NYT:The Displaced-Cast From Their Ancestral Home, Creoles Worry About....

The Displaced
Cast From Their Ancestral Home, Creoles Worry About Culture's Future
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: October 11, 2005
NATCHITOCHES PARISH, La., Oct. 9 - It is peaceful here on the Cane River, beyond the fluffy tops of high cotton and towering magnolia trees, but it is not home. For the New Orleans Creoles living in exodus here and elsewhere around Louisiana, their city was far more than home - it was homeland, the capital of an ethnic nation unique in this country.

"New Orleans was our womb and for most of us, it was going to be our grave," said Timothy Bordenave, who is living in a cottage here, a five-hour drive away from the city, describing the deep sense of lifelong connection felt to New Orleans by many of the city's Creoles, the population of mixed-race families who trace their roots to the city's French and Spanish colonial era.

The Creoles have been more distinctly connected to a place - New Orleans - than perhaps any other American ethnic group but their rural Louisiana neighbors, the Cajuns. But unlike the Cajuns, who settled in Louisiana after being expelled from Canada by the British, the Creoles lived in the birthplace of their culture.

And now, after the recent storms and the blows they dealt to Creole communities around New Orleans, scattering them to states from coast to coast, many Creoles fear that without a geographical base, their already fragile culture and their very identity could be lost.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/national/11creole.html