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There are important similarities and differences between the creative, vibrant and indomitable peoples who created the cultures of Saint-Domingue/Haiti and Louisiana. Both places were colonized by France. Some of the colonizers of both places were pirates. Although Saint-Domingue/Haiti remained a French colony until it achieved its independence in 1804, Spain took effective control of Louisiana by 1769 and the United States did the same by 1 804. Despite these changes in administration, Louisiana's population remained largely French, Cajun1 and Creole. The French language survived widely in rural areas until the mid-twentieth century and is still spoken today in some places in southwest Louisiana.
The colonizing population of Saint-Domingue/Haiti and Louisiana was both similar and different. Saint-Domingue 's Native American population, the Arawak, had developed an extraordinarily just, productive, spiritual, and artistic civilization. The first Africans were introduced in 1502 by the Spanish. During the first few decades of Spanish colonization, the Arawak and enslaved Africans - initially Ladinos who were Africans born or socialized in Spain, and then mainly Africans of the Wolof ethnicity brought directly from Senegal - cooperated in revolts against Spanish rule. First the Ladinos and then the Wolof taught the Arawak how to revolt effectively against the Spanish and the Arawak helped the Africans escape to the mountains and create runaway slave communities.2 But before French rule began in Saint-Domingue/Haiti, the Arawak population had been utterly destroyed as corporate groups by the Spanish conquerors and colonizers.
In sharp contrast, in Louisiana the first slaves were Native Americans, and several of these nations, including Alabama, Attakapas, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Mobile, Natchez, Natchitoches, and Tunica remained powerful throughout the eighteenth century. While some colonizers of Louisiana were born in France, many of them were Canadian courreurs du bois [fur traders] who lived among and merged with Native Americans both biologically and culturally. Africans often allied and merged with Native Americans as well, following the same pattern as in early Saint-Domingue. Africans taught Native Americans in Louisiana how to combat Spanish and French methods of warfare and Native Americans helped Africans escape to the forests and swamps and create runaway slave communities.3 Whites with deep roots in Louisiana often have ancestors who were African slaves as well as Native Americans, but they were rarely...