Group seeks World Heritage Status for New Acadia

NEW IBERIA (AP) — New Acadia enthusiasts here are seeking something beyond discovery of a “lost colony” or Beausoleil’s grave site to tell the story of Acadian settlement in this region. The archaeological search for both is ongoing near Loreauville in Iberia Parish.
Success of that search may provide a path to a grander, global stage on which to tell the Cajun story. That’s the greater goal.
That’s why a fledgling group, perhaps a dozen to 15 people, are taking initial steps toward seeking World Heritage Site status for portions of southern Louisiana, a designation that would boost interest in the Acadian story worldwide and help preserve and protect places of universal historical value here.
Heritage activist Warren Perrin said the effort springs from One Acadiana initiatives to tie our region closer together and embrace and espouse a culture unique to this part of the state.
Would a lofty designation like World Heritage Site, granted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, boost tourism? Absolutely, says Ben Berthelot, executive director of the Lafayette Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Bethelot said such a designation would give “instant credibility” to area tourism and would make an “easy sell” to people who might want to visit this area. Acadiana is already a tourism destination, he said: the birthplace of Cajun music, site of Tabasco production, a place of culture and cuisine.
Would such a designation come easily? Absolutely not, said Perrin. A UNESCO World Heritage Site designation is a longshot; it may take 15 years or more to realize — if ever. But those touting the effort say they’re ready to start the long trek.
More than 1,000 sites worldwide have been designated as World Heritage Sites since the UN launched this effort four decades ago. Twenty-three are in the U.S. and one, Poverty Point National Monument in West Carroll Parish, is the sole site in Louisiana. That ancient site, created by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture, includes earthworks and mounds built during the Archaic period, centuries before the birth of Christ.
Initially, Perrin said, the idea was to link Acadiana to the World Heritage Site in Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, from where the Acadians were driven by the British in the Great Upheaval or Grand Dérangement of 1755. Eventually, those Acadians, led by Joseph Beausoleil Broussard, made their way to Louisiana in 1765.
Part of the challenge of gaining a World Heritage Site designation rests in picking the right Acadiana locations for making UNESCO application. Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site tells the Acadian story in an important way but rests on the fiction of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie,” Perrin said. It’s a story based in beauty and lore but UNESCO approval for a heritage site must rest on an applications grounded in fact.
Perrin said Projet Nouvelle Acadie on Bayou Teche near Loreauville may provide part of what the locals need for a winning nomination. It involves the search for Beausoleil’s grave and for the site of a genuine colony of New Acadia founders. That might prove weighty in UNESCO minds.
Archaeologist Mark A. Rees, an associate professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said the search for the lost colony involves little paid staff but progresses through the efforts of students and volunteers. Work on the project has progressed through three summers and two winter sessions, usually with a professor and a handful of students.
The work is time-consuming and arduous, he said, but has revealed some two dozen archaelogical sites on Teche Bayou.
Eight have yielded 18th century artifacts. The home site of Amand Broussard, son of Joseph and Agnès Broussard, Acadie emigrants, is known. Two abandoned cemeteries have been revealed nearby.
Right now, project discoveries are in the lab and progress is in the writing phase. Rees himself must pay more attention to other, paid projects but he said Projet Nouvelle Acadie is worthy and may produce intended results.
The risk, he said, is that development — houses, commercial projects, even farming — may destroy sites now hidden for 25 decades. Mitigating risks to treasured historic sites is part of the reason for UNESCO’s site program.
But is the Loureauville site, even if fully uncovered and detailed, enough to win World Heritage Site status?
Robert Barham, director of Louisiana’s state parks and historic sites, which include Poverty Point, says he’ll play the skeptic.
He said he’s familiar with the Acadiana effort, but said whatever application the locals come up with must approach in stature sites already within the World Heritage Site fold, which include the Great Wall of China, The Grand Canyon, or the Incan site Machu Picchu in Peru.
He said it’s too early to say how World Heritage Site status has benefited Poverty Point, located in his home parish of West Carroll, but he offered an anecdote.
The last time he was at Poverty Point, he said, visitors in line in front of him were from France.
He asked them what brought them to Poverty Point and they said the World Heritage Site list forms their “bucket list” — places they want to visit in their lifetimes.
“These were people who would never come to Poverty Point except for the list,” he said. The list creates “a new level of attraction.”
Would even a fully presented Beausoleil site do the same? Probably not, Perrin said.
But his band of enthusiasts are looking for other, ancillary evidence for a need for an Acadiana World Heritage Site. To that end, the group has formed committees that would extend the story to show how Acadians have “changed the landscape” in the region. Loreauville would be the “preeminent site” but other Cajun-related sites and efforts would explain the Acadian impact in other ways: religious, maritime, sites of military significance, burial sites and other word connections.
Marty Guidry, who chairs the religious sites committee, said his group will explore the Acadian connection to churches built in the 1700s, including St. Gabriel Catholic Church in Iberville Parish. Guidry said focus on Acadian churches would teach people that although the Acadians were devout Catholics, they were also pragmatic people intent on carving out their lives in the Louisiana wilderness. Sometimes they quarreled with their priests. There’s a story to be told, he said.
He said there are plenty of primary historical sources — you must read Spanish or French — that reveal the relationship between God and the Acadians, who depended upon their faith to survive their rough life.
Perrin said the Acadians had impacts in agriculture, on efforts at self-determination during the Spanish era, on the American Revolution, when Acadians aided the Spanish in fighting the British.
Right now, the National Park Service is reviewing sites for nomination to the U.S. World Heritage Tentative List. The Acadiana project is years away from the nomination process, Perrin said, but application could be prepared for the next go-around on nominations.
Meanwhile, the local committee will study other sites that have made successful UNESCO application, including the Landscape of Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, to which Acadiana is related; and the San Antonio Missions in Texas. The goal: to be ready when the next round of nominations come, which may be a decade away.
“The hill is very steep to climb,” Barham said of the process for World Heritage Site nominations. “They don’t just give them out.”
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