Williams: New Orleans -- one of the great music towns of the world. Jazz, Blues, Soul, Country -- all meet and often mix here. It’s the heartbeat of the city and helps draw in millions of tourists every year. Bourbon Street in its heyday was never up-market but these days it’s just plain sleazy. This old French Quarter of New Orleans has been Spanish and then briefly French and since 1803 it’s been American.
In what’s called the Louisiana Purchase, Napoleon sold
all the land between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains for four cents an acre to the American Government in order to finance his wars in Europe. It doubled the size of the United States.
Today, the French Quarter of New Orleans today is for tourists. If you want to see the real thing, then you must head out of town to ‘Cajun Country.' We’re not there yet and this typical Louisiana thunderstorm isn’t helping. Down here on the Gulf of Mexico things get very wet. Then suddenly we’re through the looking glass and in Bayou country. The Louisiana swamplands --Cajun country. The man steering this skiff is a Cajun, Brian Champagne.

Brian: It's like a different world in here, you know. You don't have any pressure, so to speak.

Williams: He loves the swamps, the cypress trees, the Spanish Moss, the birds. Of course, in all this beauty there has to be a beast.

Savoy: Cajun music is the glue that holds the entire culture together. You take the music away and the whole culture will collapse upon itself.

Williams: Marc Savoy runs a Saturday morning jam session at his music shop. It’s how tries to keep the Cajun culture alive.

Savoy: There are more children learning the language through the music. They learn the songs and memorise the words
and get inquisitive and say what do these words mean. They learn the language that way.

Williams: So are these people French or American..or something else?

Savoy: American by birth. Cajun by the grace of God. They see themselves as being a part of America but apart from it also. They see themselves as being something very different. As far as they’re concerned and as far as their families are concerned, someone who has much better values than the normal American way of life.

Perrin: I’m 55 years old, I was born in 1947 and I was raised to not want to be a Cajun, I was raised to be what’s called an Americain -- not Cajun, an American. But that was a time when most young people my age, baby boomers, wanted to have nothing to do with the Cajun culture.

Williams: Walter Perrin is a lawyer and a Cajun, and these people are his family. It’s now good to be Cajun since their music took off internationally about twenty years ago and the world started to eat blackened fish and chicken and found out Gumbo was a soup.

Perrin: We love to get together. We call our third and fourth and fifth cousins our immediate family, so we party together. We go to our restaurants and you dance with three or four generations of families, and that’s how we like to enjoy and celebrate our culture.

Williams: Cajun is a corruption of the old name of these people --Acadian, and Acadia was Nova Scotia where they settled in the 17th century and from where they were brutally evicted in 1755 by the British.

Perrin: Ethnic cleansing pure and simple, genocide without a doubt. The same percentage of Acadians died as the percentage of Jews died in the Holocaust of World War Two, one third.
You are in the heart of Acadiana, a 22 parish, parish being the equivalent of a county, in Louisiana where the largest percentage of Acadian descendants reside in the world today. Those people, simply because of their ethnicity, their language and their religion, were forcibly removed by the greatest military force of its kind at that time.

Mire: Simply put it was ethnic cleansing, it was the first ethnic cleansing --the only ethnic cleansing of Europeans in North America and that’s what it was. They wanted to rid their selves of us and they did.

Williams: Pat Mire is a Cajun filmmaker. These scenes are from his award winning reconstruction of the deportations, “Against the Tide”, and Pat believes the brutality of that event still affects the way Cajuns think and act today.

Mire: Yeah, I think that having a good time is real important to us because real Cajuns live this very fearful existence I think, in that the whole drama of the deportation is still within us, it’s like in our DNA, and that to have a good time today because you -- I think we feel inside we just don’t know if we’ll be kicked out again, we don’t know when someone is going to tell us to, you know, stop all that stuff.

Williams: Being Cajun seems to be a bit like being Irish. It’s a full time job and Marc Savoy is determined to keep the culture and the music pure.

Savoy: The word traditional or maintaining tradition or keepers of the flame is a word that looks like no one wants to hear any more. So what I try to do here and what I’ve always tried to do with the jam sessions on a Saturday morning is to maintain -- it’s more like an old time house dance of long ago.

Williams: This is another Saturday morning tradition in the small Cajun town of Eunice near Lafayette. Buying boudin, the spicy sausage that’s as essential to the Cajun as potatoes to the Irish or rice to the Chinese.

Johnson: It’s a Cajun ritual you might say. Back in the old days in the country they would kill their hogs and get their meat ready on Saturdays. That’s when they made the boudin
so when we started making boudin, it was a Saturday thing.

Williams: Wallace Johnson runs the local store.

Johnson: Boudin is a mixture of rice, pork meat, pork liver, green seasonings such as bell peppers, green onion, celery and chopped up onion heads. It comes from the Cajun families when they used to butcher in the country a long time ago.

Mae: They’d kill two big hog so they had all that fat and all the meat they’d put that with salt to preserve it, salt meat. And it was good.

Williams: Meet Mae and Mevaly Aucoin -- that’s Mae on the left, Mevaly on the right. The ladies are having their photograph taken in front of the house where they were born and grew up. At Warren Perrin’s lakeside place, Mae and Mevaly are family.

Mae: We had an easy life, very easy. We had a lot of friends. Everybody would come to visit my mother.

Mevaly: And she had some treat for them all the time.

Mae: She’d make coffee all the time, a lot of coffee.

Williams: Mae and Mevaly’s father planted this tree when he was seven years old. This is what you call a family tree. Before they eat, the Grace is said in French.

Williams: Cooking is one of the ways Cajuns celebrate their survival of their culture. But Attorney at Law Warren Perrin wants more - he’s officially seeking an apology from Queen Elizabeth for the dreadful wrong done to the Acadians in 1755 in the name of the British Crown.

Perrin: I prepared a petition and I delivered it to Queen Elizabeth and then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1990, where I demanded a couple of things but primarily an apology for what took place. And no compensation, but secondly and just as important I discovered that the deportation order had never been annulled or recalled and in fact was specifically kept in effect to prohibit the Acadians from ever returning to Nova Scotia.

Williams: We contacted the British Government and the gist of the reply was that since Nova Scotia is now in Canada, it’s now a Canadian problem.

Perrin: It’s a cop out. I mean, the Crown existed then, the Crown exists today. The Crown will acknowledge the wrong and the Crown will be better respected for it in the long run.

Williams: Warren Perrin is not about to let the British Government off the hook, but for the moment there is other serious business on hand. Cajuns are very serious about having fun -- the Cajun way.

Perrin: It’s the food, it’s the music that never went away. The music was always --even in the darkest times in the '40s and '50s when no one wanted to be Cajun, when Cajun wasn’t cool, the music survived.

Savoy: These people are such characters, you know, and you listen to their music and you go listen to what’s selling, or what is considered popular and there’s a difference like day and night. It’s not just learning the tunes that makes this music Cajun. It’s learning about the music, how this music fits into these people’s lives. How it affects their lives. How they feel about their music. It’s not just some yo-yo from China or from Little Rabbit Australia who sits down and memorises a series of notes. That’s not Cajun music, that’s not Cajun culture music.

Williams: But as we look around one saddening fact is the lack of youth - the raging Cajuns are getting old and in the face of juggernaut of American culture - these might be the last true Cajuns.Savoy: I think probably in the next 10 years we’re going to see the gradual decline of Cajun music as we know Cajun music to be. It’s going to get less and less and less popular. But I think at the same time if you come back in 50 years from now, or 60, or 70, or 100 years from now, underground you’ll have a group of people who still have the same joi de vivre, gonna have the same attitude about themselves see themselves, they're going to see the world, see themselves and how they fit in this world. That’s what I call Cajun.