Creole peoples

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The term Creole and its cognates in other languages — such as crioulo, criollo, creolo, créole, kriolu, criol, kreyol, kreol, kriol, krio, etc. — have been applied to people in different countries and epochs, with rather different meanings. Typically, creole peoples are fully or partially descended from white European colonial settlers. Their language, culture and/or racial origin represents the creolization resulting from the interaction and adaptation of colonial-era emigrants from Europe with non-European peoples, climates, cuisines, etc.

The development of creole languages is attributed to, but independent of, the emergence of a creole ethnic identity.

Etymology and overview[edit]

The English word creole derives from the French créole, which in turn came from Portuguese crioulo. This word, a derivative of the verb criar ("to raise"), was coined in the 15th century, in the trading and military outposts established by Portugal in West Africa. It originally referred to descendants of the Portuguese settlers who were born and raised overseas. While the Portuguese may have originally reserved the term crioulo for people of strictly European descent, the crioulo population came to be dominated by people of mixed ancestry (mestiços). This mixing happened relatively quickly in most Portuguese colonies. The growth of a mixed population was due to both the scarcity of Portuguese women in the settlements, and to the Portuguese Crown policy of encouraging mixed marriages in the colonies to create loyal colonial populations.

The following ethnic groups have been historically characterized as "creole" peoples:

United States[edit]

Alaska[edit]

People of mixed Alaska Native American and Russian ancestry are Creole. The intermingling of promyshlenniki men with Aleut and Alutiiq women in the late 18th century gave rise to a people who assumed a prominent position in the economy of Russian Alaska and the north Pacific rim.[1]

Chesapeake Colonies[edit]

Main article: Chesapeake Colonies

During the early settlement of the colonies, children born of immigrants in the colonies were often referred to as "Creole". This is found more often in the Chesapeake Colonies.[2]

Louisiana[edit]

Main article: Louisiana Creole people
Main article: Creoles of Color

In the United States, the word "Creole" refers to people of any race or mixture thereof who are descended from settlers in colonial French Louisiana before it became part of the United States in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. Some writers from other parts of the country have mistakenly assumed the term to refer only to people of mixed racial descent, but this is not the traditional Louisiana usage. Originally it referred to people of French and then Spanish descent who were born in Louisiana, to distinguish them from immigrants. Later Creole was sometimes used as well to refer to people of African descent born in Louisiana. Later the terms were differentiated by French Creole (European ancestry) and Louisiana Creole (meaning someone of mixed racial ancestry).

Contemporary usage has broadened the meaning of Louisiana Creoles to describe a broad cultural group of people of all races who share a French or Spanish background. Louisianans who identify themselves as "Creole" are most commonly from historically Francophone communities. Some of their ancestors came to Louisiana directly from France and others came via the French colonies in the Caribbean. Many Louisiana Creole families arrived in Louisiana from Saint Domingue as refugees from the Haitian Revolution. They had settled first in Cuba before moving on to New Orleans, the center of Creole culture in Louisiana.

Spoken Creole is dying with the dissolution of Creole families and continued 'Americanization' in the area. Most remaining Creole lexemes have drifted into popular culture. Traditional French Creole is spoken among those families determined to keep the language alive or in regions below New Orleans around St. James and St. John Parishes where German immigrants originally settled (also known as 'the German Coast', or La Côte des Allemands) and cultivated the land, keeping the ill-equipped French Colonists from starvation during the Colonial Period and adopting commonly spoken French and Creole French (arriving with the exiles) as a language of trade.

Creoles are largely Roman Catholic and influenced by traditional French and Spanish culture left from the first Colonial Period, officially beginning in 1722 with the arrival of the Ursuline Nuns, who were preceded by another order, the sisters of the Sacred Heart, with whom they lived until their first convent could be built with monies from the French Crown. (Both orders still educate girls in 2010). The "fiery Latin temperament" described by early scholars on New Orleans culture made sweeping generalizations to accommodate Creoles of Spanish heritage as well as the original French. The mixed race creoles, descendants of mixing of European colonists, slaves and Native Americans or sometimes 'Gens du Colour' (free men and women of colour), began during the colonial periods with the arrival of slave populations. Their collective cultures are known as "Creole", though many non-Louisianans do not distinguish between the two groups, or do not recognize the distinctions made in the New Orleans area between the original white colonists whose offspring were the original first born in Louisiana and Creoles that were a mixture of people of European ancestry and slave populations (or free men and women of color).

They were also referred to as 'criollos', a word from the Spanish language meaning "mixed" and used in the post-French governance period to distinguish the two groups of New Orleans area and down river Creoles. Both mixed race and European Creole groups share many traditions and language, but their socio-economic roots differed in the original period of Louisiana history.

The term is also often used to mean simply "pertaining to the New Orleans area".

Louisianans descended from the French Acadians of Canada are not creoles in the strictest sense but are referred to as, and identify as, 'Cajuns' - a derivation of the word Acadian, indicating French Canadian settlers as ancestors. Cajun French dialect and culture is distinct from French Creole. Though the land areas overlap around New Orleans and down river, Cajun culture and language extend westward all along the southern coast of Louisiana, concentrating in areas southwest of New Orleans around Lafayette, Marksville, and as far as Crowley, Abbeville and into the rice belt of Louisiana nearer Lake Charles and the Texas border.

Africa[edit]

Ottoman Africa[edit]

The Ottoman colonization of most of North Africa starting from the 1500s and intermarriage between the colonizing Turkish men and North African women led to the creation of a distinct ethnicity in Ottoman Algeria, Ottoman Tunisia, Ottoman Libya, and Ottoman Egypt.[3] Although never originally referred to specifically as creole due to the difference in language, this group was known as the Kouloughlis (from Turkish kul "slave" or "subject" + oğlu "son of"). In modern Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, people of mixed Turkish and native descent make up a large percentage of the population.[4] Because of assimilation, however, very little of the modern population speaks Turkish or identifies as of Turkish descent:[5]

Portuguese Africa[edit]

The crioulos of mixed Portuguese and African descent eventually gave rise to several major ethnic groups in Africa, especially in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, Ziguinchor (Casamance), Angola, Mozambique. Only a few of these groups have retained the name crioulo or variations of it:

the dominant ethnic group, called Kriolus or Kriols in the local language; the language itself is also called "Creole";
Crioulos
Crioulos

Brazil[edit]

In Brazil, the word crioulo initially denoted persons of Portuguese parentage born in Brazil (as distinct from colonists that migrated from Portugal), like in Portuguese-speaking Africa. It eventually came to denote a person of predominantly African ancestry. In colonial Brazil, it was common to refer to a Brazilian-born slave as a crioulo, whereas slaves from Africa were known as "Africans". Thus crioulo came to refer to slaves born and raised in Brazil. Later, crioulos was used to refer, derogatorily, to all people of African ancestry.

Former Spanish colonies[edit]

In regions that were formerly colonies of Spain, the Spanish word criollo (literally, "native," "local") historically referred to class in the colonial caste system, comprising people born in the colonies of largely or totally Spanish descent. The word came to mean those things native to the region, as it is used today, in words such as "comida criolla" ("country" food from the area).

In the period of initial settlement of Latin America, the Spanish crown often passed over Criollos for the top military, administrative, and religious offices in the colonies in favor of the Spanish-born Peninsulares (literally "born in the Iberian Peninsula").

The word criollo is the origin and cognate of the French word creole.

Spanish America[edit]

The racially based caste system was in force throughout the Spanish colonies in the Americas, since the 16th century. By the 19th century, this discrimination and the example of the American Revolution and the ideals of the Enlightenment eventually led the Spanish American Criollo elite to rebel against the Spanish rule. With the support of the lower classes, they engaged Spain in the Spanish American wars of independence (1810–1826), which ended with the break-up of former Spanish Empire in America into a number of independent republics.

Caribbean[edit]

In many parts of the Southern Caribbean, Creole people are referred to as being the decedents of slaves who were Natives peoples, or from different parts of Africa and Asia, who eventually formed a common culture based on their experience living together in islands colonized by the French and English.

Creole, "Kreyòl" or "Kweyol" also refers to the creole languages in the Caribbean, including Antillean Creole, Haitian Creole, and Jamaican Creole, among others.

Antillean creole speaking islands are: St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Haiti, Guadeloupe, St. Martin, Saint-Barthélemy, French Guiana, Belize, and Trinidad & Tobago.

Indian Ocean[edit]

Main articles: Mauritian Creole people and Seychellois Creole people
See also: Mauritian creole, Réunion Creole and Seychellois Creole

The usage of 'creole' in the islands of the southwest of the Indian Ocean varies according to the island. In Réunion and the Seychelles, the term 'creole' includes people born there of all ethnic groups.[6] In Mauritius, on the other hand, the term describe people of African descent[6] with often some Indian, Chinese, French and/or British backgrounds. In all three, 'creole' also refers to languages derived from French.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ http://rocinak.sasktelwebsite.net/roc/creole.htm
  2. ^ "First Generations: Women in Colonial America", Carol Berkin
  3. ^ Daumas, Eugène (1943), Women of North Africa: or "The Arab Woman", Indiana University Press, p. 54, ASIN B0007ETDSY 
  4. ^ Stone, Martin (1997), The Agony of Algeria, C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, p. 29, ISBN 1-85065-177-9 
  5. ^ Lorcin, Patricia M. E. (1999), Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria, Indiana University Press, p. 2, ISBN 0253217822 
  6. ^ a b Robert Chaudenson (2001(of translation)). Creolization of Language and Culture. CRC press. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-203-44029-2. 

External links[edit]

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