Le Petit Futé calls it a veritable time machine and it's true: the Village Historique Acadien outside Caraquet is an amazing journey in time. It probably helped that a horse-drawn cart was passing just as we entered and we hitched a ride, the weather was grand - and that there weren't too many other visitors. But what made this collection of buildings gathered from across the province of New Brunswick gel was the fact that the buildings were in use (bread and cakes are baked, meals served, laundry done and a fence painted, wool carded and spun, brooms and buckets made, quilts sewn, a newspaper printed, etc.). Fields were planted, animals pastured, and every house had a fully stocked chicken coop - except Ferme mazerolle, which had turkeys.
Fully furnished in period style, each house is inhabited by someone impersonating the building's earlier inhabitants. Relaxed and comfortable in their roles, they seem grateful for visitors and more than happy to chat (in French or English), naming and puncturing the illusion by telling us what year they're in, where the building used to be, what activity they were in the middle of doing. That freshly baked bread whose smell filled the house, would we like to try some? (It was delicious!) The buildings are sprinkled organically across a wooded landscape as it might have been settled, views opening up one by one as you walk (or ride!) through, moving gently from the late 18th to the early 20th century. It sounds corny but it wasn't - at all.
I'm actually more than a little confounded at how delightful the whole experience was. (We stayed hours and hours, as the guidebook predicted we would.) But it seems especially sweet that it should be succeeding so spectacularly for the Acadian community - a community defined by rupture and diaspora. The story, deftly told by a most convincingly schoolmarmish Mademoiselle Céleste Richard on July 5, 1869 in the schoolhouse of Chockpish (at the left in the top picture), is and is not simple. The simple version is that a community of French farmers, settled in the north of what became Nova Scotia and friendly with the native Mi'kma'ki, were deported by the British after they refused to swear allegiance to the British King. (
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Acadians were rounded up from 1755 to 1778 and sent to Britain and then farmed out to British colonies as far away as the Falklands, often as forced laborers; some, deported to France, were lured back to North America by the Spanish, seeking farmers for their colony of Luisiana (voilà, the Cajuns). Many wound up in New Brunswick and Canada, where they kept their heads down, ever aware that they might suffer a
grand dérangement again. There are Acadians around the world, the teacher said, but what binds us together is the enduring memory of the deportation. The magic of the Village Historique Acadien is partly this dream of being able just to live out your simple life, safe from the violent tides of history.
This simple outline defines what must have been, and continues to be, a most unsimple history. What led the British to seek to to eradicate Acadian culture (some think genocide a more accurate term than deportation) might have been their being Catholic (one reason they couldn't swear fealty to the leader of the Church of England) or their wish to remain neutral between the great powers of France and Britain. Or it might have been the way they mixed and intermarried with the Mi'kma'ki, embodying an alternative to the settler colonialism that felt called by God to wrest the land from its prior inhabitants. Whatever the source of this imperial wrath, it rendered them stateless and dispersed, with a history only they remember.
I'd be lying if I told you I was aware of this history before this trip. I'd sort of elided the story of the Acadians (I knew about the deportation, and Cajuns) with that of Québec - francophone Canadians all, non? Non. Québec lives in a kind of
subjunctive - une Amérique francophone is almost real! Acadian existence is diasporic, pushed off every map. Never a nation, just a memory of a village from afar.
Le Petit Futé calls it a veritable time machine and it's true: the Village Historique Acadien outside Caraquet is an amazing journey in time. It probably helped that a horse-drawn cart was passing just as we entered and we hitched a ride, the weather was grand - and that there weren't too many other visitors. But what made this collection of buildings gathered from across the province of New Brunswick gel was the fact that the buildings were in use (bread and cakes are baked, meals served, laundry done and a fence painted, wool carded and spun, brooms and buckets made, quilts sewn, a newspaper printed, etc.). Fields were planted, animals pastured, and every house had a fully stocked chicken coop - except Ferme mazerolle, which had turkeys. 
