America's forgotten atrocity

Another of your core beliefs about the Acadian story is that nothing that happened was inevitable, is that right? Their fate was not inscribed on a tablet by God, and things could have ended differently. In looking at the Acadian example, you actually think it's possible to imagine a version of European settlement on this continent in which there was an entirely different relationship with the native peoples.

Absolutely. I believe that firmly and I've believed it for a long time, before I ever knew about the Acadians. My expertise is frontier history, and as you may know, before I did this book I wrote a biography of Daniel Boone. In that book, what I found so fascinating about this genuine American hero was that -- he certainly didn't make the world he was born into, and he was born into a world in which his interests as a white Pennsylvanian, later a white North Carolinian, later a Kentuckian, were in many ways diametrically opposed to the interests of the Indians whose homelands those places were.

On the other hand, Boone always attempted to make those moves in the utmost good faith, dealing directly with Indian people, respecting them, talking about the ways in which he admired their culture. And objecting, at the end of his life, to the fact that the reputation he had gathered during the Revolutionary era was as an Indian hunter. At the end of his life, he found his best friends among Indian people. He ended up in Missouri, among Indian people who had also exiled themselves to Missouri, as a result of the expansion of the United States.

When you look at the story closely, you find that although American history moved in a particular direction, and certainly for the Indians it was not a positive direction, at every step along the way there was a significant minority of white Americans who objected to that direction and who proposed an alternative strategy, a way of getting along. It was always contested, and there were points in time where that minority actually prevailed for long periods of time. The whole history of the fur traders on the American frontier, for example, was in general very positive; it was about finding and making connections. We tend to remember frontier history like a horror story. It ended up that way, but it wasn't that way at every turn.

The point I'm trying to make is that one of the roles I see for a historian in the United States -- and here I separate myself from, let's say, the Ward Churchills, who are only looking to tell stories about victims and villains -- is to resuscitate those points at which people faced with the dilemma of a whole new world attempted to do something good, and achieved something that was worth remembering.

To what extent should the Acadians be viewed as a mixed-race or an ethnically mixed people? And how much did that perception contribute to their downfall?

There was an early period in their history, mostly in the 17th century, where there was considerable intermarriage. It really characterized the first and maybe the second generation, when the community was in formation. Once they had established their community the rate of intermarriage fell off, but the important point was that they recognized kinship across community lines. The Acadians looked at the Míkmaq and didn't just see "others" there. They saw cousins, distant cousins perhaps, but cousins nonetheless. They often went to the same missionaries, their names were placed in the same baptismal records, the same marriage records. Because of the early pattern of intermarriage, they came to recognize a cultural and Christian kinship across ethnic lines.

In fact, this also characterizes a lot of American history. I don't like the word, but we're a miscegenated culture. There is nothing really pure about Americans. You scratch us, and we bleed many colors and many ethnicities. Our culture is about hybridity, bringing formerly separate things together. The Acadians are perhaps a more dramatic example.

Now it must be said that the French had a tendency, in part because they emphasized commerce rather than agriculture, to create the kinds of ties with the Indians that made commerce possible. They also practiced an ecumenical Catholicism and were genuinely interested in converting the Indians, where the English really were not.

Yes, you write that the Puritans made no attempts to do that.

Well, there were some attempts, John Eliot and the Mayhews -- these were missionaries in 17th century New England. But the Indians that Eliot converted, who lived in the "praying towns" in Massachusetts, those Indians were attacked during King Philip's War, and subjected to the same hatred and violence as non-Christian Indians. This remains one of the fundamental problems in understanding North American history: the English way of dealing with the Indians vs. the French way.

You've suggested a couple of reasons for the difference, but I gather there's no clear-cut historical understanding of this question. Why did the French get along with the Indians so much better?

Some people might like to suggest that the French national character was more accepting, but you can certainly find instances where the French would be just as brutal. My own interpretation is that Roman Catholicism was extremely important and the role of commerce was extremely important. In the case of the Acadians, these were people who, because of the details of their history, were pretty much left alone. During the first three or four generations of their time in America, they figured out quickly that finding a way to live in cooperation with the Míkmaq was crucial to their survival; accommodation became the salient fact of their existence.

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