Issue III, Winter 2022
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Director’s Message
Dear colleagues,
With February upon us, another Black History Month is here (Canada and the USA) and it has me pondering what cultural events and histories will be rolled out this year. Typically, in Canada, we have been trapped in a cycle where we do two things: 1) revisit biographies of famous or noteworthy black Canadians or (2) celebrate the Underground Railroad which erases our slaving histories and positions our white citizens as the “good guys” who saved enslaved African Americans fleeing northward to Canada (away from American Slavery).
Both strategies are limiting and problematic. Coming from the discipline of Art History, I know all too well that the drive towards canonical biographies comes at a steep price and usually results in systemic biases and exclusions as scholars and others seek to determine who is worthy of commemoration and veneration. Such biographies also typically sanitize the complexity and messiness of history to package lovable and praise-worthy heroes. By fixating on the Underground Railroad, our second custom ensures that Canadians continue to ignore, or completely erase, the 200-year history of slavery under two empires, the French and the British.
To trouble these traditions, I want to offer a reminder of how difficult it is to recuperate the biographies of enslaved people and how challenging and rewarding such archival work truly is. I suspect that it is this challenge that prohibits people from undertaking such research and relying instead on a list of the “usual suspects” that get rolled out in Canada each February.
Enslaved people are very difficult to research. Free black people are also difficult to recuperate in the period of slavery. The former because they were considered chattel under the law, but also because they were denied access to literacy, leisure time, and the material means to document their lives. The latter group, free blacks, are also challenging to research because of the pervasive systemic racism of western societies, which left them commonly impoverished or destitute. While wealthy whites have historically left behind wills, estate inventories, journals, and business ledgers, the average person, including impoverished blacks, did not. Researching the enslaved then means recuperating their lives by finding mentions or representations of them in the documents, artworks, and artifacts left behind by their enslavers.
John Rock, “Ran away from her Master John Rock,” Nova-Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, Tuesday, 1 September 1772, vol. 3, no. 105, p. 3; PANS MFM #8155, Reel 8155, 1772 – 1774; Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax, Canada.
John Rock, “Run away from the Subscriber,”Nova-Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, Tuesday, 12 February 1771, vol. 1, no. 24, p. 4; PANS MFM #8154, Reel 8154, 1767 –1789, Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax, Canada.
Estate Inventory: Rock, John: 25 September 1776, PANS MFM #(19)420, RG48 Reel 420, #61 (Halifax), 17 pages, p. 7 of 17; Nova Scotia Archives , Halifax, Canada.
Take Thursday, for instance. This enslaved black girl in Halifax, Nova Scotia first enters the public record on 1 September 1772 after running away from her enslaver John Rock on August 18. Besides describing her height, build, and clothing, Rock also stated that Thursday had “a Lump above her Right Eye,” most likely a mark left by a physical assault. If so, that he did not feel ashamed to print such a detail is a sign of his knowledge that he operated with impunity. There is evidence that Rock was a difficult and perhaps violent man in general. Earlier on 12 February 1771, Rock printed another fugitive notice, this time for a twenty-two-year-old white indentured servant named James Twifoot, who had fled two days earlier. Did James and Thursday live in the Rock household at the same time? If so, why did they not collaborate and flee together? Perhaps we shall never know. But what is clear is that neither indentured white people nor enslaved black people wanted to live in the Rock household.
Estate Inventory: Rock, John: 25 September 1776, PANS MFM #(19)420, RG48 Reel 420, #61 (Halifax), 17 pages, p. 12 of 17; Nova Scotia Archives , Halifax, Canada.
Unfortunately, Thursday shows up again in another manuscript related to Rock, his estate inventory of 25 September 1776. Listed on pages seven and twelve of the seventeen-page document, she was described on the latter as “1 Negroe Wench Named Thursday” valued at £25.0.0. (sic) On page seven, she was listed as “Thursday (Black Girl),” and we learn that she was actually sold for £20.0.0 to a man named John Bishop. There are several painful lessons across these four documents. Furthermore, we are also left with several gnawing gaps. First, Thursday’s escape was obviously short-lived, and she was recaptured at some point before September 1776 and returned to the Rock household. The exact date will be hard to determine since my preliminary investigation has yielded only one extant workhouse record for Halifax for the period, 1771. Workhouse and jail records could be crucial to understand the nature and length of Thursday’s flight since they were typically the places in which fugitives were locked up when captured.
Profoundly, the reason why we know of Thursday at all is due to her brave resistance. But disturbingly, the reason why we can trace Thursday after her escape is due to her recapture and to Rock’s financial status, which allowed him to write a will and to have an estate inventory completed. Next, while the where, why, when, and how of Thursday’s escape remain elusive, we are saddled with the grim knowledge of her recapture, but also her enslavement by another white man after Rock’s death. Thursday’s legal status as a “slave” sadly means that future attempts to uncover her life will go through John Bishop to see what, if any, traces of Thursday he documented as her enslaver.
For now, though, I would like to celebrate the valiant black girl named Thursday who understood that slavery was an injustice that she could resist and who fled from Rock’s household in her red gown, with her red ribbon in her hair, and with thoughts of freedom in her mind.
-Prof. Charmaine A. Nelson, Director of the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery
Black History Month Fellows Panel
Tuesday, February 15 from 12-1:30 pm (AST)
The Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery is proud to present a panel discussion featuring Tonya "Sam'Gwan" Paris, Jason Cyrus, and Bruno R. Véras. Each panelist will discuss their research/creation from their fellowship at the Institute during Fall 2021. Topics covered include Black fashion history in Canada, nineteenth-century Canadian Press coverage of slave rebellions in Brazil and intertwined histories of Black and Indigenous resistance. The panel will be moderated by Institute Director, Dr Charmaine A. Nelson.
Webinar link and Passcode: Xf1gQG
For more information, accessibility inquiries or to request to join virtual Fellows' Talks by phone, please contact: theinstitute@nscad.ca
“Slavery and the Colonial Archive, Newfoundland”
By Katelyn Clark - Research Assistant, Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery
Since the November newsletter, I have been fortunate to continue my work supervised by Prof. Charmaine A. Nelson as an undergraduate research assistant at the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery. Up until this point, my efforts have been predominantly focused on a study of Prince Edward Island’s historic newspapers, court records, and shipping ledgers that span the period between 1790 and 1834.
As detailed in my submission in the second Institute newsletter (Fall 2021), Researching P.E.I. Slavery, my objective has been to help piece together the history of slavery in the province through the collection and analysis of various documents. Through this work, I am in my own small way contributing to a growing and important scholarship that seeks to understand the history of enslavement in the Atlantic and St. Lawrence regions. These histories are inseparable from trade, law, and society, and yet remain generally unintegrated within broader Canadian historical narratives.
Over the course of October and November 2021, I found myself reading through Charlottetown Harbor’s 1790-1847 Customs House ledgers. During this period, port authorities kept a close record of incoming and outgoing shipping, which recorded important information about ownership, ports of origin, destinations, and records of transported articles and goods, all of which situated Prince Edward Island as a part of transatlantic trade networks. For nearly every vessel recorded in the well-preserved ledgers, there was also reference to the location in which duties were paid on these goods; port cities in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Newfoundland were all frequently mentioned. Having learned from my recent research in Charlottetown that these local records provided excellent insight into Prince Edward Island’s own relationship with slavery, I became curious about what additional information the custom-house ledgers of other Atlantic regions might contain. Discussing this topic with Professor Nelson during an end-of-term meeting, I volunteered to use my Christmas break to embark upon a research field trip to Newfoundland and Labrador, a province in which the question of slave advertisements (and other primary sources) has not yet been explored. Before I knew it, I was on a plane to St. John’s, ready to begin my research at the provincial Newfoundland and Labrador Archives.
I entered the archive as well prepared as possible, having scoured the available literature on enslavement in the region. Newfoundland and slavery have increasingly been the subject of important and ongoing research by scholars and journalists, with the focus predominantly on Newfoundland’s place in the trade networks that connected Caribbean plantations and West African slave markets. Locally produced Island goods such as dried salt cod were exchanged for products produced on plantations such as rum, salt, and molasses. Additionally, the work of shipbuilding in the province, specifically ships intended for use as slave ships, was recently brought to light in Camille Turner’s multidisciplinary exhibition, the Afronautic Research Lab, functioning as further evidence of Newfoundland’s place in the Black Atlantic. Finally, there were vessels entering the Newfoundland ports which came directly from slave-owning societies. Vessels from regions such as the Turks and Caicos Islands are known to have employed enslaved crew members hired out by their enslavers, typically plantation owners in the Caribbean. Therefore, just as with Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland would have had enslaved crew members onboard vessels entering and economically interacting with the Island colony. (Kennedy, C.M. [2007], “The Other White Gold: Salt, Slaves, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and British Colonialism,” Historian, 69: 215-230.)
In terms of archives, Newfoundland and Labrador is a potentially research-rich environment. There are growing collections of holdings from the sixteenth century to the present dispersed in various archives across the capital city, St. John’s. The primary locations I was able to access during my visit were the Newfoundland and Labrador Provincial Archive at The Rooms, the Memorial University of Newfoundland Library, and the Provincial Reference Library at the Newfoundland Centre for Arts and Culture. Also relevant is the Maritime History Archive, which unfortunately was inaccessible to me during my stay due to Covid-19 restrictions. Each of these public institutions hosts an independent range of resources and support staff which, ideally, should make accessing important material easy for the general public. This being said, given the pervasive national ignorance of histories of Canadian participation in Transatlantic Slavery, doing archival research on related topics can also pose specific challenges to the researcher. In Slave Life and Slave Law in Colonial Prince Edward Island, 1769 - 1825, Harvey Amani Whitfield and Barry Cahill describe a general “historical amnesia about slavery.” Taking inspiration from scholars such as Afua Cooper and her work on the African-Canadian Diaspora, Whitfield and Cahill suggest that the study of enslavement until recent years, has been treated as “an alien and exceptional practice imported from the United States” (31). This erasure from the collective historical consciousness, a process which has been variously observed by historians in Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, is, as evident from my experiences in certain Newfoundland and Labrador Archives, also present in that province.
As a historically recognised location for trade and shipping since the late seventeenth century, Prof. Nelson and I expected St. John’s to yield archives of materials documenting these histories. Specifically, we expected that the St. John's newspaper records would be rich for our period of study. I quickly realized this was not the case. The earliest St. John’s newspaper dates to 1807, but no copies of the newspaper prior to 1810 have survived. For comparison, the Montreal Gazette has available bilingual editions from 1785, The Prince Edward Island Royal Gazette and Miscellany is available from 1791, and The Nova Scotia Weekly Chronicle and Advertiser has printings available dating back to 1752. The lack of early newspapers through which we might learn more about enslavement in Newfoundland and Labrador is a bit ironic as Newfoundland's first published newspaper was founded by a slave-owning merchant, John Ryan, who had previously published in what is now recognised as New Brunswick. Moving to Newfoundland around 1806, Ryan brought with him an enslaved Black female, Dinah, marking him as a part of a slave-owning class whose presence is visible in wills and estate inventories. (Henry, Natasha. "Black Enslavement in Canada," The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published June 13, 2016; Last Edited June 09, 2020.)
When I did find mention of race or colour in the Newfoundland newspapers, it was not in the form of runaway slave advertisements, but in the rather large number of desertion notices; advertisements placed by ship captains, tradesmen, or masters notifying the public of fleeing crew members, a runaway apprentice or indentured servant. These advertisements would specify details of the individual who left their employment, along with a description of their eye colour, skin tone, and build. However, the terminology used in these descriptions is not a sure signifier of the deserter’s race or enslaved status. Although the written descriptions used terms like “Black,” “dark complexion,” or “swarthy,” all these terms were used throughout the period of slavery (especially prior to the nineteenth century) to describe people of various races. None of them, therefore, clearly identifies a person of African ancestry. Interpretation of what makes a man “Black” changed depending on the time period, cultural understandings, and the describer’s own perspective. Therefore, our ability to confirm the race and status of these ship deserters requires that future researchers trace the vessels and determine the birth origins and ethnicities of the crew members.
My experiences in St. John’s have made it clear that there are important aspects of the story of slavery in Newfoundland and Labrador still waiting to be uncovered. Uncovering the full history of enslavement in Newfoundland and Labrador will be a trying job because the secondary literature is thin and the archival evidence seems even thinner. This project will pose an extensive amount of work for archival researchers such as myself. My three-week exploratory trip only began to scratch the surface of the archival holdings.
Slavery in the News
Britain’s shameful slavery history matters – that’s why a jury acquitted the Colston Four | Read how jurors were asked to rule that Edward Colston’s heinous crimes were immaterial, but they chose to put themselves on the right side of history.
The Institute in the News
Listen to Tonya "Sam'Gwan" Paris interviewed by Jeff Douglas for CBC Mainstreet NS on her artwork "Freedom is No Game."
Listen to Jason Cyrus discuss style as armour among Black Canadians on CBC Mainstreet NS.
Listen to Bruno R. Véras interviewed on CBC Mainstreet NS about his research into Canadian Press coverage of slave rebellions in Brazil.
History Is Rarely Black or White: Exhibition and Speaker Series | View the online exhibition curated by Institute fellow Jason Cyrus, exploring Victorian cotton, slavery, and its ongoing legacies, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario. | Panel discussion: "Fully Known: Cotton Production, Black History, and the Canadian Experience" with Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson and Shannon Prince | Register for "Style as Armour" virtual talk on Friday, February 11.
Obituary
bell hooks | A trailblazing cultural theorist and activist, public intellectual and a teacher who made a pivotal contribution to Black feminist thought | Read obituary
Sidney Poitier | Oscar-winning actor who starred in To Sir, With Love, and broke down racial barriers in Hollywood and beyond | Read obituary
Explore Media on Slavery and its Legacies
BLK: an Origin Story (Premieres February 26) is a cinematic four-part doc series that looks beyond the Underground Railroad to explore the untold stories of Black Canadians from the 1600s to the present. Created by Institute Advisory Board members Jennifer Holness and Sudz Sutherland for History Canada, this groundbreaking limited series asserts that Black history is Canadian history | Watch Trailer
Watch recordings of the Institute Fellows' Talks from December 2021 and January 2022. Bruno R. Véras, Tonya "Sam'Gwan" Paris and Jason Cyrus.
"Reconcile This" is new podcast from Texas Christian University’s Race & Reconciliation Initiative and the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium | Listen to the episode discussing Clemson University’s Call My Name project.
Black family sees home value increase $500K after erasing themselves from appraisal | Watch coverage on how racism and structural inequality in the process of buying and selling homes.
Black Sonic: the Imagined New Vol. II | Explore the new issue from this interdisciplinary platform for critical exchange and research around African and African diasporic art practices.
Free Black Communities: Bulwarks of Safety Before the Civil War | Read the article by Bill Jeffway about the Dutchess County's local history.
CERLAC presents the Michael Baptista Lecture Series 2021-2022: Envisioning Emancipatory Horizons in the Caribbean and Latin America Unsilencing the Unthinkable | Register for the webinar.
Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Season 8 Discover the surprising ancestral stories of 21 fascinating guests in season eight | Watch here
Passing (2021) is a film adapted from Nella Larsen's celebrated 1929 novel of the same name that tells the story of two Black women, Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) and Clare Kendry (Academy Award nominee Ruth Negga), who can “pass” as white but choose to live on opposite sides of the colour line during the height of the Harlem Renaissance in late 1920s New York | Watch Trailer
Colin in Black and White (2021) is a TV miniseries from Colin Kaepernick and Ava DuVernay exploring Kaepernick's high school years and the experiences that led him to become an activist | Watch Trailer
Academic Employment Opportunities
Full-Time Professorial Stream - Assistant Professor, Black Feminist & Queer Studies, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University | Find Position Information and application here
Publications
Read about Institute Advisory Board Member Andrew Hunter's new book, It Was Dark There All the Time which tells the story of a woman enslaved in Ontario. | Read the review in the Winnipeg Free Press | Hunter, Andrew, It Was Dark There All the Time: Sophia Burthen and the Wake of Slavery in Canada, (Goose Lane Editions, 2022)
Institute Advisory Board member Lisa Merrill contributed an exhibition catalogue essay to the Tate's recent publication on Lubaina Himid. | Watch lecture by Lisa Merril “Live from London: the Lubaina Himid exhibition at the Tate Modern.” | Merrill, Lisa, “The Exhibit as Theatre,” Lubaina Himid, ed. Michael Wellen (London: Tate Publishing, 2021)
Sharon Robart-Johnson recuperates the lives of enslaved people in Nova Scotia in her recently published novel Jude and Diana. | Robart-Johnson, Sharon, Jude and Diana, (Winnipeg, Canada: Roseway Publishing, 2021)
Read how Brit Bennett reimagines the literature of passing in The Vanishing Half. | Bennett, Brit, The Vanishing Half, (New York : Riverhead Books publishing, 2020)
Read about Beatrice and Croc Harry, a new novel by Lawrence Hill for children and adults about a young girl who awakens alone with amnesia in a massive forest. She has no idea who she is. She doesn’t even know her last name, or that she is Black. | Hill, Lawrence, Beatrice and Croc Harry, (Tornoto: HarperCollins, 2022)
Calls for Fellowships / Applications
Fellowships
The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University (CSSJ) and the John Carter Brown Library (JCB) invite applications for a postdoctoral fellowship focused on any area/theme of historical scholarship around African racial slavery, and/or Indigenous dispossession and slavery. | Application details
Applications
Virginia Conference on Race (VCR) 21/22 at Roanoke College: Theme "Intersections" | Where do we intersect with structures of race and forms of structural racism? How does race intersect with other categories of analysis? How might an intersectional approach expand our understanding of structural racism? | Application details
CIBC and the BlackNorth Initiative (BNI) Youth Accelerator are now accepting applications. This new, multi-year program is part of CIBC’s commitment to removing barriers and helping members of the Black community achieve their ambitions | Application details
The Reimagining New England Histories High School Summer Institute is a two-week enrichment program for students who are juniors or seniors in high school and who are Native American/African/African American/Afro-Indigenous | Application details
The Reimagining New England Histories Undergraduate Summer Institute is a two-week enrichment program for current undergraduates at Williams College, Brown University, and current undergraduate alumni of the Williams-Mystic Program. Rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors are eligible to apply | Application details
Commemorate African Heritage Month 2022 by investing in transformative social change through the convergence of scholarship, art, and outreach. Help us reach our goal of raising $10,000 to support the 2022-2023 cohort of artists-in-residence and graduate fellows at the Institute. From inquiry, to art, to action, your donation gives voice to talented artists and academics who are working to understand our past and change our future. Be part of the solution.
Stay tuned for more news from the Institute as our fellows continue to activate their research, including virtual public lectures from Tyshan Wright and Chris Gismondi.
