THE CREOLE OF THE WEST

The Creole Files of the West 

KHEMETIC NATION ABORIGINAL SCIENCE 

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What is Creole? Creole in a modern term today means the mixture of culture. Along with the mixture of language that is spoken with the residue of the English and French from Europe. Many people today think of Creole and automatically will think of a person from the Louisiana region with tawny skin. When in fact what we call Creole is a broad subject here in the Americas. As we see the people in regions such as St. Lucia, Haiti, and even the Louisiana region are under the banner of “Creole”. Even the Gullah-Geechee people who inhabited modern day South Carolina and Georgia along with the various surrounding islands speak the Gullah dialect that is entitled as “Sea Island Creole”. With the mixture of dialects that were taken and amalgamated from the Ivory Coast region of Africa and the residue of the Guale dialect.  

From the book entitled “Creole : The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color'' written by Sybil Kein (cited off page 223-227) it reads : “According to Albert Valdman , the word Creole originates from crioulo or criolo , which entered the French language from the Spanish, which in turn probably derives from the past tense crialdo of the verb criar (from the Latin creare) which means “servants raised in the master’s house.” Valdman further claims that Creole implies the corrupted or rotten European language used by blacks or by white creoles in their dealings with blacks. In a restricted sense , the term denotes any child born in a colony to European parents, but to Valman “Creole” in a broader sense refers to two groups of people: blacks born in American colonies, as opposed to those originating from Africa (Black Creoles versus Noir Bossals) , and all people of mixed race (hybrids) , as opposed to pure whites or pure blacks. Other reseachers explain that Creole or “nigger French” or “neg” is a language similar to Haitian Creole in form and pronunciation. Hesseling defines Creole as “those languages which have arisen out of European languages in the mouths of Africans, Asians, Australians , or Americans (i.e. , aboriginal Americans) in overseas provinces and then later are also frequently spoken by Europeans and their descendants.” The root of the Black Louisiana Creole population in modern time roots back to the year 1719, as the first shipment of 500 enslaved African people were brought in. According to Historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, the tables listing French slave ships that landed in Louisiana shows 450 arriving in 1719. Historian Patrick Griolet argues that the people who arrived later came from the Caribbean. In 1809 a large number of Creoles from St. Domingue, who had taken refuge in Cuba after being expelled by the Spanish, were accepted by the United States even though in 1807 President Jefferson had banned all slave importation. These people settled in New Orleans, along the plantations in the Mississippi region and in St. Martinsville in the region of the Attakapas Prairie. As Hall argues that around 66% of the people kidnapped and brought into Louisiana are indeed from Senegambia, a site of the great medieval Ghana, Mali, and Songhai trade,” a region homogeneous in culture and history, located between the rivers of Senegal and Gambia.” The Acadians or Cajuns are French settlers who inhabited Louisiana , Nova Scotia, and Eastern Canada in the 1700s. Acadians who were exiled out of Nova Scotia went into the deep south and were labeled Acadian. With the Creole stock in the south consisting of French Creole, Haitian Creole , Acadian Creole, and Latin Creole.