The exiled marsh farmers of Grand Pré whose deportation and diaspora forged the most resilient French-speaking community in the American Northeast.
New England Acadians — the community whose origins in the French colonial settlements of Acadia, the maritime region of northeastern North America encompassing present-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island where French settlers beginning in the early seventeenth century built along the tidal marshes of the Bay of Fundy a distinctive agrarian civilization whose mastery of the aboiteau dyke system, the ingenious network of sluice gates that reclaimed the fertile tidal marshlands from the sea and transformed them into the most productive farmland in the region, gave the Acadian people a prosperity and a rootedness in their marshland country that made the catastrophe of the Grand Dérangement of 1755 all the more devastating, the British colonial authorities' forced deportation of approximately ten thousand Acadian men, women, and children from their farms, villages, and communities in one of the first ethnic cleansing operations in North American history scattering the Acadian people across the Atlantic world from Louisiana to France to the Caribbean in a diaspora of loss and longing that Longfellow immortalized in his poem Evangeline and that the Acadian people themselves remember as the defining trauma and the defining proof of their indestructible communal identity. The New England Acadian community — whose deportees and their descendants found their way to the mill towns of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts where the French Canadian and Acadian immigration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries built the Little Canadas of Lewiston, Biddeford, Manchester, and Lowell, communities of Catholic parishes, French-language newspapers, and mutual aid societies whose preservation of the French language and Acadian cultural identity in the heart of Yankee New England represented one of the most determined acts of cultural resistance in the American immigrant experience, whose tante Blanche folk traditions, their fiddling music, their tourtière and rappie pie cuisine, and their fierce pride in the fleur-de-lis and the Acadian star flag maintained across generations of assimilationist pressure a distinctly Acadian identity that refused to dissolve into the Anglo-American mainstream — carries today the memory of the marshes of Grand Pré and the trauma of the deportation as the foundation of a communal pride that is stronger for everything it survived. This interactive sweatshirt connects you to that exiled and triumphant legacy with a QR code linking to the full story.
HERITAG is a purpose-driven brand that celebrates cultural diversity and awareness. Wear and share your social identity and cultural heritage with a unique collection of interactive sweatshirts that carry flags of ethnic groups in America. Create informative and fun moments by inviting people to scan the visible QR code and learn about the diverse US population.
Making products on demand instead of in bulk also helps reduce overproduction, and this quality sweatshirt will be made especially for you as soon as you place an order.
Few more things to know about this product: • Scannable QR code printed on the back for an interactive and fun experience • Designed to educate about a nation's proud history milestones and rich culture • Custom print-on-demand • 50% cotton, 50% polyester • Regular fit, sturdy and warm, pre-shrunk soft-feel fabric • Double-needle stitched spandex collar, shoulders, armholes, cuffs, and hem
