land” “ “disappearing” every hour.
Actually, and shockingly, no, they apparently are not blaming it on "global warming", but rather a lack of sediment to replenish the delta land that is there now.
From the article...
"The land here in the Mississippi delta was created by sediment carried downstream by the river and deposited when it flooded. Then in the early 20th Century the US Army Corps of Engineers built a system of levees so that the Mississippi wouldn't breach its banks.
This made life a lot safer for people living along its course. But with no fresh sediment to build up the land, it has been steadily sinking.
Add in damage from the hurricanes that regularly ravage this part of the coast, from saltwater that creeps inland and kills vegetation, and from the canals dug by the oil and gas industries, and it's a slow-motion environmental disaster."
https://youtu.be/te7KW4K-00E
Acadian Driftwood”
The war was over and the spirit was broken
The hills were smokin’ as the men withdrew
We stood on the cliffs
Oh, and watched the ships
Slowly sinking to their rendezvous
They signed a treaty and our homes were taken
Loved ones forsaken
They didn’t give a damn
Try’n’ to raise a family
End up the enemy
Over what went down on the plains of Abraham
Acadian driftwood
Gypsy tail wind
They call my home the land of snow
Canadian cold front movin’ in
What a way to ride
Oh, what a way to go
Then some returned to the motherland
The high command had them cast away
And some stayed on to finish what they started
They never parted
They’re just built that way
We had kin livin’ south of the border
They’re a little older and they’ve been around
They wrote a letter life is a whole lot better
So pull up your stakes, children and come on down
Fifteen under zero when the day became a threat
My clothes were wet and I was drenched to the bone
Been out ice fishing, too much repetition
Make a man wanna leave the only home he’s known
Sailed out of the gulf headin’ for Saint Pierre
Nothin’ to declare
All we had was gone
Broke down along the coast
But what hurt the most
When the people there said
“You better keep movin’ on”
Everlasting summer filled with ill-content
This government had us walkin’ in chains
This isn’t my turf
This ain’t my season
Can’t think of one good reason to remain
We worked in the sugar fields up from New Orleans
It was ever green up until the floods
You could call it an omen
Points ya where you’re goin’
Set my compass north
I got winter in my blood
Acadian driftwood
Gypsy tail wind
They call my home the land of snow
Canadian cold front movin’ in
What a way to ride
Ah, what a way to go
Mississippi Delta subsidence primarily caused by compaction of Holocene strata
Coastal subsidence causes sea-level rise, shoreline erosion and wetland loss, which poses a threat to coastal populations1. This is especially evident in the Mississippi Delta in the southern United States, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The loss of protective wetlands is considered a critical factor in the extensive flood damage.
The causes of subsidence in coastal Louisiana, attributed to factors as diverse as shallow compaction and deep crustal processes, remain controversial.
Current estimates of subsidence rates vary by several orders of magnitude.
Here, we use a series of radiocarbon-dated sediment cores from the Mississippi Delta to analyse late Holocene deposits and assess compaction rates. We find that millennial-scale compaction rates primarily associated with peat can reach 5 mm per year, values that exceed recent model predictions
Locally and on timescales of decades to centuries, rates are likely to be 10 mm or more per year. We conclude that compaction of Holocene strata contributes significantly to the exceptionally high rates of relative sea-level rise and coastal wetland loss in the Mississippi Delta, and is likely to cause subsidence in other organic-rich and often densely populated coastal plains.”
Yet we now have Spanish being catered to and here in Houston we have an “Arabic Immersion” school with funding from Qatar. What a twisted world.
French is one of the romance languages. I took French in high school because I wanted to be different. The only other language offered was Spanish.
The Band did that song-— love it.
Another thing ‘white’, dying at the hands of Obama.
Yep.
Thanks KC Burke. That’s a subject I know nothing about, the Quebec history.
“This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and
Hemlocks... “
Arcadian ping.
We lived in Houma for a few years while I worked with a designer of offshore oil rig service vessels. The French influence is unique throughout Southern Louisiana and we sure loved the cuisine but the French language radio stations and publications testified to the backwardness of a lot of people across that region who without benefit of the oil and gas business would be dirt poor and miserable in their refusal to leave the 16th century mindset of their ancestors.
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