Fake Cannuck Letter Destroyed Ed Muskie's 1972 Run for President

Pepere's Lake, originally uploaded by artist_charleentouchette.

A bit of interesting democratic primary history with Ed Muskie doing the crying at this link above - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canuck_Letter

fyi amies,
"Cannucks" - French Canadians, mostly descendants of the French Voyageurs and Northeast Indian women - Metis, Quebecois, and Bois Brulle and/or Acadians, the offspring of communally living French men from Brittany and Normandy in the early 1600s and Mik'mak women, were persecuted from Maine up through Canada on the eastern seaboard for over 200 years. When America was born, the border crossed over them from coast to coast. One contentious border was Maine, with Acadians having family on both sides and longing to be reunited. My Memere Louisia Aucoin Touchette was born in the late 1890s, but she yearned to return to Acadia and talked about the dispersal in 1755 as if it were yesterday.

Our people were major players in the French and Indian Wars, War of 1812 and others when we usually took the side of our Indian relatives, not usually the winning side. The Grand Derangement in September of 1755 of Acadians, when families were separated, their property confiscated and herded on ships and dispersed to the British colonies, is the first modern example of genocide in the West. Seeing Mormon children torn from their mothers reignites that tragic ancestral memory.

What most people don't know is that the Ku Klux Klan had it's biggest activity against "Cannucks" in Maine in the late 1800s and early 1900s with a membership in Maine of over a 150,000. Read this description of the times from "Performing family stories, forming cultural identity: Franco American mémère stories" by Kristin M. Langellier
First published in Communication Studies, 53(1) Spring 2002, 56-73.

"Arguably, the Roman Catholic church both held French Canada together culturally at the same time that it hindered the social progress of its people. In the U.S., the devotion to French language and Catholic faith made Franco Americans the targets of religious hostility and racist attacks. The Anglo imagination attacked the French refusal to assimilate by challenging their whiteness. The French were characterized in an 1880 Massachusetts labor report as "the Chinese of the Eastern States" (les chinois de Pest) (Doty, 1995, p. 87), a comparison not to other white groups but to another race. Using French Canadians to argue against a ten-hour work day, the report concludes, "Now, it is not strange that so sordid and low a people should awaken corresponding feelings in the managers, and that these should feel that, the longer hours for such people, the better, and that to work them to the uttermost is about the only good use they can be put to" (Wright, 1881). Class, linguistic, and religious conflict submitted Franco Americans to two hundred years of discrimination, oppression, and poverty. In the mid and late 1880's and again in the 1920s, French Catholics were the target of cross-burnings by the Ku Klux Klan. In Maine, for example, an active and flourishing Klan in Maine, numbering 150,141, waged campaigns against the Catholic Church and foreign-language schools (Doty, 1995). Anti-French and anti-Catholic attacks suggest how larger historical forces shaped language and religion within the specific cultural formation of Franco American identity. "

Unfortunately, the Muskie "Canuck Letter" didn't increase awareness about the history and unequal status of some of America's first inhabitants.

From TouchArt.net and One Earth Blog.
P.S. Our Mik'maq ancestors arrived on the northeast shores of the Atlantic 20,000 years ago.