S1: The Secret Life of Birchtown

(upbeat music) This is the Secret Life of Canada, presented by Passport 2017, a podcast that looks at the undertold and untold stories of Canada. I'm Leah Simone Bowen and I'm failing Johnson. And just a warning, this episode has some strong language because history does sometimes. When I was in school, I distinctly remember what I learned about black Canadian history. It's Laved African Americans found freedom in Canada through the Underground Railroad. And once there was a man named Oscar Peterson who was a world-class jazz pianist. This made me wonder, did I miss a class? I decided to pose the question to other black Canadians. What did you learn about black Canadian history in school? (upbeat music) As far as black Canadian history goes, I learned that black people escaped to Canada as we underground railroad and the end. I think there was black history, but in school, underground railroad, that was it. In the classroom, it was just the same story of like, oh, and this was where slaves fled to the Great White North and I remember going out of my way. Wasn't like something else part of the curriculum. That would be nothing. Nothing at all. No, nothing. All right, Leah, so today, so today is about black people, but not just any black people, black Canadian people. Well, that seems kind of obvious due to the title of our black history. Don't reign on my parade here, I'm pumped for this one. Because I want to look into the first black people who arrived in Canada. So pre-Oscar Peterson. Okay, right, so pre-PK Sue Bad? Absolutely pre-PK Sue Bad. Who Montreal? You should have never traded Montreal, worse trade ever. If everyone wasn't beautiful there and they didn't have amazing bagels, I would boycott that city forever. That trade broke my heart. That'll be our next episode, the secret life of bad trades in the NHL. And it'll be the only episode that I don't care about. And, well, that will be a nine-part series and perhaps co-hosted by PK Sue Bad. Call me. But for this episode, I wanted to start looking into the first black Canadians. And by the way, I'm mostly going to use the term black, or African-Canadian, to encompass a large group of people in the African diaspora. I wanted to focus on birch town Nova Scotia because it was one of the first settlements of black people in Canada. And we are going to talk about birch town. But as I was doing this research, I found out something else and kind of blew my mind. - Okay, what's that? - There was slavery in Canada, like 200 years of slavery. - Okay, but the underground railroad and Canada was the place that Sony slaves ran to for freedom. - Yeah, that's true. No, that happened. The underground railroad, which began in 1834, when slavery was abolished in Canada, is a beautiful part of our Canadian history. But it's only one part of the story of how black people came to live here. What happened before that? - I've never really thought about that. - Yeah, well, most of us don't. It's not a well-known piece of Canadian history because what's the better narrative? True North strong and free, or true North strong and slavery before we were free? I definitely wanted to know why we don't know about this history. So I talked to Dr. Sharmey Nelson. She's currently the William Lion McKenzie King Chair for Canadian Studies at Harvard University. And this whole interview was amazing. Here's Sharmey in explaining why we as Canadians hear about the underground railroad, but never hear about slavery in Canada. (upbeat music) - And Dr. Sharmey Nelson, the William Lion McKenzie King, visiting professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University. And my permanent affiliation is a professor of art history at McGill University in Montreal. The important thing to realize too about why we're taught in the underground railroad is because it feeds directly into this notion that Canada is a nicer, gentler, racially tolerant, or racially blind society. And that's our myth. How that myth actually plays out in the actual teaching is that kind white Canadians were good abolitionists who saved the African-Americans, slave people from the bad whites in the USA. You were raised black abolitionism because they were free and enslaved blacks who were also abolitionists who no monuments in general have been built. We're talking about a period between 1833 when what would become Canada a abolished slavery in those regions because Britain abolished it. So Britain said by an active parliament, everywhere all the holdings we own across the world must stop slaving. That's 1833. To when to 1865 that's the end of the American Civil War. So we're talking 32 years that we've been trying and we've managed to raise 200 class years of slavery. So that takes effort. That does not happen by itself. That's people writing certain histories out of textbooks and choosing not to entrench through curriculum, through popular culture, through media, et cetera, the teaching of other histories. If we're going to tell the story again, Ramrawa, then follow true. Because what happens to those black populations isn't pretty in terms of the promise of freedom that was extended to them and that was expected by now in terms of segregation of where they could live in terms of the type of land they ended up farming or living on in terms of moved by wife populations to segregate education really quickly. They didn't want their white kids to go to school with black children, et cetera. So that's part of the history too, that we don't tell because it doesn't, again, feed into the myth of Canada as a racially tolerant haven. OK, I want to meet her. I know. I'm seriously considering flying to Harvard right now. She also teaches at McGill. So if you can, students of McGill get thee to a charming Nelson class. We will hear a little more from her later, but let's dive into slavery. Oh, yes. Can we please? This just sounds like a great time for you. Well, it was for some people who profited from the free labor off of the backs of enslaved African people, but not for the African people themselves. So let's dial back to the 1600s. This was a time when this indigenous land was being co-opted by the colonizers, both French and English. The first black person on record to arriving Canada was a guy by the name of Matthew DeCosta. And he arrived in Nova Scotia, which is Migmaud Territory, between, let's say, 1605 and 1608-ish. It's hard to pinpoint the actual date, but let's just say it was well before the Don Aire became a Nova Scotia in delicacy. It's gross. I don't like that sauce. I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just-- I don't like it. Now, we don't know too much about his early life. Something he was born in the Benin Empire, which is today's southern Nigeria. Benin of that time saw a lot of activity. The Portuguese had put down roots there. So it's thought that Matthew started to pick up several different languages at home. Word got out, and he was hired as a translator for a French explorer who was also traveling with Samuel DeChampagne, who is described as the founder of New France. And yeah, big boost for this guy. He-- New France, by the way, eventually turned into Quebec City. Yeah. So Samuel DeChampagne is also known for a bunch of other stuff, but we won't get me started on that because it'll go on forever. We'll be here forever. And I'll break things. Yeah. And don't break things. Yeah. And we also hear a lot about guys like him and Cartier, but I haven't heard about the translators and the aides to these explorers like Matthew. He was really talented, and he was fluent in English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and many other indigenous people's languages. That's-- I find this just like mind blowing. Why? Well, I don't know. And like, who was this guy? I think this was a guy just trying to live in a time that black people were being enslaved, and things were being colonized, because he-- Look, he's learning every single language. Which is a really amazing part. It's the fact that he learned all these languages, and indigenous languages-- Yeah. --and indigenous languages that are probably extinct now. Well, he learned-- he learned Migma. Like, that's one of the reasons that they probably brought him there. He was kind of a link in a really good way, but also in a really bad way, because-- Yeah. Matthew seems like a talented person. I would love to have a beer with him. For sure. And-- Or a doughnut with sweet sauce. And probably I would skip that-- maybe a pizza. But I can't even picture being him, because a black person landing in what would be Canada on a ship with a bunch of dudes we now know whose sole purpose was to take brown people's things away and eradicate them. I mean, I was the only black kid growing up in a small town in Alberta in my school. And it was tough. So I can't even imagine what his life was like. He was completely alone, not another black person in sight. And it was the 1600s. His entire career in translation was probably just saying, no, you can't touch my hair in like 50 different languages. Right. Yeah. For sure. And you know, not slapping people in the face when they want to tell you about the other black person they know. Yeah. Well, he couldn't slap anyone in the face, because-- There wasn't anyone else there. Yeah. Now, I'm telling you about him not only because we should all know who the first black person in Canada is-- Obviously. --but also because he arrived around the time when the first Europeans arrived. And this is important because it dispels this common belief that a lot of people have that black Canadians are more recent arrivals to Canada. People of African heritage have been on this land for about 400 years, which means black Canadians have played a big role in shaping Canadian identity. For sure. And it's interesting when you think about the word pioneer. And for most people, it conjures up this idea of little house in the prairie, kind of like white settlers building homesteads and cultivating indigenous lands. Yeah. But there were also black Canadians clearing land and cutting down trees. And there's a lot of farmland in southern Ontario, Alberta, Halifax, for example, that was cleared by African Canadians. OK. So we have Matthew DeCosta as the first black person in Canada. Canada before it was even Canada, but how did legit slavery start here? So in 1628, we have on record the first enslaved African in Canada. He's a six year old boy who was given the name Oliver. We don't know his actual name. He was the property of some guy like the punch name Sir David Kirk and little Oliver was sold several times throughout his life in Canada. Lastly, he was sold to a Jesuit priest named Father Paul Lijon who baptized him and gave him the name Oliver Lijon. Gross, so, so, so gross. By 1689, around 60 years after Oliver gets to Canada, Louis XIV, King of France, who leads one of the mightiest rains of all time, says, "You know what? Let's put this on the books. You people living in new France?" Now Quebec, you get to keep black and indigenous slaves. He was trying to calm down all the complaints from the settlers about the shortage of available servants and workers that the colonists had. So, many brought slaves over from West Africa or captured indigenous people on their own land and forced them into servitude. See, so we do have something in common more than I already thought we had in common. We have slavery in common. Yay! Yes! Slavery, bringing indigenous and black people in Canada together in a terrible way since 1689. But by the 1700s, slavery was going pretty strong in the English and French colonies in Canada. This leads us to one of the most well-known stories of an enslaved African Canadian. The name her owners gave her was Mary Joseph Angelique. And in 1734, almost 100 years after little Oliver arrives as a Slavery in Canada, she's alleged to have set fire to her master's house and destroyed nearly 50 homes in Montreal in an effort to escape bondage. We'll never know if she did set the fire because she was tortured and hung as an example for all the slaves in Montreal. I'd like to think that she did burn some houses down and. Well, if she did, it's totally understandable. I mean. She consular asses. Yeah, I hope she's fucking haunting all of them and many generations to come. Yeah, take that. Yeah, I mean, if she did set this fire, it's totally understandable. I've read a lot of slave accounts and narratives from the US and I always think, what would I have done in this situation would I have been able to survive? The reality is I feel completely honest in saying I would have died in the first five minutes into capture because it was so brutal and that's just me. But I'd also like to think that if I had survived, I would have been one of those cooks who like made a delicious meal full of rat poison and just took out everybody. I would have waited for some Slavery convention and just made the biggest macaroni pie I could with a side of poison. Okay. I don't know what macaroni pie is. It's like macaroni and cheese but for black. And pie? Well, it's like a big, it's like almost like a casserole like this. It sounds great. It's amazing. I'm going to make you some. It's a fucking amazing. My plan worked. Okay. Okay, so Slavery convention. So that, which is that like guy like a comic con for Slavers? Yeah, they were usually held at the early Trump hotels. I do think that they were just called auctions and not conventions. You're probably right. But by 1759, it's estimated that there were thousands of enslaved black and indigenous people in Canada. Slaves were now being listed along with people's effects and merchandise and official documents and it wasn't unusual to see ads appear in the newspaper for slaves. When the British white loyalists heard they were allowed to bring enslaved people into Canada after 1783, the black population almost doubled. Slaves were brought into upper Canada and lower Canada and make no mistake. The treatment of slaves in Canada was just as barbaric and inhumane as it was in the US. Okay. So how does this history of black and slavement in Canada link up specifically to Nova Scotia? Well, I actually asked Dr. Nelson about that. So Nova Scotia and the Maritime in general and this is why two months ago, so actually, they are so important as well for the same reason. They're on the water. So we've got to think about the transatlantic world of 1500 to 1900, right, based on 400 years of transatlantic slavery. There's no airplanes. There's no cars. How are people moving around if you're lucky with a newer donkey or horse in a car? So ships or boats. So the way that the Americas were actually colonized speaks to the fact that you needed to build ports or harbors in order to ship things in and out, right? So most settlements emerged first on the water and then people settled more inland. That's why a place like Halifax and Nova Scotia becomes so important for the enslavement of people that African descent because the settlement like Halifax, as you know, is right on the water as is Quebec City and then further down the St. Lawrence, Montreal and the island. So these are the places then that get developed or colonized first. Those are the places and settlements then that needed slave labor or indentured labor, right? The thing is too indentured labor of so-called undesirable lights, parallels and slave men in all of these locations too. Halifax and Nova Scotia are important because there were waves of different migrations of people African descent. So you have moments where the governor says people in New England were welcoming you because they don't have enough settlers, right? So they're like, we want you to come settle in Nova Scotia and bring your slaves and servants. So a lot of New Englanders moved and forcibly relocated their enslaved Africans or people of African descent. They didn't have a choice. You can imagine if you're an enslaved person in the transatlantic world and your slave governor says, I'm moving from A to B, they don't ask you if you want to go. You're told that you're leaving. And whatever that means for who gets left behind, that's too bad for you. So that population there is extraordinarily complex too because at the same time you would have had the merchant ships always coming in from the British Caribbean. So you would have had people who were either African born on those ships but mostly, arguably people who had already been crealized or born in the Caribbean. So think of how complex that population is by the time you get to the late 18th century. And we know that Canadians we get asked a lot where we're from. And we get asked by Euro Canadians by our fellow white Canadians. And what's behind that question for me is the assumption that my answer can't be Toronto or your answer can't be Saskatoon. That the answer has to be like outside of Canada. That we're foreign bodies that are recently settled. And of course it has to do with the nature of the narrative of slavery because if you know the slavery transpired in Canada, then you know that black people have been hanging out in Canada for living in Canada working and forcibly made to work for others in Canada for centuries. But therefore a black Canadian speaks like us with the Canadian accent might have seven generations and how facts. So that's why we see so many of these accounts of black people in Canada happening not only in Quebec but also in Nova Scotia. Right. And this brings us to a piece of history that was really instrumental in solidifying one of the first black communities in Canada, Birchtown, Nova Scotia. And the story of how this community came to be and what happened there is truly fascinating. Now this community of Birchtown sits on the edge of Birchtown Bay on the shores of Shelburne Harbor which some say is one of the best natural harbors in the world. So Birchtown is also really close to Shelburne, Nova Scotia. They're about a 10 minute drive away from each other. And this is important to know that these two communities Shelburne and Birchtown are close and connected. So we start here in 1783 just as the American Revolutionary War is ending. Right. So this is the war in which the US was fighting for their independence from Britain and they won and now they have a reality show host and a bigot as a president. So congrats on that America way to go. I don't think that's the exact chronology of events but sure that's a bit of what happened. It's not. But there's some stuff you're missing. So in this war you had enslaved black people called the black loyalists fighting for the British side because they were told fight for us and you'll have freedom and a farm at the end of the war. That's very reminiscent of American slavery law with the promise that after the American Civil War every black person who was enslaved would receive 40 acres and a mule. That's right and I think some are still waiting for that. Yeah, no mule. No, nothing. So some of the black loyalists did get their freedom but some didn't. The British left a number of black people who fought for them behind as they retreated and then they were captured into slavery. The black loyalists were resettled in Florida, the West Indies and Canada. More than 3500, the largest group of black loyalists were transported to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. These loyalists were documented in a British military record entitled The Book of Negroes, which gives the description of the group who were granted passage. Right. And so this is the same title as the world famous and lauded book by Canadian author Lawrence Hill. Right. The document that inspired the book title, the book introduces us to the story. This is Lawrence Hill's book of Negroes of Amanada Diallo, who is abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced into slavery in South Carolina. Eventually she has the chance to register her name in the book of Negroes, allowing her to set sail to Nova Scotia. A lot more happens in the book but I don't want to ruin the ending so just go buy it. That would have been cool if we could have got Lawrence Hill to talk to us. That would have been neat. I did. Yes. Yes. Here is Lawrence Hill talking about his inspiration for the book of Negroes and why this history is so important. What inspired me to write the novel The Book of Negroes when I was reading a book by the fabulous professor and writer of African-Canadian history whose name was James Walker who wrote a great book called The Book of Negroes. black loyalists and we've been book a long time ago i came upon incredible discovery that i didn't know anything about before that my parents have never spoken to me about either having to do with the arrival of black loyalists in the was going to you know after the american revolutionary war and then there the parcher canna so used they did for africa which is so unbelievable and i can believe my luck in fighting a great story that no other novelist had dramatized that i just jumped and it seemed like the perfect story to write it was right up my alley it kind of corresponds to many of my interest forgotten african community history forgot napkin american history connections between the united states in canada and africa and great britain all sorts of parts of the stories beat my life long interest everybody likes to feel comfortable and everybody likes to get company narrative and the one comforting narrative that canadians indulgent which is really blinding in terms of its how much i'm not like it makes us know much of the blinds to a wider reality is that canada the nation of the good news and of of generosity of spirit and kindness in the canada is a nation that welcome fugitive plays from the united states and slavery of course existed in canada at the same time that the underground railroad was unfolding in if you were born in canada enslaved you would remain enslaved while american achieve their freedom from slavery when they came into canada so we had both institutions slavery and freedom operating parallel to each other and simultaneously sometimes in the same community for the complex history even in terms of the underground railroad but it's the one narrative that makes us feel good about ourselves and of course you know how canada has responded to black people to people of african is just as complex and damning and painful uh. as is how can i have responded to indigenous people in both cases we the series works in our history and in our present living as well and uh. we don't like to face that in the more comforting to think about the nasty dacidly these perpetuated by our southern neighbors in the states are by south africa during a part-hide or by any other regime perpetuating evil it's comforting to think about other people doing the wrong things especially when we don't think about ourselves doing the wrong things too okay so uh. how do you feel after that interview well i don't know if you know but there is a black canadian stamp card i shouldn't really reveal this only black canadians get it it's given to you by other black canadians and you get stamps when you do cool black canadian things such as interview lorntale for your podcast i got fifty seven stamps for them how many stamps do you need to get in like what's what's the ultimate talk about that no let's get back to the book in egos and the black loyalists so three thousand black loyalists arrive in new novus kosha and everybody there was like welcome and by welcome we mean life is going to be incredibly hard for you please check out this rocky not very good land in birch town not all the black people went to birch town though some stayed in the neighboring community of shellburn but for those who went to birch town life was hard at the time birch town was not an easy place to make life for yourself the people had a hard time cultivating the soil and were overly pleased times have not changed out much and there was high unemployment the situation got so bad that some of these black loyalists who had taken this journey to freedom ended up agreeing to indentured servitude for periods of time to the white people in shellburn to prevent their own starvation here's an excerpt from William diets diary a general in the British army on what he saw in birch town walked to the woods about two miles from barracks to a negro town called birch town at the evacuation of new york there were a great number of these poor devils given lands and settled here the place is beyond description wretched situated on the coast in the middle of barren rocks and partly surrounded by a thick impenetrable wood their huts miserable to guard against the inclamacy of a Nova Scotia winter and their existence almost depending on what they could lay up in summer i think i never saw wretchedness and poverty so strongly perceptible in the garb and the countenance of human species as in these miserable outcasts i cannot say i was sorry to quit so melancholy a dwelling and of course as soon as black people arrived the white people freaked out and ridiculous stuff like the prohibition of negro frolics were decreed do you go to those stuff who's wondering i googled it i also can't reveal that but this decree forbid negro dances and negro frolics in the town of shelter i just would have funny i know because it was like negro frolics and negro dances so what what's the what's the frolic basically meant people couldn't get together right right and that's not uncommon in Canadian history the first nation first nation ceremonies and dances were outlawed as soon as the colonizers enacted those laws the potlatch on the west coast was outlawed for like 70 years i know it's like early Canadian history is just the plot line to footloose but with brown people in the role of Kevin Bacon it's unacceptable i know great movie though so back to 1783 the black people set up in birch town and try and make a go of things even though it was really hard the black people had stayed in neighboring shellburn member it's just down the road also had a tough go of things which leads us to north america's first race riot which happened right here in canada folks they were called the shellburn riots and essentially when the white soldiers returning to the area found it hard to find jobs and compete for pay with black workers they went into a frenzy and took up arms against the black people right a reoccurring theme throughout the history of the whole world is that new people come and people ostracize them over paranoia that they will take their jobs yeah it's a lot of job hysteria yeah and one of the events during the riots involved a man by the name of david george he was a minister in the black community he would preach in a part of shellburn called black town where i imagined was the only place you could have found a good black hair care section that was not in a different aisle from the other haircare products i'm looking at you shoppers drugstore now when david tries to baptize a white woman that's when all hell breaks loose oh god so this would fall into the long story tradition of black men and white women yeah that history would be called white women or how you died back then an abridged history of black men yeah it's so true it's literally how you died it's how you died you'll look them in the eye yeah or you walk past somewhere or you whatever if you didn't get off the damn sidewalk so after the baptism a mob turns up to david's house destroys it then destroys other black homes in the area and then runs david down and beats him this is an excerpt from an account that david george gave several of the black people had houses upon my lot but forty or fifty disbanded soldiers were employed who came with the tackle of ships and turned my dwelling house and every one of their houses quite over and the meeting house they would have burned down had not the ringleader of the mob himself prevented it but i continued to preach till they came one night and stood before the pulpit and swore how they would treat me if i preached again but i stayed and preached and the next day they came and beat me with sticks and drove me into the swamp i returned in the evening and took my wife and children over to the river to birch town where some black people were settled and there seemed a greater prospect of doing good than at shellburn after the riot in shellburn birch town's population doubled the attacks kept on coming single people doing their day-to-day work were beaten houses and businesses were pulled down and things were set on fire it only stopped when troops arrived from halifax to keep the peace now remember this is seventeen eighty four and i'm talking about free people in birch town so this means there's still slavery going on which encourages this dismissive racist and violent behavior among the british and french settlers at this time why would you care about black possessions property and bodies when you can still buy and sell black people legally by the end of the riot that year a lot of black people had left the area or really sadly had been recaptured by slavers and brought back into the united states and the west indies by the seventeen nineties many black people were disillusioned with life in novus kosha and began to think they would never truly live a free life so an opportunity presented itself many took it what was the opportunity to go to seara leone west africa one of the leaders of the community a man by the name of thomas peters was sick of birch town and novus kosha for all the reasons i've mentioned and decided to petition the british empire for a new home he traveled to london where he along with a white abolitionist named granville sharp was able to convince a whole bunch of white people in power to allow them to settle a new colony in seara leone and you know what they said yes thomas came back and at least half the families took advantage of the offer a free passage to west africa after they got there they founded free town now the capital of seara leone and today it's a bustling city with more than a million people call it home there are many there that can directly trace their ancestry back to novus kosha we spoke to birchrand bickersef and albertan who has ties to both seara leone and novus kosha he told us some pretty interesting stuff i'm birchrand bicker steff i teach at old college and i know all things black and alberta our family is the early I was born there and then our parents emigrated to Alberta when I was just an infant. I was very young. So when I was growing up, I like to tell people that inside the house, it was Sierra Leone. It was an African household for the most part. My parents spoke Krio, we ate African food, and then when I went out, it was different worlds. It was the Canadian world, the mainstream white world, and I lived in both of these worlds. The part of Sierra Leone that my family is from is called at Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. And this is the part that was actually founded by Freed and Escaped, and even non-enslaved Africans who moved from North America as part of one of the several back to African movements that took place from North America. And they developed a culture, a language, and a styling that was kind of a mixture of multiple African ethnicities as well as their own western sensibilities that they had brought with them. I tend to say that my mum pointed it out to me once I asked her about her schooling in Sierra Leone as a child, and I asked her, "Well, do they teach you this history?" And she basically said, "No, we never learned about that." I just thought, "Well, how interesting. How is it that we are not taught it, and they are not taught it?" And it just left into this esoteric cloud in the middle for people to kind of discover. And then when I discovered it, it was like a huge relief for me. I have to say, because in the United States at this time, this is in the 90s, the early 90s. The term "African-American" was just kind of becoming born. It was just emerging. And it felt so right that term. It worked so well. In fact, I remember Henry Lewis Gates Jr. this African-American scholar. I remember him saying, "We used to be the N-word, and then we were Negroes, and then we were Afro-Americans and Black." And now we're African-Americans, and I'm here to say that word is not going away. When I discovered the Nova Scotian connection, I thought, "Uh-huh. I am African-American. I am. I feel as though I belong to this continent." I felt profound pride that I could directly connect myself to this nation, which had always felt like it was mine, even though white people don't make you feel like you can belong. But you still belong, and you feel like you belong. And at the same time, I felt a kind of sadness too, because I recognized that part of the reason why white people don't let you feel like you belong is because they don't know this history. This history is readily available, and it's important to the foundation of two countries, but they don't teach it. So there are many ancestors of Black Loyalists still living in Nova Scotia today, and you can go visit the Black Loyalist Heritage Center in Shelburne, or go there online to learn more about the people in this extraordinary community. And just a reminder, like all of this history we talked about today happened before the abolishment of Slavery in Canada, which was not till 1834. I mean, the last advertisement for Slaves were posted in 1820 in Halifax and in Quebec, 1821. There's children going through the Canadian school system who probably learned a lot more than I did, because I definitely did not learn any of this stuff when I was in school. And you know, it's funny. All of the brilliant interviewees we talked to in this episode, I assumed that their answer would be a lot different from mine. About what they learned about history. Absolutely nothing, zip-zilts. Nothing. I learned absolutely nothing, zero, zilts, nada. I was born in 1957. I grew up attending school in the 1960s and darn knows a suburb of Toronto. And I learned zero about black history in school. That includes elementary school, high school, and undergraduate studies at university. Well, what I learned about black history in school was the Unreal World. And what I've come to find out, T.C. Antigale, is that that's the part of so-called black community history, because of course it's not just the black history. But that's a part of black community history that's enshrined in our curriculum from grade school, because I've been teaching at class at McGill called the Visual Culture Flavories for a word decade now. And I have never had communities to enter the class knowing my slavery transpire in the Canada. And of course at university we're talking about people between the ages generally of 18 to 2325. So it's alarming because if they bypass my class which is not required material, then they go out and go world never knowing. When I was in school, I remember grade four, we had a supply teacher who came in and we were doing our native studies unit. And I remember thinking, I am going to nail this. I'm just gonna like do so well at this, like I have to. And the supply teacher came up to me and didn't come up to me but can't said to the entire class, before Europeans came to Canada, Indians ran around naked. And I was like, okay, because she was the teacher and so I assumed I assumed she was right and I went home and I told my dad that my dad was like, that's not true. Growing up, I was like, this is a nicer place for black people. This is the magical place. Like this is the place that all of the African Americans wanted to come to because we're better. You know, you can tell yourself that but the reality is that it's what Sherman says in that interview, it's taken on a mythic quality. There's this big misnomer you hear from a lot of Canadians like, oh racism, there is no racism in Canada or it's not as bad here. And you know, it's very different from the United States but it isn't because we've had the same history in a way. But there's an erasure of our history like every year in Quebec when you know, there are companies there that do urine shows and blackface and black people freak out. I always go like, why is that still happening in Quebec? Like what is it? And I now know it's because there's a fucking history of slavery there. And because we don't acknowledge it. We're in a remarkable time as the UN General Assembly declared that it's the international decade for people of African descent, which began on January 1st, 2015. I didn't get that memo but now I know and ends on the 31st of December in 2024. So that means you have another seven years to share this episode with as many people as you possibly can so everyone can know about Matthew and Little Oliver and Angelique and all the black loyalists who founded Birchtown and Free Town. The Secret Life of Canada is recorded in Toronto on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee Wendat and most recently the Mississaugas of the New Credit. It's hosted by me, Leah Smone Bowen and me, Failing Johnson, produced by Katie Jensen with Research Assistance by Aaron Brandenburg. Nathan Burley wrote and performed our theme song. To view archival photographs and supplementary information about Birchtown, Nova Scotia and slavery in Canada, you can check out the show notes at passport2017.ca. We acknowledge the financial support of the government of Canada. Thanks to Hillary Doyle, Matthew McKinnon, the editorial director of Passport 2017, and Jonathan Harris, the managing director of strategic content labs at St. Joseph Media. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes. Thanks for exploring Canada's hidden history with us. Join us next time as we dial back to 1976 and look into the weirdest detail we've discovered about Canada so far. All we'll say is it involves the Governor General's Award and sex with bears. See you next time. [Music]