In a sunrise ceremony, local aboriginal elders, opened this year’s World Acadian Congress. People have come from near and far for this gathering.
It’s a reunion of sorts. 120 families are represented, all descendants of the people who were forcefully removed by the British in what’s come to be known as the Great Upheaval, or the Great Expulsion.
It began in 1755 and continued over the years, part of the British military campaign against New France.
11,500 people on the farms and in the communities in what are now the provinces of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, as well as the north-eastern American state of Maine, were deported to other parts of the thirteen colonies, and eventually to France.
American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was inspired by the events and wrote his poem about a fictional woman named Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.
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