The Acadians: A People's Story of Exile and Triumph

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–

The year 2005 marks the 250th anniversary of the decision by Governor
Charles Lawrence and his Council to expel the Acadians from what are now
the Maritime provinces of Canada. Although this anniversary has inspired
a number of books on the Acadian experience of tragedy and survival,
this one is by far the most accessible to the general reader. Dean Jobb
is a historian and an award-winning journalist with an eye for detail,
an unerring sense of narrative, and a passion for social justice. The
latter ensures that the human element remains at the heart of his story,
which is rooted in a careful sifting of historical sources and a wide
range of interviews. While some may quibble with his conclusion that the
Acadian deportation was an act both of ethnic cleansing and of
genocide—John Mack Faragher, for example, has argued in his book A
Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French
Acadians from Their American Homeland (2005) that it was technically the
former and not the latter—Jobb is unwilling to split hairs over what
for him is a crime against humanity that was neither necessary nor
inevitable.

What makes this book particularly engaging is the way that Jobb nestles
the colonial history of the Acadians into their current conditions and
interests. He has interviewed many Acadian descendants (now estimated to
total three million worldwide) who have diligently traced their origins
to the Maritime region. Their stories underscore the extent to which
individual and collective identity is sustained by the historical memory
of a tragic event. In the closing chapter of the book, Jobb explores the
attempt by Louisiana lawyer Warren Perrin to secure an apology from the
British Crown for the deportation. Although Governor General Adrienne
Clarkson signed a Royal Proclamation in 2003 acknowledging the tragedy,
there would be no apology. This book, both a history of a people and a
history for all people, helps to make up for this omission.