Cajun / Acadian / Arcadian

A Cajun is a member of the community of descendants of French Canadians who colonized the Bayou Teche region of Louisiana after 1755, the dialect spoken by them—a variety of English with strong influence from Louisiana French—or a style of cuisine, a mix of French and African influences, popular among them that includes gumbo, jambalaya, and crawfish as primary features.

Cajun is a variant of the French Acadian, which in turn is from the Greek Ἀρκαδία (Arcadia), a mountainous region of the Peloponnesus in Greece which became a metaphor of an ideal, rustic life, such as that lived in the mythical Golden Age.

We see this metaphorical sense of Arcadia being used in English by the late sixteenth century. Here is an example from Thomas Watson’s poem Eglogve Vpon the Death of the Right Honorable Sir Francis Walsingham (also known as Meliboeus), which Watson produced in two versions, Latin and English. It’s inspired by Virgil’s Eclogue 1. Watson writes in the preface:

A third fault (haply) will bee found, that my pastorall discourse to the vnlearned may seeme obscure: which to preuent, I haue thought good, here to aduertise you, that I figure Englande in Arcadia; Her Maiestie in Diana; Sir Francis Walsingham in Meliboeus, and his Ladie in Dryas; Sir Phillippe Sidney in Astrophill, and his Ladie in Hyale, Master Thomas Walsingham in Tyterus, and my selfe in Corydon.

And early in the poem the character Corydon (Watson himself) opines on the death of Meliboeus (Walsingham):

Let deadly sorrow with a sable wing,
throughout the world go brute this tragedie:
And let Arcadians altogether sing
a woefull song agenst heauns tirannie.
     Alas too soone by Destins fatall knife
     Sweet Meliboeus is depriu'd of life.

The French colony of Acadia, named for the mythical rustic paradise modeled on the Greek Arcadia, was established in the seventeenth century in what are now the Maritime provinces of Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island). The colony was not a formal colony of France, rather an independent settlement of French colonists that had a politically tenuous existence between the French colony of Quebec and British North America. Acadia was conquered by the British in 1710, and in 1755, the British began the “Great Expulsion” of French colonists from the region. The Acadians were initially scattered along the eastern seaboard of North America with many returning to France, but a substantial number eventually settling in what is now Louisiana.

We see a reference to Acadian refugees in South Carolina being offered transport somewhere else in the Boston Weekly News-Letter of 3 June 1756:

CHARLES-TOWN (in South-Carolina,) May 1.

We hear, that an Offer has been made to the Acadians here, to supply them with Vessels &c. at the Public Charge, for transporting themselves elsewhere, as they have frequently solicited (or rather demanded.)

Aversion to “the wrong kind of” immigrants is nothing new in American history.

And a reference to Acadians arriving in New Orleans can be found in the 12 June 1765 edition of the New-Hampshire Gazette and Historical Chronicle:

It was reported that 400 Acadians were lately arrived at New Orleans, and the West-Floridians began to doubt whether the Spaniards would come to take possession of the said city and island.

France had ceded the colony of Louisiana to Spain in 1763 following its defeat in the Seven Years’ War, but the French colonists there rebelled, and Spain had difficulty in establishing its rule over the city of New Orleans and the surrounding area.

The form Cajun begins to appear in print in the 1860s, during the US Civil War. Ohio’s Delaware Gazette of 12 December 1862 gives this racist and extremely unflattering—to say the least—portrait of Cajuns that also revises the history to place the blame for their expulsion from Canada on their own heads rather than that of the British:

THE LOUISIANA CAJUNS.

A correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial, who was captured by the rebels in lower Louisiana and confined at Camp Pratt thus describes the singular race of “natives” who inhabit the swamps in the south-western part of that State:

“Camp Pratt was filled with Cajun conscripts. You don’t know what a Cajun is? Of course you don’t, but I will try and tell you. A Cajun is a half-savage creature, of mixed French and Indian blood. They live in swamps, and subsist by fishing and hunting and cultivating a small patch of corn and sweet potatoes.

[…]

Nova Scotia was settled by the French, and by them called Acadia. When the territory passed to the dominion of England, many of the people refused to live under British rule, and emigrated to Louisiana. They settled along the Mississippi, but were driven back further and further by the advancing tide of civilization into the swamps, where the lived like savages and bred like rabbits. They were called ’Cadians by the better settlers, and looked upon in something of the same light as the sandhillers and dirt-eaters of the Carolinas—poor white trash. The rebel authorities do not expect much service from them, but distribute them about to fill up old regiments.

Unfortunately, the popular conception of Cajuns today is not all that different from this 1862 newspaper account. They do traditionally dwell in bayou country, which is rural and economically depressed, but economic circumstances and a long history of exclusion and oppression are to blame for their status, not any inherent characteristics of the people.

Sources:

“Advices by Wednesday’s Mail (5 June 1765). New-Hampshire Gazette and Historical Chronicle (Portsmouth), 12 July 1765, 2/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dictionary of American Regional English Online, 2013, s.v. Cajun, n.1.

“The Louisiana Cajuns.” Delaware Gazette (Ohio), 12 December 1862, 1/6. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2025, s.v. Cajun, n. & adj.; December 2011, s.v. Acadian, n. & adj.; second edition, 1989, s.v. Arcadian, adj.1 & n.

“Postscript.” Boston Weekly News-Letter (Massachusetts), 3 June 1756, 1/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers. [The pages are not numbered; this is the first page of the postscript, not of the newsletter itself. There is further confusion in that two versions of the postscript were published, one dated Thursday, 3 June and the other Thursday [sic], 4 June. The third was a Thursday and the date the newsletter itself was published. So this postscript apparently was published after the regular publication, on the same or the next day.]

Watson, Thomas. An Eglogve Vpon the Death of the Right Honorable Sir Francis Walsingham (Meliboeus). London: Robert Robinson, 1590, sig. A2v and B2r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Hypersite, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.