This post marks the fifth anniversary of this Franco-American history blog. Sincere thanks to everyone who has read, encouraged, and supported its research and reflections.

The author delivered the following remarks as the opening lecture of the University of Maine at Fort Kent’s Scholars Symposium on April 26, 2022. The transcript appeared in the summer 2022 issue of Le Forum, the quarterly publication of the Franco-American Centre (University of Maine). Please cite appropriately.

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By virtue of my training as a historian, this lecture will discuss the past, as you might suspect. But it will focus on memory much more than on history. The distinction is important. History is a field of inquiry by which we seek the truth about what came before us in order to better understand our world and ourselves. Memory serves the same overall purpose, but approaches it differently. Memory is more democratic. It occupies different spaces stretching from family lore to movies to public commemorations. Memory does not have a set method; it evolves more organically. Finally, it is often less conscious because it is so deeply enmeshed in our social relations. Memory is how we make sense of the past without studying the past.

This may seem like a strange point of departure for a Scholars Symposium that prizes extensive research, methodological precision, careful analysis, and objectivity. As we know from the fields of anthropology and sociology, however, memory is itself a helpful tool that can help us understand what a society values, how it operates, and how it views itself. In my view, historical study does not help us predict the future. But memory can be a good predictor of how some groups will act and react in certain circumstances.

Collective memory serves a special function in historically marginalized communities, among which are French-heritage groups across North America. Here we are mostly talking about four large ethnic communities: the Acadians, found in eastern Canada and northern Maine; the Cajuns of Louisiana, who are descended from displaced Acadians and who have had their own unique historical trajectory; French Canadians, concentrated in Quebec but also present in other Canadian provinces and many areas of the United States; and the Métis Nation of the Canadian West whose culture and ancestry is in part Indigenous. In this talk, I am setting aside immigrants from France to this country, who did not experience the same social and political struggles, and Haitian and West African communities, which may be French-speaking without bearing the same metropolitan French heritage and which do not have the colonizer roots of the Acadians and French Canadians. In the St. John Valley, though many people are quick to identify with their Acadian roots—that is part of their historical memory—, ancestrally they are often much more French-Canadian. In other words, they are descended from people who came from the St. Lawrence Valley much more than from the survivors and refugees of the Deportation.

So, what of the memory of these French groups? I would argue that while we like to celebrate the achievements of our group, whatever group that may be, loss is equally significant in how we see the past and ourselves. In fact, it is often our primary way of framing our collective past. All of this plays out in very specific ways for ethnic minorities that can claim the Western privilege of whiteness. For them, loss is success, and success is loss. Let me explain. Over time, immigrant groups that must first settle for the least specialized and most menial work will grow more affluent. That is to say, under pressure from mainstream culture and government policies, they will integrate and lose certain strands of the ancestral culture. This is especially true of people who face no racial barrier—who have the opportunity and luxury of becoming invisible within the dominant group. At the cost of great toil, many families will achieve financial success while they lose part of their ethnic identity. To be sure, it’s not a net loss: their culture also grows through hybridization. Still, the immigrant generation sees its children become less ethnic and more American. Having passed the challenge of conforming, the third and fourth generations look back longingly for the Old World culture that has almost entirely melted in the great American stew. Historian Marcus Lee Hansen famously described this multigenerational process in the 1930s. The point is clear: if the ethnic identity and consciousness survive three or four generations down, they tend to be defined by what was lost: language and faith, foodways, music, holiday celebrations, types of community organization, social mores, kinship ties, and the intangibles that also make up a culture. Descendants of Irish, German, Italian, French-Canadian, and other immigrants easily fall to fits of nostalgia, and with reason. It seems we paid culturally for the gains we made economically.

With all four of the French-heritage groups I listed, that loss has a distinctive twist and it is organized primarily around opportunities and language. To tell that entire tale, we have to turn the clock back to brutal ruptures that took place in the 1750s and to events that still loom large in the historical memory of Acadians and French Canadians. In 1755, the British colonial government began the process of removing 14,000 Acadians from their homes in the present-day provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Most Acadians were forcibly shipped to the Thirteen Colonies and to Britain. Families were broken up; people died of hunger and disease. Other people were able to flee and carried on as refugees; yet more were incarcerated and put to forced labor in Nova Scotia. The violence of the Deportation unleashed a tragic sequence of events and gave rise to small diasporic communities all around the Atlantic. Such communities, including that of the Upper St. John Valley, retain the memory of the Deportation. It remains central to their identity. After all, we cannot explain the Acadian communities in the Upper St. John Valley or in Louisiana without this crucial rupture. As it happens, French Canadians lived a defining rupture in almost exactly the same years. The St. Lawrence Valley fell to the British in 1759-1760. The Canadiens, five times as numerous as the Acadians, were spared deportation. Still, the regime change is perhaps the most important moment of their multicentennial history. What we today call the Province of Quebec lost its colonial bond to France. French Canadians would remain the numerical majority in that region—they would also remain in a political wilderness, struggling to have their collective aspirations and cultural concerns reflected in public policy for another century.

Research conducted by Marc Robichaud (Acadiensis, 2011) and Jocelyn Létourneau (with Christophe Caritey, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 2008) among francophone high school students in New Brunswick and Quebec confirm the significance of the two events I described. When crafting their own historical narratives, based on their course of study but also their larger cultural environment, students in New Brunswick mentioned the Deportation more than all other events of Acadian history combined. In Quebec, among Grade 11 students, the British conquest was second only to the settlement and development of New France in number of mentions. This is the historical baggage these students will carry the remainder of their lives.

We do not have the same type of data about historical memory from the Franco-American communities of former mill towns like Woonsocket, Fall River, Lowell, Manchester, and Lewiston, important destinations for French-Canadian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In such circles, the narrative of decline and fall is well entrenched—and has been for the better part of 60 years. Just last summer, on July 4 of all days, Radio-Canada published an extensive report titled “Les derniers Franco-Américains,” “The Last Franco-Americans.” This would be a sad assessment if it weren’t for the fact that the Quebec media has been publishing these cynical, defeatist reports for all of the last 60 years—yet, Franco-Americans are still very much here. Of the three featured interviewees, a regrettably small sample, two were now living in Montreal. This was not serious, investigative, on-the-ground reporting in the Franco-American world. However, this decline-and-fall narrative is present in Franco-American memory as in Quebec’s perception of its expatriated sons and daughters.

Here is the Franco-American twist on the memory of French heritage loss. Prominent figures in the community have argued that “Francos” are twice orphans. They became disconnected from two historic homelands—France and then Quebec. They did not experience the French Revolution or the Quiet Revolution, which completely refashioned Quebec society in the 1960s. Still today, many Franco-Americans feel a sentimental bond to the St. Lawrence Valley that their ancestors left, even when they themselves have little personal experience or knowledge of Quebec. Then there’s another aspect to that sense of cultural loss. Many Franco-Americans long not only for a lost world, but also for lost words—the words of the ancestral French language, which in most families is no longer spoken. We will long debate whether language is the essential linchpin of a distinct culture. Regardless, the linguistic aspect cannot but be central to the collective memory of minority groups. What happens when we can no longer communicate with our ancestors through the documents and artifacts they’ve left behind? What comes after the loss of language as a distinct social and cultural space? These are big questions and I’m sorry to say I won’t be resolving them in the course of this lecture. Still, I take this opportunity to propose an interesting paradox: when language is lost, if cultural memory remains, the “language of loss” becomes a replacement cultural site. In other words, the narrative of loss, even when expressed in English, can help a community remain cohesive. That, after all, is one of the primary functions of memory; it is a community’s lingua franca, and it sets it apart from other communities that have different historical experiences. Today, Franco-Americans continue to gather and to organize en anglais and, ironically, the fact that it is happening in English, the fact that their forebears integrated in the mainstream, serves as a social bond.

To complicate matters further, St. John Valley communities’ historical experience differs from the industrial world that Franco-Americans knew in various parts of New England and New York. It’s a long way from New Canada to these Little Canadas; a long way from Frenchville to Nashua’s French Hill. Many families here were not immigrants in the traditional sense. It’s been said before: they did not cross the border; the border crossed them. As I noted, historically, self-identification here tends to be more Acadian. The legacies of the Deportation and the settlement of the Valley by Acadians in the 1780s and 1790s loom large in our memory—more so than the conquest of New France. Ours was a majority French-heritage society that faced new challenges precisely as the border cohered and American institutions developed. Reliance on public education at a time when French teaching was proscribed in state-funded schools translated into language losses. I hasten to add that our region did not have access to the same diverse economic opportunities as other parts of the Northeast, such that the immigrant narrative of integration and upward mobility rings doubly false; we do not have the usual counterweight to the cultural narrative I have been describing.

In all of these regions, all of these French-heritage communities, the period prior to the ruptures of the 1750s often stands as a golden age—before it all went wrong due to the apparent evils perpetrated by the British. This period emblematizes authentic customs, ideal values, and the type of society that is still hoped for. It is thus another paradox of historical memory that a sense of loss, this historical lament, goes hand in hand with romanticization.

All of this, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. A person who is descended from the Nova Scotia Planters, the Irish settlers of the Ottawa Valley, or the Portuguese of New Bedford would view these events differently—if they even bring them into their historical memory at all. This is to say that we mustn’t confuse narratives with facts. The narratives that undergird a community’s memory are ways of organizing facts. Being a value judgment, loss is a way of stringing facts. There are other ways, other possible narratives, if we broaden our slate of facts, or rearrange them, or look at them from a different perspective. To put it plainly, memory is not objective reality—insofar as that is even attainable in historical study. But memory has a great deal of inertia because it involves identities, communities, and entire worldviews. As a result, historians who try to add nuance and complexity to our memory face a daunting challenge. That is all the more true when the word privilege comes up or when we confront historical trauma and tragedy. The challenge is made greater because memory involves useful myths—“myths” not because they are false or fictitious, but because they have taken a life of their own in the collective imagination and aren’t easily nuanced or displaced. They serve a purpose.

But why would historians even want or need to confront our collective narratives if memory serves a useful social function? As a historian myself, I believe we should engage in the difficult work of taking a critical look at our past, ourselves, and our world to understand them as they were and as they are. I believe we should broaden our horizons and appreciate the messy complexity of our world. I believe that a Manichaean worldview based on irreconcilable differences leads to conflict. A bolder, bigger, more inclusive memory helps us approach other cultural communities on their own terms and foster respect. At last, I believe that our inherited communities can thrive while acknowledging inconvenient facts, which might nourish introspection and dialogue.

If it sounds as though I am talking out both sides of my mouth on this issue of history and memory, I am. This is the last paradox I want to put to you. History and memory exist together, and arguably must exist together. Although they often occupy different spaces, each has value and plays an important social function. We are lost if we rely on one to the exclusion of the other. The first of two great challenges that lie before us, then, is to reconcile these intellectual universes. Historians must be conscious of the role of memory—and sensitive to the sense of loss—among historically marginalized groups. In addition, we must all anchor our narratives with ascertainable facts that provide as accurate and comprehensive a historical picture as is possible. For those of us who are of French descent, our ancestors lived in a tumultuous, complex world that did not fit our twenty-first century categories. Accordingly, they cannot act as stand-ins onto which we project our own values. We must understand historical actors—French, British, Irish, Portuguese, and so forth—on their own terms. This is a supreme act of empathy that holds lessons on approaching historical actors that are alive today—ourselves and our neighbors.

I mentioned two great challenges. One is to reconcile history and memory. The second is to confront the historical experiences and memories of other groups, particularly African Americans, Indigenous peoples, Muslims, and others who, for generations, faced insurmountable barriers. Economic ascent and access to political influence have historically been much less attainable for these racial, ethnic, and religious communities. They also have a story of loss, and one narrative cannot come at the expense of the other. We cannot let the marginalization we have experienced blind us to the very real struggles of other groups or deter us from the precious opportunity that lies ahead—the opportunity to break cycles of injustice from a position of mutual recognition. Working from a common basis of historical fact and understanding the essential role of collective memory in each community can help us do that.