UM Franco center to mark Longfellow’s birthday Event to feature Acadian film, panel discussion

ORONO – Members of Maine’s Franco-American community this week will mark the 200th birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Maine poet who immortalized the Acadian people in his epic “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.”

One of Longfellow’s descendants, Layne Longfellow, will participate in a panel discussion Friday night at the University of Maine campus.

Among the events planned for the University of Maine’s Franco-American Center are the showing of a film about Maine’s Acadian people, a panel discussion, and traditional food and music, according to Lisa Desjardins Michaud, communications director for the center, which is housed in Crossland Hall.

Maine filmmaker Brenda Nasberg Jepson’s “The Story of the Acadians” will be screened at 6 p.m. Friday.

The video had its European premiere in France when Gov. John Baldacci presented the film to the French government during a trade mission in October 2005.

A panel discussion featuring Jepson, “Evangeline” scholar Francoise Paradis and Layne Longfellow will follow.

“It’s very important for the Acadians of today to know where they come from and why they are where they are today because of the many sacrifices made by those who came before them,” Michaud said in a telephone interview.

“Taking us back to France where it all started. Exploring the New World in search of a better life,” she said.

“The hard-working, inventive, friendly Acadians were a determined people. It’s important to keep their legacy alive and to pass down to future generations their history and culture,” she said.

“My hopes for those attending are they leave … that evening with a greater sense of what the Acadians accomplished before the ‘Grand Derangement’ and how they persevered after,” Michaud said, adding, “I am proud to be of Acadian and Quebecois descent.”

Jepson’s film shows how a nation without borders has survived for more than 250 years and has become even stronger for its struggles.

While the story of the Acadians has been retold many times in different forms, Jepson’s documentary goes to the very beginnings of the saga – to St. Croix Island, off modern Calais, where the French first settled off the coast of Maine in 1604.

“I felt that to truly understand what had happened to the Acadians at the time of their deportation from their beloved Acadia in 1755, the viewer needed to understand where they were coming from – literally and metaphorically,” Jepson said.The quest to discover who the Acadians were took Jepson to various parts of coastal Maine and Nova Scotia for filming.

It also took her to France.

“I felt that to tell the whole story I needed to find out who these French people were who came to settle New France. Where did they come from in France? What were their lives like before they left? Why did they leave France?” she wondered.

It was in France that Jepson discovered the tragic and ironic ending for some of the Acadians. Hundreds of the Acadians rounded up and deported from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755 were sent to France to a refugee camp set up for them not 20 miles from the village their ancestors had left to settle the New World 138 years earlier.

Even more Acadians were dropped off up and down the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Georgia.

Names heard in Maine such as Benoit, Daigle, Martin, Thibodeau and Theriault are good clues that the bearers of those names are of Acadian descent, as Jepson sees it.

“It may well be that the deportation is part of the reason Maine now has a population 40 percent of which are folk of French descent,” Jepson said.

In her film, Jepson explores how the first French settlers brought prefabricated homes with them from France to North America in 1604 as well as the settlers’ alliances with the American Indians who helped save their lives.

Jepson also looks at the innovative designs the French used in constructing their unique fortresses they built, as well as the intricate system of dikes they introduced after arriving in North America.