We Know Who We Are; an Ethnographic Overview of the Creole Traditions & Community of Isle Brevelle & Cane River, Louisiana

Gregory, Hiram; Moran, Joseph

The purpose of this study is to pursue an old-fashioned ethnography of Isle Brevelle and adjacent areas of Cane River. Methodologically, the study was to be field oriented with oral interviews, providing a tape archive, and would attempt community involvement at all levels. The St. Augustine Historical Society had developed on Cane River to protect and preserve Creole patrimony and culture. Virtually an all-Creole organization, that group was asked to help, to keep the "study" within their social boundaries, to keep the study as unobtrusive and emic as possible. A local Creole artist, well known for his ethnological photography, Joseph Moran was asked to join Hiram F. Gregory, anthropologist, in the study. The society agreed to help them and has. Some fifty to sixty people have been involved with this study. Fieldwork, with an on-going review of the literature, has yielded a different picture of Creole culture. It has a national dimension; families who participated in the exodus from rural Louisiana to urban areas not only developed a brokerage system in which relatives found work and provided newcomers with resources until they were established, but also developed homecomings and traditions of children's visiting their rural relatives. As highways and airlines became better, back-and-forth visitation became national as well as local. The apparent loss of Cane River population was in no way to be taken as cultural loss. By the 1980s, a nationwide network - California, Illinois, New York, and Texas having the largest colonies - had developed. The Creole Heritage Day at Isle Brevelle, held on Augustin Metoyer's birthday, attracts people home from across the nation. Louis Metoyer's Bayou Talk, a Creole newspaper based in Los Angeles, now is distributed nationwide; Kathleen Balthazar-Heitzman's Cane River Trading Company operates as a news and genealogical newsletter from her home in Climax, New York. Computer networks are developing, and the extended family has become almost a nationwide group. Active politically in state, local and national politics, both secular and ecclesiastical, Creoles have an unbroken history of cultural agenda and leadership in civil rights and multi-racial, multi-cultural issues. Buried in the traditions of Creole family, church, and foodways are always the roots of cultural transmission and maintenance. A deep reverence for things which operate as metaphors for Creole culture and survival has preserved much of Creole material culture and the Cane River landscape. This study has tried to define Creole identity and to show how it, as the French proverb says, has changed but remained the same, plus ça change plus c'est la même chose. Emphasis has been on sampling a wide range of Creole culture, so the past/present interaction is seen as a dynamic, but maintenance and tradition do not overpower the fact that Isle Brevelle is tied to a wider world. Creoles on Cane River have mastered being who and what they are. There is no identity crisis for the whole culture group, even though stress sometimes rises for individuals. As one leader expresses it, Cane River and Creoles are "comfortable," allowing a place and a culture where people can be who and all that they are. Over sixty informants, thirty years of conversation, one lifetime of dealing with identity and expression, and a two-year span of fieldwork have produced this view. Creole culture, defined by Creoles, is for them, by them, and whatever happens, it will remain a state of being "comfortable." It keeps Cane River as its metaphor for continuity and stability, a safe place in nostalgia and for children to visit and slow down in. In short, Creoles see Isle Brevelle, no matter where they go or what they do, as "home."

We Know Who We Are; an Ethnographic Overview of the Creole Traditions & Community of Isle Brevelle & Cane River, Louisiana

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