From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People, 1605–1755

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–

In 1956, Naomi Griffiths sailed from England to Canada to do graduate
work in history at the University of New Brunswick. Her MA thesis
focused on the Acadians and, over the course of her long career at
Carleton University, she delved ever deeper into the history of these
ill-fated people who in 1755 faced a deportation order from British
officials based in Halifax. Now recognized as the foremost authority on
the colonial history of the Acadians, Griffiths provides an impressive
synthesis of recent scholarship on this topic that will not soon be
superseded.

Griffiths notes in the introduction that she is particularly interested
in the factors that led a group of early European immigrants to identify
with a place called Acadia and that enabled them to retain a distinct
sense of identity without the benefit of political autonomy. In
addressing these issues, she draws a detailed and intimate portrait of a
people who developed, over a century and a half, a sense of independent
destiny that informed their stubborn resistance to both English and
French authorities. “In considering their history,” one has to give
this “‘obstinacy’ its due,” she argues. One of North America’s
first immigrant peoples to embrace “republicanism”—Aboriginal
peoples in the region, with whom the Acadians got on reasonably well,
may well have served as models in this respect—their claims to
“neutrality” backfired in the context of imperial rivalries played
out in the contested territory known variously as Nova Scotia and Acadia
(the borderland of the book’s subtitle). Unlike many scholars who
approach this topic, Griffith is cautious in her conclusions concerning
the deportation order, suggesting that short-term decision-making rather
than “a planned policy flowing out of ethnic hatred” is central to
what happened. Her unfailing respect for the Acadians is revealed in her
refusal to reduce them to a static essence. She notes that their society
was as diverse and as complicated as any other and that there is much
more to Acadian history than the catastrophe of the deportation, and a
struggle between good and evil—points fully documented in this
remarkable book.