Two hundred and forty years ago, Britain tried to deport the Acadians, settlers of French ancestry in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and the British did, by the thousands. It was an aggressive effort by the world’s then most powerful country to physically uproot an entire culture in North America, and cast it out.

But thousands of Acadians — descendants of the pioneers of the late 1600s and early 1700s — were determined to remain in the region. Fleeing inland, hiding or enduring long detention under the British, these Acadians, and their influence, survived.

The entire Atlantic region, from coastal New England to the Maritimes, is richer for the French-speaking, Catholic culture contributed by these strongly family- and community-oriented people.

But what the British failed to do two centuries ago, time and improved transportation and communications systems are threatening to accomplish today. Cultural erosion and assimilation, processes that occur everywhere to all peoples, are overtaking Acadians, especially those in northern Maine.

House Speaker John Martin, in what Sen. William Cohen refers to as the speaker’s “magnificent obsession,” is attempting to focus state and federal support on the establishment of an Acadian cultural center in Maine, near the Canadian border. The state authorized $150,000 for the project last year. Martin, with the help of Cohen and Sen. George Mitchell, is trying to assemble an advisory group within the Interior Department to promote programs on Acadian culture and education, and to give the National Park Service the authority to acquire a site of up to 20 acres on which to build an Acadian cultural center.

The end of physical isolation for many Acadian communities — a process that will be accelerated by the Free Trade Agreement — may mean the end of their distinctiveness. As bastions of French culture, they are threatened by the overwhelming English influence in public schools and by the steady pressure of media and marketing.

Maine can do whatever is possible to slow the inevitable erosion of Acadian culture, but it must act soon to salvage elements of that heritage that eventually may disappear. “Once a facet of (Acadian) history is lost,” Sen. Cohen told a Senate hearing, “it cannot be retrieved, and we are diminished as a consequence.”

There was no excuse for the cruelty of the Acadian deportation, or for the subsequent generations of prejudice and ethnic intolerance that Speaker Martin so eloquently relates about the French experience in Maine.

There will be no excuse, if in the future this cultural imprint vanishes and nothing was done to preserve its important elements.