I trust those with whom I express disagreement will accept this critique in the collegial spirit it is intended.
“Recently, someone asked me, “Why do Cajuns identify as Cajuns?”
This implied other, related questions, namely “Why don’t Cajuns identify as Creoles? Aren’t they a type of Creole?” — as some, including myself, assert.
The short answer is: Like their Acadian ancestors, Cajuns have always viewed themselves as a distinct people. Even from other south Louisiana Creoles.
Not only culturally distinct, but, as importantly, historically distinct.
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| Poster in downtown Lafayette, La. (photo by the author, 2024) |
Let’s start with a few definitions:
In its broadest sense, the term “Creole” can mean a native-born Louisianian of French-speaking (less commonly Spanish-speaking) Roman-Catholic heritage — a definition without racial connotation. According to this definition, one can be Black, White, or multiracial and still be considered Creole.(1)
As such, some ask “Wouldn’t Cajuns therefore qualify as Creoles?” Because what are Cajuns in a broad sense but native-born Louisianians of French-speaking, Roman-Catholic heritage?
A growing number of Cajuns, Creoles, scholars, and activists accept this notion of Cajun ethnicity. They agree that Cajuns are indeed a kind of Creole.
A kind of Creole — and yet, most would assert, still Cajun.
This might prompt the further inquiry: “Yes, but why do Cajuns continue to see themselves as distinct from other Creoles?” Creoles who today seem eager to welcome Cajuns into their fellowship, but only if, as some Creoles insist, they jettison the “Cajun” label.
In short, the message is “Stop calling yourselves ‘Cajuns,’ start calling yourselves ‘Creoles.’”
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| Unveiling of the "Flag of the Louisiana Acadians," late 1960s. |
Some who support this idea imply if not outright assert, without evidence, that Cajuns are not a real ethnic group. That Cajun identity came into being only in the late 1960s as a racist response to the Civil Rights Movement. That “Cajun” is therefore a made-up or fake ethnic label.(2) As the person who queried me about Cajun identity declared: “the word [Cajun] doesn’t mean anything.”
Clearly, however, the word means a great deal to a great many people. According to recent census data, over 107,000 Americans (more than 74,000 of whom reside in Louisiana and, to a lesser extent, Texas) identify their primary ethnicity as “Cajun.” (As an aside, the same census data shows only about 14,000 persons in Louisiana and Texas choosing “Creole” as their primary ethnicity.)(3)
Despite the dubious claim that “Cajun” is “a new identity” dating back only 55 to 60 years, researchers (including me) have shown that the word originated as an ethnic label in English as early as 1862 — and in French as early as 1851.(4) Since then, the label’s use has not only persisted but grown enormously.
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| Google "Ngram" chart showing use of "Cajun" in books. Note the uptick spurred by the Cajun fad of the 1980s. (Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer) |
And these findings are based solely on printed references. Who knows when the word “Cajun” (whatever its spelling) first sprang into existence purely as a spoken word?
Returning to the core issue “Why do Cajuns identify as Cajuns?”:
Given the size of their population (again, over 107,000), there could be any number of reasons why individuals identify as Cajuns. A theoretical Cajun might have embraced the term because their parents and other relatives identified as Cajuns; because they inherited a surname commonly regarded as Cajun; because they identified closely with other self-identifying Cajuns; because they discovered their Cajun ancestry through family oral traditions, genealogical research, or state-of-the-art DNA testing, among other reasons.
In other words, Cajuns choose to identify as Cajuns for the same reasons other peoples around the globe embrace their identities — whether we speak of present-day Assyrians in the Middle East, the Tagalog people of the Philippines, the Mestizos of Spanish America, or any other group. Including, for that matter, the Creoles of south Louisiana.
Consider, however, one particularly powerful driving force of ethnic identification: history or, less formally, storytelling — both of which play a vital role in creating group identity and cohesiveness. For example, the story of the Acadian expulsion fits into a long tradition of exile narratives, such as the Romans claiming descent from defeated sea-wandering Trojans, or the Israelites enduring a forty-year exodus from pharaonic Egypt that led them to the Promised Land.(5)
Called Le Grand Dérangement (The Great Upheaval), the Acadians’ tragic exile experience occurred when British redcoats (often New England colonists in service to the Crown) expelled up to 18,000 Acadian men, women, and children. As prisoners, they were shipped to inhospitable locales in England, the thirteen British colonies of North America, the French mainland, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. About a decade later, the first of roughly 3,000 Acadians arrived in south Louisiana, a new homeland they tellingly called Nouvelle Acadie. In time, their descendants would come to be known as the Cajuns.(6)
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| Carl Brasseaux's important study The Founding of New Acadia. |
This exile spread the distinct Acadian identity far and wide, as noted by Carl Brasseaux, author of seminal works about Cajun and Creole history:
[M]ainstream historians of the past 150 years . . . have clearly established that the French colonists of the Bay of Fundy Basin [i.e., Acadia] had forged a new, collective ethnic identity as Acadians long before their expulsion from Canada in 1755. . . . During the ensuing years of exile and wandering, the Acadians were universally regarded by their reluctant hosts [in the places to which they were deported] as a distinct people with a common ethnic identity. That identity clearly remained intact after successive waves of surviving Acadians made their way to Louisiana between 1764 and 1788.(7)
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| 19th-century illustration of the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians. |
Cajuns aware of their history regard the expulsion and its aftermath as a painful but defining legacy, one that serves to distinguish them from other ethnic groups. Even from those who endured their own diasporas, as in the case of Creoles of African heritage.(8)
Brasseaux moreover observes, “At the time of their arrival [in south Louisiana] and for decades afterward, the exiles’ ethnicity was clearly and unequivocally recognized by established Louisianians, including proto-Creoles, who clearly viewed the immigrants as the ‘other.’”
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| Another book by Brasseaux (et al.). |
Indeed, Creoles in the late 19th and early 20th century — white Creoles, but Creoles nevertheless — worked to distance themselves from, and exclude, Cajuns. As an 1881 federal census study maintained, “The Creoles proper will not share their distinction with the native descendants of those worthy Acadian exiles who . . . found refuge in Louisiana. These remain “cadjiens” or “cajuns”. . . .” As late as 1939 one scholar observed, “[The Creoles] often had a word for the poorer Cajuns: ‘Canaille!’ — that was their way of saying poor-white trash.”(9)
Brasseaux adds, “This does not mean that, after centuries of evolutionary adaptation to the same physical and cultural landscapes, there were not similarities. . . .”
So, yes, Brasseaux says, the Cajuns are similar to other south Louisiana groups. Similar, yet distinct.
Furthermore, modern evidence reveals legal and genetic proof of Cajuns separateness. In 1980 a U.S. federal court, per the lawsuit Roach v. Dresser, established that Cajuns are a people of “foreign descent” and thus protected from discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the presiding judge stated, “By affording coverage under the ‘national origin’ clause of Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] he [the Cajun] is afforded no special privilege. He is given only the same protection as those with English, Spanish, French, Iranian, Czechoslovakian, Portuguese, Polish, Mexican, Italian, Irish, et al., ancestors.”(10)
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| My 2003 book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People. |
Meanwhile, scientists identified a distinctive “Cajun genotype” traced to the early Acadians’ common origins in southwest France. Acadians and Cajuns both compounded this trait through intermarriage, a practice encouraged by generations of remote settlement patterns. As I wrote in my book, The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (University Press of Mississippi, 2003):
“John P. Doucet, a molecular geneticist at Nicholls State University . . . and other scientists studied genetic diseases that affected Cajuns more prevalently than the general population. These ailments included Friedreich’s ataxia, Tay-Sachs disease, and Usher syndrome. Interest in this new scientific field led to . . . DNA research at Tulane University that uncovered a common Cajun genotype — further evidence that Cajuns are indeed a bona fide ethnic group. . . .”(11)
So there you have it: Cajuns identify as Cajuns because they have always viewed themselves as a distinct people. And the reason they have viewed themselves as distinct is not merely cultural, but historical — a history in which observers not only categorized them as separate, but, as Brasseaux notes, one in which 19th-century white Creoles excluded them as undesirable "others." The Cajuns' distinct sense of identity has only been reinforced in recent decades by legal and genetic evidence.
As I have written before, today’s moral consensus demands we respect others’ professed identities and reject erasure in all its execrable forms. Is it therefore fitting that some would tell Cajuns their identity — one existing in the historical record for at least 175 years — is “meaningless”? Or should we respect how others choose to identify, put aside past and present enmities, and work together for mutual benefit, as many scholars, activists, and others have been doing for decades?
Notes
(1) For more information, see my previous essay: Shane K. Bernard, “Of Cajuns and Creoles: A Brief Historical Analysis,” Bayou Teche Dispatches, 13 February 2022, http://bayoutechedispatches.blogspot.com/2019/06/of-cajuns-and-creoles-brief-historical.html, accessed 22 September 2025.
(2) Shane K. Bernard, “Born of ‘Elite’ White Reactionism?: Assessing Claims about the Rise of Cajun Ethnicity,” Bayou Teche Dispatches, 5 May 2022, https://bayoutechedispatches.blogspot.com/2022/05/born-of-elite-white-reactionism.html, accessed 22 September 2025.
(3) Shane K. Bernard, “Disappearing Cajuns and Creoles? Ethnic Identity and the Limits of Census Data,” Bayou Teche Dispatches, 20 June 2024, http://bayoutechedispatches.blogspot.com/2024/06/cajuns-creoles-and-limits-of-census-data.html, accessed 22 September 2025.
Self-identification is by far the most common method of declaring one’s ethnic affiliation. Indeed, short of genetic testing and meticulous genealogical research — which some people consider deeply personal and extremely private — what other method of ethnic identification is there? Reliance on self-identification — practiced routinely, for example, by the U.S. Census Bureau — admittedly carries the possibility of error, even deception. It assumes, however, that most claimants respond in good faith and with some degree of accuracy.
(4) Shane K. Bernard, “Notes on the Birth of Cajun Ethnic Identity,” Bayou Teche Dispatches, 12 February 2022, http://bayoutechedispatches.blogspot.com/2020/09/notes-on-birth-of-cajun-ethnic-identity.html, accessed 22 September 2025.
Some counter that “Cajun” was used in south Louisiana solely as a negative term prior to the birth of the Cajun pride movement in the 1960s. They also claim “Cajun” was used solely as a catch-all term for any poor White French-speaker, no matter their culture or heritage. Yet analysis of 19th- and 20th-century primary-source evidence reveals a more complex, more nuanced use of “Cajun.” While negative occurrences of the word “Cajun” certainly exist — some of them scathing — so, too, do positive and neutral ones. Likewise, while “Cajun” was sometimes applied to all poor French-speaking Whites, it was also commonly used to denote those who descended from Acadian exiles. In short, the issue of how “Cajun” was used in the past is by no means monolithic.
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| Evangeline. |
(5) Some might argue that the Acadian exile hardly merits comparison to such momentous events. Yet it remains a story so powerful and emotive that Longfellow — described as “for more than a century, the most famous poet in the English-speaking world” — adapted the Acadian exile as the basis for his epic poem Evangeline. A poem, as I have elsewhere noted, “Generations of schoolchildren memorized . . . alongside Byron, Tennyson, and Shakespeare.” A poem that inspired Broadway and Hollywood productions, as well as a veritable Evangeline cult centered on St. Martinville, Louisiana. See Shane K. Bernard, Teche: A History of Louisiana's Most Famous Bayou (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), pp. 5-6.
(6) Carl A. Brasseaux, “Scattered to the Wind”: Dispersal and Wanderings of the Acadians, 1755-1809 (Lafayette, La.: The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana [now University of Louisiana at Lafayette], 1991), p. 67, Table VI; ____________, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765-1803 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), p. 91. In the former, Brasseaux places the number of Acadian exiles in colonial Louisiana at about 2,600. In the latter, however, he places the number at “2,600 to 3,000.”
One critic accuses present-day Cajuns and some who write their history of “romanticizing” the expulsion. The critic in question does not explain what is romantic about an event marked by disease, starvation, exposure, and outright physical violence — an event resulting in a roughly 55-percent mortality rate that claimed up to 10,000 Acadian lives. See John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 469-471. Faragher writes, “The Acadian entry in the book of the dead is staggering: in July 1755 they numbered eighteen thousand persons in the maritime region. Over the next eight years an estimated ten thousand exiles and refugees lost their lives as a direct result of the campaign of expulsion” (pp. 470-71).
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| Faragher's Great and Noble Scheme. |
(7) All Brasseaux quotes in this essay derive from Carl A. Brasseaux, Lafayette, La., to Shane K. Bernard, New Iberia, La., 9 May 2022, email correspondence in Bernard’s possession.
(8) One might ask “What about persons of African heritage who, because of interracial relations, share the Cajuns’ genetic fingerprint and possibly also their language, music, foodways, and other cultural markers, right down to their Cajun surnames? Should they not be considered ‘Cajun’?” There is no denying a racial element to Cajun identity. As I have shown, despite claims to the contrary, Cajuns and their Acadian ancestors have historically been considered “White.” Regardless, I believe someone of both Acadian and African ancestry should be free to identify as Cajun. Indeed, there is no legitimate reason they should not identify as Cajun, if they so choose. I would, however, never tell someone how to identify: that is a choice they should decide for themselves, and their decision should be respected.
(9) George E. Waring Jr. and George W. Cable, History and Present Condition of New Orleans, Louisiana: Social Statistics of Cities, Tenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior/U.S. Government Printing Office, 1881), 10; Shields McIlwaine, The Southern Poor-White from Lubberland to Tobacco Road (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939), p. 143.
(10) Shane K. Bernard, The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), pp. 136-37; ____________, “Calvin J. Roach v. Dresser Industrial Valve and Instrument Division,” 64 Parishes, 19 January 2023, https://64parishes.org/entry/calvin-j-roach-v-dresser-industrial-valve-and-instrument-division, accessed 22 September 2025; James Harvey Domengeaux, “Native-Born Acadians and the Equality Ideal,” Louisiana Law Review 46 (July 1986): 1152, 1158, 1159-60, 1194-95, passim.
(11) Bernard, The Cajuns, p. 147.
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