The Queen’s Proclamation

In 1988, Acadian Museum Chairman Warren A. Perrin first began studying how to seek a formal apology from the British Crown for its role in the 1755 illegal deportation of our Acadian ancestors from Nova Scotia. These were lands then known as the French colony of Acadie that the Acadians had first settled in 1604, 16 years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock. Many of the 10,000 men, women and children exiled from Nova Scotia who didn’t die from disease, famine, or drowning at sea would later resettle in Louisiana, where they became the genetic and cultural ancestors of today’s South Louisiana French-Acadian (or “Cajun”) people.

In part, Perrin’s effort to launch the petition was inspired by the U.S. apology to the Japanese-Americans for their internment during WW II and the respect that a similar action would show for our Acadian ancestors.

The initiative was officially launched in January 1990 when a Petition on behalf of all Acadians was delivered to then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain and Queen Elizabeth II. Soon, attorneys and historians representing each side began negotiations to settle the historical dispute. The Petition caught the attention of the international legal community and, as a result, in 1993, Perrin was invited to present legal arguments in support of the Petition at the World Human Rights Conference in Caen, Normandy, France.

Happily, with near-unanimous international support—and the adoption of resolutions backing the human rights initiative by the Louisiana Legislature and the U.S. Congress—the effort was successfully concluded on December 9, 2003, when Queen Elizabeth II’s representative Adrienne Clarkson, the governor-general of Canada, signed the Royal Proclamation.

In it, Queen Elizabeth II acknowledged for the first time the wrongs committed in the name of the English Crown during the Acadian deportation of 1755. The implications were three-fold: an acknowledgment of the horrific wrongs committed against the Acadian people; a symbolic reconciliation for the death and suffering resulting from the diaspora; and the establishment of July 28 of each year as “a day of commemoration of the Great Upheaval.”