Postcards from Acadie: Grand Pré, Evangeline and the Acadian Identity

Kimberly J. Frail is a librarian in the Science and Technology Library
at the University of Alberta.

Public Services Librarian
University of Alberta Libraries
Bibliothèque Saint-Jean

In Postcards from Acadie, author and university professor Barbara
LeBlanc focuses on the 47-acre area known as the Grand-Pré National
Historic Site, located in the village of Grand-Pré, Kings County, Nova
Scotia. In the first two chapters, LeBlanc provides the historical
context, describing the geographical, economic, and political history of
the area from the 17th century to the “Grand Dérangement” or
deportations of the Acadians in 1755. In Chapters 3 and 4, she analyzes
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s mid-19th-century poem “Evangeline: A
Tale of Acadie” revealing how the story of the deportation,
Longfellow’s heroine, and the area itself were successfully used as
marketing tools to help turn Nova Scotia into a major tourist
destination. In Chapters 5 through 7, LeBlanc establishes links between
Evangeline, Grand-Pré, and the nation-building activities of the
Société nationale l’Assomption from the late 19th century to the
cultural “reawakening” in the 1950s sparked by the bicentenary of
the deportation.

LeBlanc draws on her experiences as former director of the Grand-Pré
National Historic Site as well as on a substantial amount of research to
explore the relationship between the Acadian people, the Grand-Pré
site, and Parks Canada, which took over management of the site in 1956.
She defines this relationship as “an Acadian struggle for empowerment,
a continual negotiation for control over how history is interpreted and
by whom.”

In the second half of the book, she draws parallels between the
building of the Acadian Nation and the building of the Nova Scotia
tourism industry that are effectively summarized in a side-by-side
timeline table (Appendix A). The book concludes with a summary of how a
fictional literary character and the promotion of Grand-Pré as a symbol
of ethnicity were used in the construction of an Acadian identity.

Postcards from Acadie is suitable for anyone with an interest in the
history of the Grand-Pré area.