Acadians: A People's Story of Exile and Triumph [Paperback]

 

 

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Dean Jobb, well-known for his "Politics and the Westray Tragedy"(1994), has created in "The Acadians A People's Story of Exile and Triumph" an excellent survey of one of the darkest events in British North American history that took place about a hundred years before Canada became a nation state. Contrary to other contemporary historians who do not question the callousness of British commanders (p. 281) or governments who suffer the British monarchy to squirm on the issue of the Acadian Deportation, the author has understood that the 2003 made-in-Canada Royal Proclamation did not constitute an apology whatsoever to the Acadians as "no one apologized for anything" (p. 252).Dean Jobb calls the Acadian Deportation (1755-1762) what it was and continues to be (the Deportation Order has never been revoked) : "a genocide and ethnic cleansing" (p.2) as defined by Article II of the Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (9 December 1948). There is no statutory limitation on murder and genocide is the collective murder of a people.

"The Acadians A People's Story of Exile and Triumph" is a must-read for anyone interested in the unadulterated history of the Acadians, the first ever permanent neo-European founders of North America above the Rio Grande. That some Acadians returned to their homeland does not diminish the fact that they were the target of a cultural and religious "improvement policy" fomented by the British Honoverian-German Royal Family (who changed their names twice from the House of Hanover to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and to Windsor) and its Privy Council at a time that their Hanoverian King George II was no mere puppet. The "improvement policy" slated for peoples on the fringes of the nascent British Empire began by transforming Acadians into "aliens". (see Daniel Kanstroom's "Deportation Nation" p. 45) though they already had "ACADIE" as a homeland for a span of some 150 years.

Dean Jobb's story of the exile and a purported triumph of the Acadians brings to mind that Acadians were made outsiders in their own homeland and may remain so until Queen Elizabeth II makes a formal apology on behalf of her German Royal ancestors and the British Government rather than try to mitigate the deportation into a "cheap littile robbery" (p. 252) by usurping the authority of the office of the Canadian Governor-General in issuing a made-in-Canada Royal Proclamation, as if the Atlantic Ocean storms and the Canadian Government were somehow responsible for the Acadian Deportation - this in spite of the fact that Canada did not even exist as a nation state at the time of the Deportation.

The book of Dean Jobb is unique in that it tells it as it was! It's an ultimate triumph long overdue for 18th century Nova Scotia historiography!!

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