Warren and Mary Perrin

Attorney Warren A. Perrin is a skills professor at Loyola Law School and an adjunct professor at the University of Louisiana. He was named by five Louisiana governors to lead CODOFIL. In 1999, he was awarded the French National Order of Merit and the Université Sainte-Anne in Canada gave him an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree. He founded the Acadian Museum and has edited or authored 12 books. In 1990, he filed a petition seeking an apology for the Acadian Deportation from Queen Elizabeth II resulting in the signing of the Royal Proclamation of 2003. From 1995 to 2010, he represented Louisiana at five World Francophone Summits. In 2007, he was inducted into the Louisiana Justice Hall of Fame. In 2018, Perrin was named as one of the University of Louisiana’s Outstanding Alumni. In 2022, Perrin was appointed a member of the Historical Commission, Diocese of Lafayette, to prepare a report for the Vatican for the proposed canonization of the “Little Cajun Saint” Charlene Richard and Auguste “Nonco” Pelafigue. In 2023, Perrin was named as president of the New Acadia Project (NAP).

Mary Broussard Perrin is an author, visual artist, and former educator and gallery owner living in Lafayette, Louisiana. She is a mixed-media artist working in painting, photomontage, artist books, and performance art. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from UL Lafayette; and a Master of Visual Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has work in the collections of the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC; the private collection of Krystina Wasserman, curator of book arts at the NMWA; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, a branch of the Smithsonian; and the Louisiana State Museum. She is co-author of Acadie Then and Now, a People’s History, 2015 winner of Le Prix France-Acadie, as well as Seeking an Acadian Nation, the Diary of an Evangeline Girl, published in 2019. She is also a Lafayette Parish Master Gardener, and as such is chairperson of the international-award winning Healers’ Garden, or Jardin des Traiteurs, a demonstration garden comprised solely of native Louisiana medicinal plants located at Vermilionville Living History and Folklife Park in Lafayette. In conjunction with the garden, she instituted Vermilionville’s popular quarterly speaker series “Healing Traditions of Acadiana” in 2013 still going strong in 2023. She has recently co-authored a book, Healing Traditions of South Louisiana, Prayers, Plants and Poultices on medicinal plants and traiteurs, or traditional Cajun French folk healers. She herself is also a traiteuse.

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