As someone who has studied Louisiana’s French and Creole language populations for more than two decades, I have come to understand that you cannot be a good historian or researcher if you are not open to discovering and accepting new information, even if it challenges you to completely change your beliefs about a particular subject or topic. In this, LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, and PERSPECTIVE are critical. One of the first things I had to understand and accept is that EVERYTHING we are taught about our own history in Louisiana is projected from a very American English-speaking White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant Westward Expansion Manifest Destiny … Continue reading What English made us forget | More Louisiana perspectives

I never really noticed it until, one day during a tour, some French visitors pointed it out. They asked me why the national flag of the United States was prominently displayed in St. Louis Cathedral, there, in the midst of … Continue reading The Flag in the Cathedral

The house was a single shotgun on N. Prieur Street. Weathered peach-coloured paint covered the wooden siding. I opened the gate and walked up the short path to the steps. The old man on the porch nodded his head without … Continue reading Lower 9th Ward 1997 : Lô-haute 1927