Louisiana Up Close: Acadians forced exile on display at Museum of the Acadian Memorial

ST. MARTINVILLE -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized the Acadians’ exile to Louisiana in the fictional poem “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.”
Longfellow, who based the work on a Canadian legend he had heard from Nathaniel Hawthorne, tells the story of an Acadian women named Evangeline who is separated from her fiancé Gabriel during the deportation, and her long search to reunite with her love.
That story has long served as an inspiration, and as a badge of honor, in the state of Louisiana from everything to food products (Evangeline Maid Bread) to gambling (Evangeline Downs) and even serves as the name of one of the state’s 64 parishes.
Yet, as inspiring as the poem has proven to be in the 169 years since it was first published it remains simply a fictionalized work. The real story of the Acadians being deported can be found, and more importantly experienced, at the Museum of the Acadian Memorial, which celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this month.
“The purpose to have a place in Louisiana that memorialized the original Acadians is that because so many of us have that Acadian heritage,” said Patty Guteakunst, President of the Acadian Memorial Foundation Board.
The museum, which overlooks the Bayou Teche, lays out the details (in both English and French) of how British troops deported an estimated 10,000 Acadians to British American colonies, England and France between 1755 and 1763; how the refugees arrived in New Acadia from 1764-88, the Cajuns role in the American Civil War and how Mexican film star Dolores del Río who posed for the Evangeline statue that is located in the church yard of St. Martin de Tours.
In the museum visitors can view several different items, such as the Acadian Bicentennial banner from 1955, the handmade Acadian Odyssey Quilt, and a miniature version of the Evangeline statue that currently rests in front of the Evangeline Parish Courthouse in Ville Platte.
The museum is flanked on both sides by two other attractions.
To the museum’s right is the le chêne d’Evangeline or the Evangeline Oak. The enormous oak tree there marks the legendary meeting place of Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux, the real life inspirations for the main characters of Longfellow’s poem. There is also a bust of Longfellow in the courtyard with the oak tree.
“The oak has become a centerpiece of local history here,” Guteakunst said. “People gravitate to the oak.”
To the museum’s left is the building, the town’s former city hall, which now houses two large exhibits.
The first is the “The Arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana,” a 12 x 30 acrylic painting on canvas mural by Robert Dafford. The models used for the painting were actual descendants of exiled Acadians.
“The people that are depicted are a representation of the original families that arrived here,” Guteakunst said. “The portraits in the mural are of the descendents of those families.”
Visitors can sit and listen to an audio presentation about those Acadians, as voice actors give life to those men and women that were exiled to the area, including Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil, who was later Commandant of Attakapas District, which consists of the modern day parishes of Lafayette, St. Martin, Iberia, Vermillion and St. Mary.
The other side of the building is The Wall of Names, which consists of 12 bronze plaques surrounded by granite with the engraved names of 3,000 Acadian refugees. The inscription at the beginning of the displays reads, “Pause Friend, Read My Name and Remember...”
For those who are interested in further tracing their families’ Acadian heritage, one can utilize the museum’s database of Acadian Genealogy, on the museum’s website at http://acadianmemorial.org/genealogy.php.
That isn’t all though as behind the building in the courtyard there is the Mosaics of Acadian Family Coats of Arms, which is comprised of broken titles, Our Eternal Flame which symbolizes the culture’s ability to rekindle itself and the Deportation Cross, a replica of Grand-Pre Deportation Cross, which was dedicated by Bishop Michael Jarrell of the Diocese of Lafayette in 2003.
The museum also has events throughout the year that further help promote the Acadian heritage in the area. On July 28th, there will be a World Wide Day of Remembrance honoring Mavis Arnaud Fruge who is known worldwide as a proponent of French in Louisiana, there will be a genealogy workshop in September, the National Day of the Acadians on August 15th and of course the annual Acadian Memorial Festival, a museum-style event which highlights Cajun traditions and music, which is held every March.
“When we hold our annual festival in March we try to hold a reenactment with wooden boats that land at the site and have local Native American groups come and participate with us in remembering where the Acadians arrived here in Louisiana,” Guteakunst said.
With Cajun culture popular as ever, is there still a need to have a museum that vividly retells the experience of the Acadians forced deportation to Louisiana?
For Guteakunst, the museum is needed more than ever.
“The thing that happened to the Acadians are happening to other people in the world we live in today,” Guteakunst said. “It is ongoing problem to other people throughout the world. Terrible atrocities happened to our culture and we can’t lose sight of any of that. We did lose sight of that for a while but never again. The world needs to remember these incidents.”