Acadian Cotton from Seed to Salvation

There’s more to Acadiana than red beans and Cajun music.

Story by Leslie Petrovski

Photos by Sharon Gordon Donnan and Elaine Bourque

For the past thirty years, Elaine Larcade Bourque has carved out a corner of her garden and planted a small batch of Acadian brown cotton. Her gardening regimen is inspired by her love of the soil, her love of weaving, and a deep commitment to preserving a Cajun textile tradition. For years, Bourque suspected she was likely the last in a long line of southwest Louisiana spinners and weavers to cultivate this Cajun varietal, so she carefully harvested the seeds each fall.

Just five years ago, Bourque, seventy-seven, was one of the only people left in the world with the skills—and seeds—to keep Acadian brown cotton alive. If it hadn’t been for the chance discovery of an old brown-and-white blanket, Acadian brown cotton might have gone with the wind.

Field of Acadian brown cotton bolls.

Acadian brown cotton is a Cajun textile tradition. It is the quiet member of a holy trinity of culture that encompasses the toe-tapping music and spicy cuisine that insinuated blackened redfish onto menus from Hawaii to Maine. Bourque has documented more than one hundred Acadian blankets throughout the Acadian parishes, collecting memories and oral histories about the weavers long dead, who spent winter nights in the attic throwing their shuttles back and forth like their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers before them.