Oct 8th, 2018
Reading Log 4
Naomi Griffiths’ paper “Acadian Identity: The Creation and Re-creation of Community,” is great piece on the wavy road that the Acadian peoples took to get to where they are now. CBC’s “The Acadians,” timeline provides a great picture of when and where the Acadian people are, beginning in 1604. Both works show the rollercoaster of a life the Acadian peoples had from being a healthy prosperous people to an exiled people spread thinly. Griffiths paper gives great and intrinsic detail into the liveliness of the Acadian people at some points even getting down into the nitty gritty details like where small groups of ended up and how they got there. The timeline is great in the amount of detail each annotation gives because it is simple and straight to the point.
The life of the Acadians is basically broken down into three parts, life in Acadia, the great deportation and life after the deportation. The people of Acadia lived long and hearty lives when they were located in the true maritime land of Acadia. Not only did they have a flourishing agriculture system, “they could expect to know their own grandparents and be grandparents themselves,” (Griffiths, P.335). Then the great deportation happened stripping them of their land and sometimes even family. This deportation came after the British took over they land that the Acadians lived upon, after a couple of attempts to get the Acadians to take up arms with the British. But after refusing to take up arms against anyone the Acadians were deported by the British Government. Some of the Acadians that got deported came face to face with new diseases they had never scene before when they arrived at their new home. Some Acadians escaped their deportation and waited for the possibility of there fellow Acadians to return which would form the Acadia that we know today.
Together Griffith’s paper and CBC’s timeline complement each other very well. The timeline gives a time aspect to every event in the Acadians lifetime then Griffiths paper adds the specifics like who was where and how they get there. Griffiths work sometimes comes off too detailed making it difficult to follow along, some pages seem to be just straight facts making the reader lose interest. If the timeline was to include a bit more of the facts in its annotations and if Griffiths paper was to look more into the relations and perceptions of the time. These two pieces together would paint a great picture of the Acadians bumpy life.