This here PDF blogspot started in 2012 to provide a real, albeit liminal, perspective on Louisiana Cajun and Creole culture. It was shown through the eyes of a young, self-taught Louisiana French speaking woman who found herself in an old place that was still largely wilderness. I am talking both metaphorically and about the physical realm here. The linguistic as well as geographic isolation, coupled with learning my heritage language, doing my genealogy, observing the seasons and plants and animals was all enriching as well as overwhelming. I was inspired by the language, the place names, the folklore of Louisiana, and wanted to provide something new and more substantial than the usual cliché versions of our culture found in the media and popular culture. I didn’t want to feed into those ideas, but to provide a real look into the values of a modern Cajun woman. I used it as an excuse to explore my own linguistic acquisition as well as document the place where I lived, which, from the surface, seemed like any Louisiana back country, east of Opelousas, but underneath held the old memory that only the ground can store.
I hazarded myself to my elders, accepting their corrections, guidance, and stern warnings against some behaviors. I saw, and still see, my role as someone who gathers, protects, expands not just the folklore and language but also the values carried in it, the old Latin ways and Indigenous matriarchy that our great-grandparents operated within, maybe even without realizing it. I wanted to share my experience learning the language to provide an example of what is possible for other young people as well as what healing can be done inter-generationally across the reacquisition of our heritage languages, and applied this to my artistic work. It was healing work of my own linguistic wounds as well as those of my community and for years I did it anonymously, with no name attached to my blog. This was my personal deeply painful healing work and I wanted to be a vessel for it, to transmit it. If you know anything about treatment, faith healing and the beliefs that we still carry, you know this work intrinsically carries a prohibition against capitalizing on the work, if the healing is going to happen at all. Otherwise, it’s just American business as usual. This has been my struggle and I still as of today, reap no financial benefits from my herbal, language or artwork because of my core belief that it may negate the healing. Like saying thank you for a plant, or working on Good Friday. There are certain things we just don’t do.
Fast forward 20 years and there are a whole crop of “Cajun influencers” who despite their heavy accents and adorable mannerisms, many of which hit people including me in the nostalgia, still miss the mark. This is deeply personal work within the individual, and also that spills out into the larger society. If we share it without true understanding, it risks the continuation of Cajun stereotypes, half truths and generalizations that we have endured for centuries, but this time it is metabolized, disseminated and sold out by our own people who think a quirky t-shirt and some catch phrases is proof of culture deep enough to influence. I fear that Americanization has already influenced the influencer to capitalize on our culture on a surface level to appeal to the general American public. This work of figuring out who you are, who we are, how to reengage with the language and apply the values of our ancestors is not to be broadcast and cheapened. It’s personal work full of the missteps made by us, the children of this culture, who are just learning how to speak. If influencers did the private work, and learned the language, experienced the humility of the old ways, felt the embarrassment, ingested the same indignity shown to our elders through the language, they would cease to want to be influencers on an American platform. There is a change in the value system when we metabolize the true essence of our people and of Louisiana French, and this dignity has parameters, it is not a joke or entertainment. It’s like a rare prairie plant that blooms quietly in the pasture, unseen by anyone but the bees who work to pollinate the entire Cajun Prairie.
