Now, black Canadians – who make up about 1 percent of the country’s 31 million people – are trying to put the broken tombstones back together, pick up the pieces of their ancestry and fill in the spaces that were left in the history books. Books, plays and documentaries about the black experience in Canada have recently been released as a new generation of African-Canadians comes of age and tries to tell a history it was not taught in school.
“It was a shameful spot in the history of the community,” said Jennifer Holness, director of Speakers for the Dead, a film distributed by Canada’s National Film Board that traces the search for tombstones in a divided town. “Shameful they eradicated the gravestones, which indicates how blacks were treated, that blacks were forced off the land and white settlers took their land. There were some intermarriages they thought of as shameful. There is a desire to keep that quiet.”
But Holness said the story of Priceville encapsulates the story of racism in Canada and digs beneath a stereotype of racial tolerance. “We as Canadians trot around and say, ‘Americans are so racist. Look at the segregation down South. Look at the lynchings.’ But it was just as bad in Canada. We didn’t have official segregation. But there were places blacks couldn’t go. We can’t be smug about Canada’s place in history when it comes to racism.”Huh, Priceville’s maybe the distance to Toronto from here, just west instead of south. Never even heard of the place before…
*pause* ….How could we be smug about a lack of racism when the whole fucking country is on stolen land?
Town buries legacy of black settlers
Published
Mooncustafer 