Prairie Acadian Cultural Center to celebrate 25th year

The celebration of the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center’s 25th year begins Saturday with a birthday party.
Normally on Saturday the center is the scene of events for children, cooking demonstrations followed by the “Rendez-vous des Cajuns” show at the Liberty Theatre.
The lineup Saturday includes a Cajun jam session from 2 to 4 p.m. in honor of former ranger Claudia Wood on the center’s new “front porch.”
The Cajun French Music Association is hosting the jam session, which will be followed by a reception at 4 p.m.
The birthday is a reminder that the center has not always been a focal point of downtown Eunice and Cajun-Creole cultural.
Park Ranger Angelle Bellard said the center provides national recognition of the cultures and particularly the Prairie Cajun culture.
But the center also serves the local population.
“We get people in that are local that will go, ‘I remember when my mama used that’ or ‘I remember when I helped papa do that...” Bellard said.
“I think it was meant to be a place where people just come and make themselves at home,” she said.
Bellard, who is starting her second year as ranger, said the big surprise for her is the number of local residents she meets who have never been toured the center.
In contrast, a guest book has entries from people from around the world.
Eunice Mayor Scott Fontenot said the city is lucky to have the center which preserves the local history.
“I think anything you have like that brings more people to your city,” he said.
“They come from all over the world and go in there,” he added.
A feature of the usual Saturday’s events is a cooking demonstration and Fontenot noted the last one attended included guests from Minnesota and New York State.
Jack Burson, Eunice alderman at-large, said, “I think it was one of the many significant things that Curtis Joubert spearheaded while he was mayor.”
The center draws tourists to Eunice, he said, but it also “gave a good jolt of pride to our heritage.”
Burson, who describes himself as “half Cajun,” noted that in the past children were discouraged from speaking French in school.
The center helped change the image of the Cajun people, he said.
A history of the center prepared by the National Park Service references the effort to retain the French cuture.
Excerpts from the history are:
“The initial impetus for the eventual creation of three NPS-owned and -operated cultural centers in Cajun country came from an energetic and politically astute mayor of Eunice, Louisiana, Curtis Joubert. Mayor Joubert was extremely proud of his Cajun heritage and quite unhappy with the stereotyped images of Cajuns that were prevalent in the national media and general pubic perception.”
The history stated Cajuns were perceived as lazy, fun-loving, ignorant, simple-minded and unwilling to assimilate to the dominate English language culture took hold in the 1870 and 1880s.
“As Mayor Joubert put it in an interview, the most common stereotype about Cajuns was that they walked barefoot along the bayou, wrestling the occasional alligator on the way to the next beer joint.”
In February 1985 Eunice aldermen passed a resolution authorizing Joubert to pursue an agreement with the Park Service to establish a satellite historical office “to perpetuate and promote the Acadian culture.”
Joubert obtained the support of U.S. Sen. J. Bennett Johnston. In May 1985, Reps. John Breaux and Catherine Long expressed support during a meeting in Eunice.
Other supporters included Cajun musicians Dewey Balfa, Houston Lejeune and Marc Savoy, documentary filmmaker Les Blank, state Rep. Dale Sittig and state Sen. John Saunders.
In the spring of 1986, the city purchased the Liberty Theatre and with mostly volunteer labor and donated materials refurbished the building and by October regular shows were being held.
The efforts were part of a resurgence of Cajun cultural cuisine and music that began in the 1960s.
In 1968, the state launched the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, however it stressed Parisian French rather than Cajun French. “but it did lead an effort to establish French language instruction in the public schools of the Acadiana parishes.”
The Cajun French Music Association was founded in 1984.
St. Landry Parish native Paul Prudhomme caught the attention of the national media with his book, “Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen” in 1984. Gumbo and blackened fish were on plates across the nation.
Meanwhile, Johnson pushed legislation to enable the secretary of the Department of Interior to construct folklife centers in Acadiana.
Folklife centers were built in Eunice, Lafayette and Thibodaux.
In Eunice, the Park Service purchased the old Seale Building adjacent to the Liberty Theatre. The building had been constructed in the 1930s and had been used as a grocery, car and farm implement dealership.
Work on the Seale Building began in March 1990 and a renovation of the Liberty Theatre began in November.
The Saturday night show was moved to Eunice High School while the work was done at the Liberty.
The grand opening for the center was held in October 1991 in conjunction with the eighth annual Folklife Festival held in downtown Eunice.
There was a debate over whether Cajun French would be used by the emcee, Dr. Barry Ancelet, at the Liberty. Ancelet prevailed and the Park Service eventually embraced the tip to cultural preservation.
Another acknowledgement of local cultural is the Prairie Acadian Center is the only Park Service site that stays open on Mardi Gras, a day when the streets of Eunice are filled with revelers.
“Curtis Joubert, who more than anyone was responsible for bringing NPS to Eunice, believes that more could be done to market the center regionally to service clubs, retirement communities, and even the casinos. Nevertheless, relative to the community’s size, the center has been quite successful. Eunice is a city of 12,000, the center there annually attracts about five times that number of visitors,” the Park Service history stated.