Author Jeremy White never had a conversation with his grandmother without his father translating because she only spoke a dialect of French that was literally beaten out of his dad’s generation. It was deemed unworthy of passing down to White’s generation of Cajuns growing up in an otherwise Francophone region of South Louisiana, where their exiled Acadian ancestors finally settled when it was still a Spanish-controlled colony. They arrived following a three-decade-long diaspora instigated by New Englanders who violently expelled the Acadians from the Canadian Maritimes in the mid-1700s, dispersing them hither and yon on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The British crown accepted responsibility for this early instance of ethnic cleansing in North America when Queen Elizabeth II, via Royal Proclamation, apologized to the Acadian people in 2003 for the horrors wrought by descendants of Pilgrims.
Cajun Shame: Demise of a Centuries-old Culture explores the largely unknown history of White’s people, including the 1980 landmark civil rights case, Roach v. Dresser, which said Acadians/Cajuns represent a unique ethnic identity. This ethnic identity was created in seventeenth-century Nova Scotia, where French émigrés transformed from weary peasants into proud frontiersmen in a single generation. White’s lineage traces back four centuries to this foundational generation of Acadians through all eight of his great-grandparents. Following the lives of his ancestors, their migrations, and their exploding numbers amid the imperial ping-pong match between a neglectful France and a bellicose Britain, White not only puts a human face on this largely unknown history but also reveals its most opaque facets.
Stay up to date on Jeremy’s latest work, Cajun Shame…
While my first two books were about things that suddenly happened in my life—my wife finding her biological family and Humana trying to throw my mom’s life away after a stroke—Cajun Shame is the book I was meant to write. In a way, The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture and InHumana helped prepare me for incredible discoveries of familial history and heritage amid institutionalized cruelty.
— Author Jeremy White
