The Cajuns: From Acadia to Louisiana

The Cajuns of Louisiana are a people descended from one of the earliest colonies of European North Americans. Their ancestors, the Acadians, established a French-speaking settlement around Canada's Bay of Fundy in 1604 -- several years before Jamestown. In 1755, their community was decimated in one of American history's most brutal and sordid episodes, known to the Cajuns as Le Grand Dérangement. English soldiers seized the inhabitants of entire towns, arbitrarily splitting up Acadian families and shipping them south. The Cajuns traces both the Acadian roots of these staunchly independent people and the exodus of their refugee descendants into the physically and politically challenging bayou country of colonial Louisiana.