It is a story that predates America, but we not white people, and we're not black people.

We have a fancy $10 word for it multiculturalism.

When you start trying to say that or explain it.

99% of America just does not buy it.

An American system had no room for some individual.

I am a Creole.

I'm a proud Creole from cane River.

The kernels are representative of a movement that's starting to happen in America.

And that movement is against the idea of race as a deciding feature of a population.

This film is funded in part by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Funding is also provided by a grant from the cane River National Heritage Area and Commission, and by a grant from the Louisiana State Arts Council for the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Our been here on this land for almost 300 years.

That makes our culture native to this country.

We were here before America woke.

I am a child of a Frenchman and a slave.

My appetite for France sailed a slave.

I am two part Indian.

What Spaniard?

We are mixed nationality of people.

We were citizens of France.

My ancestors and my people never let go of their native to a land called Louisiana.

I have been nourished for generations by the waters of cane River and the rich Red River valley of North Louisiana.

It's it's a culture, and it's a heritage.

Yet the new Americans never accept it or recognize me.

More needs to, when something's yummy.

My history was never written.

In essence, they were erased.

Or perhaps more appropriately, we would say they became invisible.

We were known at one time as the Forgotten People, and it had been my quest to never be known as a forgotten person again, to be forgotten.

Yet I have endured to.

This culture is too rich for other folk not to know about it.

You see, it is too important, too significant for those who have come before.

And for the children who follow mother to Judy.

I will forever endure.

I want to celebrate it and share it with other people, because it is something very special to the world.

Girls, they don't move away in the spirit.

I am a spirit, so my own culture.

I am a culture.

A crowd.

I am Creole.

Go to build new myths to true.

They say see day Misty.

New.

Well, the colors are a little different.

Like the Creole people, some of them are lighter.

Some of them are darker.

The best place to begin learning about my Creole people is Miss Leer la cause Creole mama dance.

The Creole people are different.

Let's start with them.

Mama layer, as she's known on cane River, has been making her mama dolls since she was a child.

Dolls born of the Creole spirit and struggle.

Some of our Creole people look like white people.

Some of them are darker.

But we are Creole people.

And I wanted my doll to be a Creole doll.

I don't want to be a white person, and I don't want to be a black person.

I want to be who I am.

I'm Lil LaCour.

I'm a Creole woman.

A little piece, only a Creole de la Louisiana.

So who are Louisiana's Creoles?

The word Creole has had many different meanings over the last 300 years.

Most definitions center on New World goods that came from Old World stock.

Today, Creole refers to people of non Anglo ancestry who were born in Louisiana during the French and Spanish colonial periods, and their descendants.

Historically, everyone born in colonial Louisiana was considered Creole.

Some were of French or Spanish descent, while others.

My Creole people of Payne River were of a mixed heritage.

It's the French, Spanish, African, Native American cultures that define who I am as a creole to us.

For almost 300 years, Creole has been very simple because that is who we are.

And Creole is nothing but an ethnicity and a culture.

In Creole communities, almost everyone a contemporary community is centered around a church.

Catholicism is is crucial to Creole identity.

Saint Augustine on Cane River, established in 1803, this church is the oldest Catholic church in America that was built by none whites.

Totally.

The Creole spirit is strong internal.

Delfin, president of the Saint Augustine Historical Society and a leading advocate of Creole heritage and culture.

We view these ground as being holy and sacred ground to us, because not only is it the birth place of our religion, but it is the birthplace of our culture.

I can fit in this church and meditate and think about 200 years of history, where all of my ascendance on cane River sent me the same buried church.

This church plays a tremendous role, and it gives us a lot of honor, prestige and pride simply because it's an achievement for our people.

It's a place where all of these cane rebel Creoles get together.

They talk, share stories, gossip.

It's the community center.

It's a cultural center.

It's sort of the glue that has held these people together for so many years.

After made all the cane removal, went over to the whole to eat, and everybody brought food.

And it was wonderful.

And we do this now.

That was the part I went for.

I don't know, some people in the island don't say, come in the hole.

I love the days better than I do.

The best facility for my dance company.

Better.

I danced like an animal.

America.

Love.

I love the state calendar was.

You know, being on cane River is totally different than being anywhere else.

People connect to each other even though they've never met each other.

I can tell a Creole from a mile away.

Long distance is very much a community, and they very, you know, the community makes you feel welcome and they make you feel very much a part of the family.

So I know your grandmother or I knew your uncle or your mother and my mother went to school together.

A spirit of connectedness that can only be felt if you have been blessed to have the heritage that Creole people have.

This bond is so obvious.

They may not know each other personally, but they know that they're connected.

They're connected through these lineages, but they're also culturally connected.

For me, being a Creole is something as far as my heart goes.

It's a yearning to want to be free to say I am Creole.

Creole encompasses several cultures, and it's something that I'm proud of.

I don't want to keep it a secret.

You have a very, very self-aware community, and one that has taken ownership of what it means to be Creole.

What do you how do you determine that something is Creole?

It's very hard to put a definition.

You know, a lot of people want to say, if your skin is black, then you are African-American.

If your skin is white, then you are Caucasian.

You're in between, so you're Creole.

That's not always true.

It does have.

It has a lot to do with family.

It does have a lot to do with Catholicism, with genealogy, with the way you were raised, with your beliefs.

That's what makes me Creole.

French colonial Louisiana Creole culture and heritage has developed and flourished in communities well beyond cane River.

We have our people everywhere.

They are 60 communities in this state that I can draw a circle around.

Each one of them.

And those are the people that I'm talking about.

Creoles of color.

The ties between Creole communities in Louisiana are strong.

Karen Dolphin's wife, Lily, is from Pillar Cove in south Louisiana.

Lily's father was from another south Louisiana colony called grandma Red.

Her mother and father met at a Creole baseball game.

Baseball was a big social event for Creoles.

It was a time for dressing up and time for meeting new people.

Also.

Lily met tarot at his father's funeral.

Actually, he came to see me the next night.

As for their daughter, Daphne, that makes her a member of three Creole communities.

In the last century, the Creole spirit has soared to new places.

Today, there are thriving Louisiana Creole communities across America.

In major cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, ours is the story of this country's first multicultural people.

Creole culture is one of the richest and oldest native cultures in America, second only to American Indian.

So why is it so few people know or acknowledge us?

When you get out there in this wide world.

And you start trying to tell people that, hey.

I am in between the black and white race.

I'm not black.

I'm not white.

I'm in between.

I'm a Creole.

I'm a multiracial person.

When you.

When you start trying to say that or explain it.

99% of America just does not buy it.

Cane River Creole and author John Sharpie.

This multiracial thing to me is at the heart of my concept of being Creole.

All right.

It was as at the heart of the concept of my grandparents and great grandparents and great parents before them, of being Creole multiracial seems to not exist.

People's eyes are closed to it.

When it comes to looking at a person of part African and white ancestry, it's a nonexistent phenomenon as far as the masses of America is concerned.

This race thing, this black white thing, is an artificial, manmade concept designed for the purpose of our, you know, divvying up privileges and selling out disadvantages.

It's just it's a manmade divider.

But when, in fact, we are all human beings.

We have been there all the time.

Just haven't been paid attention to.

So we are not talking about Creole ism from a racial perspective.

We are talking about Creole ism from a cultural perspective, because we don't think it's necessary to add to debate the race issue.

To some it's about race, to others culture.

To most of my cane River people.

Being Creole is about both.

All we want to do is be able to identify ourselves.

If you.

Like it was in the beginning.

We were the way.

To cast an eye across 18th century colonial America is to see two distinctly different experiences.

English colonies of the East reflected the Anglo traditions of what was to become the United States of America.

Louisiana, west of the Mississippi River and its associated territory belonged to France, and the French colony was up and coming.

The early outpost of Natchitoches was founded in 1714.

It was a very rude, very crude, to say Natchitoches was founded in 1714.

Is is kind of a false concept because it was really just a few men and a couple of huts.

But from that point on, this became a very important trade area for one.

The area around Natchitoches was dominated by the Caddo Indians just to the west.

Spanish Texas, the first French to arrive were all men, mainly soldiers as well as traders and laborers.

There were no French women that came to the colony early on, and so immediately Indian slavery developed to fill that need.

All over Louisiana, French soldiers began to marry Indian women.

French traders began to marry Indian women.

It was a pretty easy way to gain alliance with a tribe.

If you married in and had a family and you were kin.

This concerned the French commander, Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, because he was afraid that the soldiers who, you know, would run off and live with the Indians rather than to come back and be French soldiers.

There were very few African people in Louisiana before 1718.

The time the first African slaves arrived in was, the month.

And, there were Native American women.

There were African women who were here in slavery and because it's human nature for these people to mix, mixing occurred to give us and, I'm a 10th generation descendant of Claude Thomas.

Pierre.

I'm at.

Why are you and Marie to red coin?

Coin?

One such couple was the French merchant Claude Thomas Pierre Omidyar and an African slave named Marie Torres.

Going coin.

In 1768, Marie Torres, the slave lady and the Frenchman had a set of twins, their first children.

Throughout their relationship they had ten children, but the first children were the set of twins and the boy name.

They named a boy Auguste and McGuire, and the twin daughter Suzanne, and I'm a direct descendant of the Suzanne Suzanne line of McGuire's.

Well, with the relationship between Claude Thomas, Pierre McGuire and the African slave, or the slave lady with African lineage, multicultural people were created.

They created multicultural people.

And in colonial Louisiana, you had a three tiered society.

You had white and blacks and mixed breed who became to be known as Creole.

And that is how I came to be, how my people came.

River came to be.

Each Creole community has 1 or 2 families like that that are kind of the beginnings of the community.

Through the life of the colony.

These relationships became very close, very long lived.

The children born of these relationships were well taken care of.

They were given certain freedoms and responsibilities that, enslaved people did not have.

Even though some of them at that time were still formerly slaves, it wasn't until later that they gained their freedom, but nevertheless they were treated as they were children.

And this whole society, this whole Creole society, develops as as an offshoot of kind of this system.

Why do you suppose Claude Thomas and Marie Torres never married?

They must have loved each other.

They had ten children together.

The French code Noir, which regulated conduct between Europeans and Africans at that time, forbid them from marrying.

After living together and loving each other openly for nearly 20 years.

That's why you and Marie Torres or urged by local authorities to end their relationship.

In 1786.

After 18 years of common law and, cohabitation with Claude Thomas Pierre, he decided that he would get a European woman married wife to leave his wealth to.

But in that process, he also helped his children with Marie Torres.

To get these land grant and to acquire all of this property.

Marie Torres reaped the benefits of this relationship.

He, gave her and the children land.

He gave, her freedom.

He gave her children, their children together, their freedom.

We don't, of course, know how his wife felt about this relationship or about the relationship of his children, but it was not an uncommon thing at that time to maintain two families.

They ended up acquiring a lot of property along the banks of cane River.

Their estate, in the 20 years that the relationship existed.

They acquired over 18,000 acres of land along the banks of cane River.

And they were what we would call if you position the economic in their proper place in, the American culture, you will find that Creoles of cane River in other communities, that started just like in under the same situations and circumstances, were part of colonial aristocracy because they were landowners.

They also acquired a large number of slaves himself.

And and that had always been fascinating to me, too, simply because I came to find that one of the reasons why they acquired all of this property and acquired all of these slaves was to, to, to get to buy in, give them the best life they could under the circumstances, because the majority of the slaves that they bought were their cousins, and they bought them out of slavery.

And if you put that particular relationship in to a mirror into American history books, you will find that this was almost a 100 years before Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad.

When Marie Torres going, going died, nine of her children owned more than 1200 acres of land, each.

When France ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1763, the colony remained French in the hearts and minds of the people and was in fact administered on a local level by French citizen and under Spanish rule, use of the word creole begins to solidify, but it was used to rank people.

So it comes here as a marker of people born here, in Louisiana, as opposed to in France or Spain.

And so Creole populations get tagged with that label.

So Creoles, we were all of us until strangers began to arrive.

18 03A year to be remembered in French Louisiana, especially on cane River.

It was the year Agustin Mattei, a son of Claude Thomas, Pierre Mature and Marie Torres, coin count, founded Saint Augustine and became the patriarch of a burgeoning cane River Creole colony back in the hands of France.

It was also to be the fourth and final time Louisiana would change hands.

Under French rule.

We were treated as a unique race, a unique group of people.

All of it ended abruptly with the Louisiana Purchase.

So in 1803, when the Americans took over, this was still a French speaking part of the world.

And, the, and terribly Roman Catholic, you know, thoroughly Roman Catholic.

The Americans were mostly from the Protestant East.

They were English speaking.

They didn't understand any part of Latinized culture.

Jefferson's intent to buy Louisiana was not well received in Congress.

It wasn't something they all leapt to in a hurry.

And one of the things they all worried about was, what are we going to do with all these foreigners?

Foreigners on our own soil, my cane River people and the Louisiana colony as a whole worried about the same thing.

What will we do?

What is this democracy they speak of?

How are we supposed to behave?

And they didn't exactly, cherish the idea that suddenly Napoleon had sold them, without him knowing much about it.

In fact, it kind of happened without anybody knowing much about it.

It, it had happened to them once before.

They became Spanish subjects that way.

And they weren't happy about that either.

The word Creole confused the Americans.

They didn't understand the Louisiana colony.

How my cane River people were.

And except the class of native born colonial people that distinctions lost on them.

They don't just they don't understand about how things like race and class were handled under Latin cultures.

Even slavery in Louisiana was unusual to the Americans.

Oftentimes, slaves did not live in quarters.

They lived out in villages by themselves.

It wasn't a benevolent institution.

But on the other hand, it took a different form.

It's almost like reading a contemporary newspaper account of Mardi Gras.

You know, everybody goes to the party, but they don't quite understand why they're having that party.

You know, and, you know, Ash Wednesday, when you got these people walking around with ashes on their forehead, they don't know what the hell that's all about.

And so it's the same kind of thing.

Louisiana has, I guess, in the American eye, been a very confusing place for a very long time.

People always say, well, it's different.

It is still different.

We were citizens of France.

We were citizens as citizens of colonial France and my ancestors and my people never let go of that.

So the whole Creoles problem, kind of grows out of that big misunderstanding about where Creoles fit.

Meantime, my Creole people kept to themselves on cane River, though the son, Augustine, led them at twice the color to a section of cane River called prevailed one by one.

Each brother followed, and track by track, grant by grant and purchased by purchase.

More and more lands came under their collective control.

The Creole spirit flourished.

Our white Creole neighbors called us the family extraordinaire.

One extraordinary family.

They began to intermarry with other Creole families from other communities.

As these Creole families grew and grew and prospered and prospered, they became the thread work of a way of life, the patchwork of a culture.

They became a people.

The cane River, Creole people.

But we found ourselves encountering more and more Anglo-Americans and Anglo attitudes for us.

It intensified around the time of the Civil War.

By that time, they were very well-educated, affluent people.

Many of them sent their children back to France, to school.

They were tradesmen.

There were planters.

They, they were writers and artists.

Very, very polished population of people.

But not everybody was affluent, of course, but lots of them were.

And, they had a very powerful influence on the colony as they are being consumed in an American system.

One basic change occurs in their everyday life that affects everyone.

The Americans came in with the idea that people are either white or black.

So it was not very long after that, after they took over the colony, that they began to put it translated into their own system.

It's the problem, I think, of, of, to some extent marginalizing people that you want to control.

As the Americans became more and more prominent and Creoles were less prominent.

They were outnumbered.

Certainly waves of American immigrants came into the area and outnumbered Creoles early on, white Creoles began to appropriate the title for themselves.

A large part of the Creoles owned slaves.

They had an interest in this conflict, but the Creoles didn't like everybody else in the South.

Wound up on the Confederate side of the war.

From the start.

This American Civil War seemed very far away from paint River.

You received word of distant battles.

You weren't immediately affected by these realities until the war actually arrived in Natchitoches Parish in 1864.

With the Red River campaign.

Both the Confederate and the Union Army moved through the heart of Natchitoches Parish and Cane River during the campaign.

They moved through once on their way north, and again on their way back south.

The Union soldiers on their retreat back south took every chicken, every mule, every horse.

Many people reported all buildings on their property destroyed.

Food taken.

You might have thought very comfortably in early March that you had enough corn to feed your livestock through the summer.

By the end of the Red River campaign, you don't have livestock and you don't have corn.

It didn't matter who you were.

The war was an equal opportunity destroyer.

Well, in Natchitoches Parish, they ran into the odd social reality of a black slave owner, a Creole of color who owned slaves.

At the end of the campaign.

What was real for the people of Natchitoches Parish was poverty.

By the close of the war, my Creole people had a lot in common with their white neighbors.

They're no longer slave owners.

Their slaves have been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

Economically, they're in a lot of trouble.

There's no cash flow.

There's no money.

The most they have is their property.

Going into the Civil War.

Louisiana was a tri caste society, meaning there were whites, there were free people of color, and there were black slaves.

There are no longer three castes.

Everyone's free.

The American system had no room for them in the middle.

Their system of understanding society and race said one drop of black blood makes you black.

My Creole people had long said, we are French too.

Yes, we have color.

They were there to admit they had color.

They were mixed, but they were French.

They were somewhere between the white and the black categories that Americans placed on them.

Therefore, we have, by the end of the Civil War, lost that separate status for the Creoles.

And they find themselves as I look around and reconstruction politics.

They find themselves being categorized as blacks.

When you read, all you will see is white history and black history.

There is nothing in between.

There's black history.

There's white history.

But where there is any element of a mixture of white and black, then that mixture has to disappear into black.

So all you see is black history.

And essence that were erased.

Or perhaps more appropriately, we would say they became invisible.

Taking away their history over a long enough period of time would essentially take away their identity.

You see, captive mind management happen when a dominant culture declares another smaller, another culture as being invisible and nonexistent, and all of their contributions is given to other folks and accomplishments of other people than the people that created them themselves.

True Louisiana history.

When it comes to building infrastructure, then architects and carpenters in masonry, people in and workers entailed us in educated.

You will find all of those people in colonial Louisiana coming out of the Creole culture.

But you can't find that in American history books.

It was done on purpose.

The idea of assimilating them into Anglo American culture, which was the only way they were going to be American.

They were consumed or subsumed within the greater black society.

And as far as outsiders go, there were no longer Creoles of color in Louisiana.

And so, as a Creole at that time, if you were a white Creole, you knew that your future rested with your ability to fit in the white category.

For in America, whites had the power, whites had the right.

Blacks did not.

Well, white Creoles and my Creole people of mixed heritage.

The new American system turned their entire world on its ear, forcing a position no one could have imagined.

You have to decide as a Creole.

Where do you feel it?

And for the first time, many are realizing I have to fit.

Because if I don't fit one way or the other, I don't fit in this new American scheme of things.

The ones with the lighter skin and then the pure white Creoles are the ones that understood.

Our best shot is to clarify the fact that we are white, and we're going to put ourselves in the white category.

And it's at this point in time, when you see the fervent struggle to appropriate the term Creole for whites only.

And so when white Creoles began to call themselves Creole and insist that Creoles were white, only they were trying to hold on to two worlds at one time.

They're trying to hold on to the traditional heritage that they were raised with.

That Creole upbringing, but they want to fit into the white classification of American society.

By the late 1800s.

My people saw slowly, over time, the right to call themselves Creole.

Taken away.

They simply wanted to maintain that distinction as a different portion of the population, and they're not going to win.

Ultimately, the Americanization process takes that away from them.

Actually.

When I was growing up, I never heard the term Creole.

My parents and grandparents and everybody refer to ourselves as French.

We are the Frenchmen of cane River.

That's the way we were taught.

They couldn't use Creole anymore and be accepted by white Creoles, essentially, but by their calling themselves French.

They distinguish themselves from the Americans around them and tied themselves back to the land of their heritage.

Increasingly, they found themselves put in directly into the black category, and, people didn't pay attention anymore to the fact that they were saying, but we're French.

We're not American.

This is where the struggle for my Creole people began.

Of course, many of our people didn't like that.

You know, we existed, and we lived for years, on our own, amongst ourselves.

It's sort of like saying we always had our culture.

Our Creole culture was not taken away from us.

No one could tell us, stop behaving in a certain manner or stop having a certain religion or a certain practices which are identifiable as our culture.

We always had that what was taken away by the so-called Jim Crow laws was nearly everything else.

Essentially, this Jim Crow period started with a landmark case that began in New Orleans that involved a Creole of color named Homer Plessy.

In 1892, Plessy boarded a train in New Orleans bound for Covington, Louisiana.

Upon sitting in a first class white only car, he was asked to leave.

Plessy refused and was arrested.

In fact, in Louisiana through the 1960s, easily, we had a Jim Crow set up where if you went to the doctor's office, there was a black waiting room in a white waiting room.

And so here we find the Creoles caught up in this, and they are forced to pass.

In their hearts, their French.

In their hearts, they need the third door that says Creole.

And they'll be willing to walk in that door and feel proud about their choice.

Having to decide white.

Black is unfair for any Creole at that time.

To complicate things even more.

Other Creoles were caught like mama les dolls.

Some looked more white than they did black.

It seemed the very Creole spirit of our heritage and culture began slipping away.

But what I do, actually, to protect this heritage that I feel is slowly ebbing away, perhaps because whites have taken the label Creole from them.

They continue their insistence on their French heritage, and they build it in their communities.

Children were raised with the understanding that we are different.

Newsome Creole.

We are Creole.

For many years we continued probably new long Creole from say to speak the Creole French language, German.

We knew who we were.

We always had.

The problem was we were living in a world that didn't recognize us, but to protect their own understanding, their self identity.

They kept their communities tied.

We made sure our children met children from other Creole communities, knowing full well that if they moved away and married outside the tradition, the culture would follow them right out the door.

I think it's unfortunate that as Creoles over time have insisted, hey, we're different.

A lot of people took that as saying, hey, we're better.

And honestly, I don't believe the Creoles were saying that at any point in time by saying, hey, we're different.

There were also that was another way of trying to say, we want to save what we've got.

We don't want to pass for white.

We're different.

We don't want to pass for black because we're different.

But over the course of this racial tension journey during Jim Crow, when you have in one classroom blacks whose great grandmothers had been slaves, and Creoles who did not know slavery in their family, there are, at the most basic level, cultural clashes.

Beginning at the time of World War one and through World War Two, great migrations of people of color from the south began.

While history focuses on the broader African-American experience of this shift from the rural South to industrialize America.

My cane River Creole people also took part in the Great Migration.

That's when the plantation system begins to collapse.

They go north to Chicago.

They go west to LA.

Go as far away as New York.

And everywhere they land that they build a Creole community.

Cane River Creoles, wherever they live, they tend to band together.

They tend to stay in touch with some and uncle, cousin or grandparent, if they're lucky.

And in on cane River.

As our children left home for cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, their culture remained as important, perhaps even more so than back home, extending the bounds of cane River.

But there, to my Creole people were put in the familiar yet unimaginable position of suppressing their heritage and identity.

Even their patriotism.

And the personal tolls were high.

My father joined and volunteered for the United States Navy in 1928, when it was restricted to members of the Caucasian race only.

And he lived a lifetime regretting that he did that.

But the only way that he could get in was to.

He had all.

He was like Homer Plessy.

He had all of the characteristics to be a first class American citizen, but because of his ethnicity, he would denied the right.

And he lied in order to join the Navy and have the travel experiences that he had.

But he live to regret it every day of his life.

And he told us, he say, never deny your ethnicity and culture wherever you are.

Don't do that.

And it haunted him every day.

Live.

And part of my involvement, I would have to say, would be an old man to a dead man.

You know, people should have the right to determine their personal and self identity.

The government should not have that right.

So many times, passing for white was an economic necessity in terms of feeding their families.

They lived in an industrialized city and needed work.

One sure way of getting it was to allow the lightness of your skin to mark you as a white person, and to go with that.

I find that tragic because when they've cut ties with family, they've cut ties with their heritage, with the traditions they were raised with, and they become almost like homeless people in that their culture lies.

They've cast aside all of that wealth of culture just for a little promise and comfort of, okay, living today.

The name of the father and of the son of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Lewis McGuire is a proud California Cane River Creole, an eighth generation descendant of Nicholas Augustine.

That's why when we learn so much about who we are as a person and when we learned so much about how socially how to interact with people and stuff, we learn through our culture.

The family came to California in about 1963, and that was considered the second wave of migration of our people moving from Louisiana to the West Coast area.

What was really on my mind about the move was for the children to get a good education.

That's what I really, really wanted.

When we came out to California, of course, we dad was the first one to come out for the first 2 or 3 months, and he stayed with my aunt and my uncle at that time.

So it was like coming from Louisiana.

But yet when we got here, it was just like still being in a part of Louisiana.

Just a great big, big city compared to what Natchitoches cane River was.

But as far as family concerned, we had so much family already out here.

It was just like being at home.

In more ways than one.

It was the height of the civil rights movement, and Lewis Metoyer remembered familiar dissent.

Coach Lewis.

When I was in school, and they would ask you even to fill out a form, you know, and I said, well, I'm Creole.

And they said, well, no, no, you're you're African American.

And of course, at the time I just went along with it because that was the thing we did in school.

But I didn't feel good doing that.

That was something that bothered me about doing that even at the age of, you know, 15, 16 years old in high school and so forth and so on.

It just didn't feel like that's who I was.

Just as on cane River, strength of community and culture kept the Creole spirit alive, but estimated by a family in the greater California Creole community, began to age and grow.

Louis McGuire felt a need to reconnect.

We had a lot of our people out here on the West Coast, but yet, like us, we were starving in terms of knowing what was going on in Louisiana because we loved that Louisiana tie.

You know?

Lewis and his family began publishing Bayou Talk, a California Creole newsletter, in 1989.

Never in our wildest dreams did we know that it would take off the way it did.

By the time we got the second edition out of Bayou Talk, we knew we were going to be called upon as being the answer to so many people, questions and misconceptions and understandings on who are Creoles?

Who are these people?

So it was just an awesome experience, but also forced me and of course the rest of the members of the family to look into our own family background, look into our own history to learn some of those answers to some of those questions that were coming about.

There were more and more questions coming in and.

Rumors began to spread through cane River in the early 1990s that the Department of the interior and the National Park Service were conducting a study about preserving Creole culture.

Harold Delfin.

So what we decided would be was to have a Renaissance, a cultural renaissance, where we would document our history, we would tell our own story.

We would give credit to the descendants and the ancestors of the accomplishments of generations of the past.

Like he tells you, it ain't about race with you.

It's about culture.

About being Creole.

We believe that it's our responsibility to take care of our people.

If culture is too rich for other folk not to know about, you see, it's just too important, too significant.

All we want to do is be able to identify how we feel and feel.

Creole Renaissance Mothers by Tracy Colson found to know a seeing to it.

The next generation can my nine year old teacher specifically asked me to come and talk to the class because she didn't know.

She said, I'm not from Louisiana, and I know that Creole is a big part of Louisiana, a big part of the culture here.

And I want you to come and teach me and teach the kids about it.

And it was a great thing.

But John felt like he was cool.

You know, it was you know, he felt a million times more confident in saying, I'm Creole than what he did the day before.

The Creoles are representative of a movement that's starting to happen in America, and that movement is against the idea of race as a deciding feature of a population.

This thing is not unique to the cane River Creoles.

It's not unique to the Louisiana Creole.

We have a fancy word for it multiculturalism.

From my perspective as a multiracial person, we may individually identify with any aspect of our ancestry as we so choose.

I blatantly refuse to accept America's rule of hybrid descent or in just because of, let's say, our one ancestry.

We must identify 100% with that ancestry and turn our backs on all of the other ancestries.

My people have never done that.

The cane River Creoles have never done that.

We've always walk that in-between rule.

That's who we are.

We are peaceable people, lovable people.

People who respect other people.

And it's just time for us to have the same consideration and acceptance.

I am who I am because of the people who have come before me, and I am so proud to be able to stand up and say that people from other cultures appreciate it.

When you can appreciate their culture, well, it's time for others to appreciate ours.

You know, accept me for who I am.

I accept you for who you say you are.

Then please give me the same courtesy and accept me for who I say I am.

I'm proud of who I am.

I tell you that now.

I'm Lil LaCour.

I'm a Creole woman.

There's a prayer that we say all the time.

And it's the prayer of Saint Francis.

And that prayer advise us not to worry about being understood, but to understand.

But I have to have a turf battle sometimes with Saint Francis in her prayer, because I feel that it's important that not only do we understand, but to ask people that they understand who we are.

I am a Creole.

I'm a proud Creole from cane River.

Do you still do it?

Don't you?

We do.

See.

Through we do.

I don't think.

Nfip.

I don't.

Irish is so popular.

I'm an amazing bourbon.

Devotee.

Do do do do do do do do do do do.

Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

Do you see the way to.

This film is funded in part by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Funding is also provided by a grant from the cane River National Heritage Area and Commission, and by a grant from the Louisiana State Arts Council to the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

For a copy of this program, call 1-800-973-7246.

Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery.

Ladies and gentlemen, may.