Marais Acadians in Canada

Canada has approximately a quarter of the world’s wetlands (marshes, swamps, bogs, etc.). It is the leading country in the world for wetlands with a larger area of wetlands than any other country. Canada is geographically the wetland country par excellence. Canada also probably has the dubious distinction of having lost a greater area of wetlands than any other country. Canada has certainly lost or damaged nearly all of its urban wetlands. Colonial Canada is historically the wetlands country par excellence as its first European settlements were founded next to marshes. Following in the footsteps of French explorers, wetlands sustained the lives of the first French colonists who crossed the Atlantic to settle in Acadia and become Acadians. Francophone culture both at home and abroad in Canada used the technology of aboiteaux (clapper-valve gate) to regulate water flows and produce output from regularly inundated wetlands. Traditional Francophone and Acadian culture of wetlands is expressed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature with Longfellow’s Americanized and saccharine inflection of it in Evangeline published in 1847 and Antonine Maillet’s novels published in the 1970s that explicitly counter Evangeline and help create a contemporary Canadian wetland culture.