Once, the French colony of Acadie ranged across what are now the Maritime provinces and present-day Maine; its first settlements are the earliest instances of a permanent French presence in North America. Concordia historian Ronald Rudin provocatively observes that the Acadian story offers an alternate genealogy of French Canada, challenging the dominant account—myth, as it turns out—that Champlain’s 1608 founding of Quebec City marks “the beginning of French Canada, if not Canada more broadly.”
But Rudin’s provocation does not quite deliver, and it is not because his account of Acadian memory lacks thoroughness or subtlety. He does a lovely job of explaining tensions in the Acadian community over how to treat the past. He is superb at showing that the Acadian story is also an aboriginal story—the two communities’ experiences of dispossession in the past, and struggles for recognition in the present, are historically closely intertwined. And he renders his account...
Sonali Thakkar is a former assistant editor of the LRC and a Trudeau Scholar. She is a doctoral candidate in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she studies post-colonial literature and memory.
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