Oral History as Identity: The African-Canadian Experience (original) (raw)

UNSILENCING THE PAST: MEMORIALIZING FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF AFRICAN CANADIAN HISTORY

Multiple Lenses: Voices from the African Diaspora Located in Canada, 2007

2004 marked the 400th anniversary of uninterrupted black history and settlement in what is now Canada. Remembering 400 years of history means that we range our vision across four centuries. We remember individuals, communities, collectivities, conditions, and events. We remember the early pioneers: the explorers and adventurers, the enslaved people; we remember the Loyalists, the Refugees of the War of 1812 whose promise of freedom was betrayed, and the exodus to Sierra Leone of those who insisted on being free; the Jamaican Maroons who did not see Canada as a promised land but a sorrow land of exile, the refugees, fugitive and free, whom we associate with the Underground Railroad; the black pioneers of BC; the black settlers of the Prairies; the Caribbean immigrants throughout the 20th century, but especially after 1962 when the immigration policies were liberalized. We remember the struggles and tribulations, the resilience, the resistance and the triumph of these African Canadians as they sought to affirm their humanity and create and live a life of dignity. We remember the communities they built and maintained and the events, small and great that shaped their lives and that of their communities. How do we remember this 400-year history? What do we choose to remember? And how do we memorialize it? I would argue that there are at least two ways in which to do so. First, through the vehicle of public history: museums, exhibits, historic sites, and monuments, and websites; and second, through the medium of academic history: research, writing, publishing, and teaching. The two are not mutually exclusive. Much of the work done in museums rests on solid research done within an academic framework. One quick example of that would be the work done for the Parks Canada exhibit the Underground Railroad, Next Stop: Freedom.

Documenting and Reinterpreting the Excluded: Black Canada's Histories and Literatures

Although the title and theoretical underpinnings of Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past are inspired by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, his work is quite distinct, as he analyzes black Canada (particularly black Canadian literature) as intricate and essential to, yet largely ignored or convoluted in, theories of the black Atlantic and transatlantic slavery studies. Acknowledging that these omissions are symptoms of the exclusions of black Canada within broader Canadian histories and literatures, Siemerling conducts a thorough and detailed study of the important local and transnational possibilities of these works. Indeed, Siemerling emphasizes a different map, with additional times, spaces, perspectives and accounts, routed through black Canadian writings. He balances the flawed possibilities of the Canadian context throughout his analysis, by navigating the ways that certain legal and political conditions of what is now Canada made important black texts and networks possible and impossible.

Mixed-blood: Indigenous-Black identity in colonial Canada

AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 2020

In thinking through Indigenous-Blackness in colonial Canada, we explored the ramifications of the intersections of mixed-blood Indigenous-Black identity with colonialism, racism, gender, and social determinants of health, and how the outcomes of such intersections manifest as erasure, racism, and fractured identity. This critical research is nested within the larger Proclaiming Our Roots project, which uses an arts-based community-based methodology to respect and represent local and global Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, and utilizes digital oral storytelling, community mapping, and semi-structured interviews as research methods. Community members gathered in workshops held in Toronto and Halifax/Dartmouth, Canada, as these are sites where Indigenous and Black communities came together in the face of white colonial oppression. Community members and researchers told their stories and reshaped their geographies as acts of resistance. This work brings to the forefront Indigen...