Nous

Scott Tilton and Rudy Bazenet's French cultural institute finds a home in the Historic BK House

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The French Quarter just got a little more French, and not just because French President Emmanuel Macron’s December visit had hundreds of Tricolours waving in the streets. On March 9, through a new partnership, the Historic BK House and Gardens will officially become the new home of the Nous Foundation, a cultural institute dedicated to French and Louisiana Creole.

Founded by Rudy Bazenet, who hails from Clermont-Ferrand, France, and New Orleans-born Scott Tilton, the Nous Foundation (French for “we”/“us”) formed after the pair launched a successful initiative to include Louisiana in the International Organization of the Francophonie, making it the first U.S. state to join the organization of 88 regions and governments with French language ties. Taking their efforts back to New Orleans, Bazenet and Tilton have modeled Nous after the cultural centers common in Paris that promote community development alongside language.

Though Louisiana had one million French speakers as recently as 1970, that number has since dropped to an estimated 250,000, as English pummeled through French-speaking enclaves as the economic lingua franca. The history of Louisiana French is complex, with the language influenced by the area’s Indigenous tribes, Acadian settlers, and years of political factions between Spanish, French, and U.S. colonizers. It has long suffered endangerment by racially-motivated policy changes, like the 1921 Louisiana constitutional act that banned French from being taught in public schools, as well as the general homogenization of American culture. But Nous and other champions of local culture are striving not just to keep Louisiana French and Creole languages alive, but to actively promote the learning and integration of the languages as a cultural norm.

Tilton and Bazenet have their hands full. From funding short films (like last year’s Film Quest and Voices of Renewal, as well as the forthcoming Heritage) in Louisiana Creole and French, to connecting French-speaking businesses and job seekers at the first ever Forum Économique this past January at Tulane—Nous’s approach is “dedicated to community, economic, and cultural development.” They believe language advancement is more than just studying grammar and vocabulary; it’s about developing the sectors that the language occupies.

[Read more about the documentary film Voice of Renewal in Alexandra Kennon's story about local documentaries in 2022 here.]

“[We asked ourselves], how do you make that tie between the history and the heritage? Not to just live in the past but have concrete benefits for our community?” said Tilton. Though acknowledging the past is important, Nous’s belief is that current community building is what will actually make a language thrive.

Nous’s multi-pronged programming reflects the building-from-the-ground-up approach. There is Le Lab, an entrepreneurial incubator that funds French or Creole-based projects across a spectrum of industries. Tilton and Bazenet understand that changing pre-existing businesses is a near-futile effort, but “creating projects and companies from the get-go with a [French or Creole language] goal in mind” will ideally create a ripple effect of multilingual business opportunity. Throughout the year, Nous creates opportunities for French and Creole speakers to engage with the New Orleans and Baton Rouge communities. In October 2022, Bazenet curated the exhibition The Louisianais.e at the West Baton Rouge Museum, showcasing eight artists exploring the future of Louisiana French and Creole through the depiction of fictional magazine covers. The title is written in the form of “inclusive writing”—reflecting a movement in French-speaking countries to make the language more inclusive by bringing masculine and feminine forms together. Tilton believes this exhibit represents the first instance of this form being used in Louisiana.

“[We asked ourselves], how do you make that tie between the history and the heritage? Not to just live in the past but have concrete benefits for our community?" —Scott Tilton

The institution also hosts La Nuit, a traveling concert series featuring music from French-speaking regions, and L’After—a series of networking nights in partnership with the Alliance Française de La Nouvelle-Orléans. And of course, they hope to strengthen the connection that they’ve already established between Louisiana and other Francophone regions: In addition to their local programming, Nous has partnered with Fulbright France to create a scholarship that sponsors French researchers to come to Louisiana, the first regional-based Fulbright in the U.S. Nous will provide a stipend in addition to the Fulbright grant, and next year plans to send Louisiana scholars to France as well. “Our goal is to launch similar programs with Quebec and other French-speaking countries/regions to have scholars coming in and out of Louisiana, and to have Louisiana scholars doing research at Francophone institutions,” said Tilton.

In Louisiana, the lingual atmosphere would be remiss without the Louisiana Creole language (also called Kouri-vini). “We made a decision at the beginning of our project that if wanted to be encompassing, the name 'nous'—us, we—we needed to include Louisiana Creole in that mission,” Tilton said.

This effort includes dismantling the stereotype that Creole is just “broken French”. The complex language was spoken alongside Louisiana French until it gradually became stigmatized for its association with Louisiana’s Free People of Color and was increasingly marginalized after the Louisiana Purchase. With fewer than 10,000 native speakers today, Louisiana Creole is considered a critically-endangered language.

[Read more about the Saint-Luc French Immersion and Cultural Center in Acadiana here.]

“We work on French obviously, but it’s not French for French’s sake. It’s about promoting heritage cultures and empowering people to learn languages that in many cases were dispossessed, that were forcibly removed from communities,” Tilton said. The organization’s documentary Voices of Renewal, which premiered at Cinema on the Bayou in January, follows five Creole speakers from three generations. One of the Creole speakers highlighted in the film is new to the language, reflective of Nous's mission to promote language learning beyond preservation.  

“We view [the term French and Creole-Speaking] not just as heritage speakers, we view that as people who are just learning it,” Tilton said. “Today a French speaker can come from New York or New Iberia. It’s important to think about that.”

Now that they have a physical presence in the French Quarter, Nous can be a hub for locals interested in engaging more with the French language and culture. The Historic BK House was originally built in 1826 and has been operated as a cultural center by the Keyes Foundation since 1970. When the Keyes Foundation decided to rebrand to focus on the various communities in the French Quarter—including Italians, Creoles, and other communities—the partnership with Nous seemed a perfect fit. The space will host the Nous offices in the back and a permanent exhibition in the front, which to Tilton’s knowledge, is the first bilingual permanent exhibit in the history of the French Quarter. Other spaces will be dedicated to film screenings, meeting spaces, concerts, and rotating exhibits.

“We view [the term French and Creole-Speaking] not just as heritage speakers, we view that as people who are just learning it,” Tilton said. “Today a French speaker can come from New York or New Iberia. It’s important to think about that.”

Ever aware of the intrinsic power of language, the Nous team has carefully considered the wording the exhibits use to discuss its history, too. “We use language like ‘French and Creole speaking’ rather than ethno-identifiers,” Tilton said. “We don’t eschew Cajun, Creole, all those, but we want to make sure we tell the whole story that there are people of Acadian descent, and there are people who identify as Creole, and Indigenous populations. We’re going to make sure the exhibition talks about that.” 

The Nous Foundation’s doors will officially open at the Historic BK House on March 9, featuring its permanent exhibition as well as The Louisianais.e. This month, you can also catch a screening of the Nous Foundation’s short film Voices of Renewal at The French Film Festival in New Orleans on March 11.

Visit nous-foundation.org to stay up to date on Nous’s latest events and programs.