Lost and Found in Acadie

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making, and co-author of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–

Like many people without a country, Acadians are preoccupied by issues
of history, culture, identity, and purpose. Clive Doucet, who has
addressed what it means to be an Acadian in two previous books—My
Grandfather’s Cape Breton (1980) and Notes from Exile
(1999)—continues his quest in this volume of 12 wide-ranging essays
that juxtapose, in a daring mix, past and present, personal and
political, local and global. As in the earlier volumes, Doucet takes his
grandfather’s Cape Breton farm as a point of departure, and the
strongest essays in the collection include his nostalgic memories of
Sunday rituals (“Sunday in the Village”) and his grandmother’s
story about bats (“First Butterfly of the Evening”). The essays on
early Acadian settlement and the Grand Dérangement are sometimes on
uncertain ground historically (for example, the fall of Port Royal in
1654 does not really mark Acadie as “an independent place,” nor were
the Acadians immune from the imperial rivalries that prevailed during
the wars that ranged intermittently from 1689 to 1748), but nevertheless
underline the significance of this book as an exercise in the
construction of historical memory and identity formation.

By using the past to inform the present, the author is in good company.
Most historians indulge in this search for a usable past. For Doucet,
the histories of his family and of the Acadians reflect the titanic
struggle between peasant peoples and larger national and corporate
forces that began with a new intensity with the Seven Years’ War. He
acknowledges that he sees his grandfather’s farm through rose-coloured
glasses, but maintains that the ideals of cultural integrity and
community well-being that inform his goal of finding ways for nations
“to exploit less and sustain more” were derived from his Acadian
roots. This may or may not be the case, but this is a worthy goal and
one that gives coherence to this life-affirming little volume.