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Canadian Studies Announcements
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In This Issue:
Program News
- Happy Black History Month!
- Retracing the steps of a Black BC pioneer with faculty affiliate Cecil S. Giscombe
Upcoming Events
- Slavery and Self-Emancipation in Colonial Canada
External Events
- Homelessness in Canada: A Complex Policy and Governance Landscape
- Native Studies, Public Intellectualism, and Seizing Opportunity in Crisis
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Happy Black History Month!
February is Black History Month in both the United States and Canada. Officially celebrated in the US since the 1970s, and in Canada since 1995, the month recognizes the contributions African-descended people have made to both societies. In Canada, this year’s theme is “Black Excellence: A Heritage to Celebrate; a Future to Build”. While Black American history is better known, Canada also has a long Black presence that intertwines with the US in interesting – and complex – ways.
Black people have been present in Canada since the beginning of the colonial era. The first Black person known to have set foot in modern Canada was a freeman, Mathieu da Costa, who worked as a translator. Arriving in Nova Scotia in the early 1600s, he is believed to have known about six languages, and helped French explorers communicate with local Mi’kmaq communities.
Since then, Canada has seen various waves of Black migration, creating a community with particularly diverse origins. A small portion of Black Canadians trace their ancestry to enslaved Africans brought to the country in the 18th century, including some transported by Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. Others descend from Black Loyalists, men who escaped slavery and fought for the British after being guaranteed freedom. When slavery was abolished in Canada in 1833, the country became the destination for tens of thousands of enslaved people seeking freedom along the Underground Railroad. During the later 19th century and early 1900s, still more Black Americans escaped Jim Crow conditions by moving to Canada during the Great Migration. Then, in the 20th century, Canada began to accept more immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. The number of Black Canadians burgeoned once the country removed racial immigration quotas in the 1960s, and today, about 60% of Black Canadians are immigrants. While historically a small minority, the number of African-descended Canadians has grown in recent years, and today they comprise 4.3% of the country’s total population.
Visit Canadian Heritage to learn more about famous Black Canadians and their contributions to the country. Curated pages include notable events in Black Canadian history, facts about the contemporary Black community, and organizational resources for educators. The Prime Minister’s Office also released a statement marking Black History Month, which can be read here. The Prime Minister promised additional resources to combat anti-Black racism and support for Black community organizations. |
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Retracing the Steps of a Black BC Pioneer with Faculty Affiliate Cecil S. Giscombe
About 800 miles north of Vancouver, just outside Prince George, is the small hamlet of Giscome, BC. Few people are aware of the remarkable story of its namesake, the prospector John Robert Giscome; and many would be surprised to discover that Giscome, an early pioneer in this part of British Columbia, was in fact a Black man from Jamaica.
Yet one Canadian Studies affiliate is intimately familiar with this story. Cecil S. Giscombe is the Robert Haas Chair in English at UC Berkeley, and an award-winning poet and essayist. As the CBC reported yesterday, Giscombe has spent decades spreading awareness of Giscome’s story. This fascination began when he first learned about the town of Giscome over 30 years ago. Since then, Giscombe has been searching for answers about the man he calls John R., who remains just out of focus in historical sources. His trips have taken him from Jamaica, where he interviewed Giscome’s family, to multiple trips into the BC interior. He’s published several books, poems, and essays about the pioneer, with whom he feels a strong personal connection. And in 1991, Giscombe recreated his ancestor’s journey, biking and hiking from Vancouver to Prince George.
But what makes Giscome such a transfixing subject? Giscombe’s work interrogates that very question, by examining his own relationship to the pioneer. This relationship is unclear on a genetic level: while Giscombe believes is a distant relative of John’s, he has never been able to prove it. But intellectually, Giscombe is intrigued by what John R. represents as a Black man occupying a prominent role where the archetypal “pioneer” is white. How was John R. able to achieve such success in British Columbia? And does his story challenge traditional narratives of settlement, as well as the way Canadians think about diversity in the Pacific Northwest? |
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Painting of John R. Giscome by Richard Estell.
Courtesy of the Huble Homestead/Giscome Portage Heritage Society via the CBC.
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| The basic facts of John R. Giscome’s life are well-documented. He was born in Jamaica, but moved away as a young man in search of work. In 1854, he moved to California to work on the railways, but he quickly found the state to be hostile to Black residents (in fact, California, inspired by Oregon, once considered banning free Black people from settling in the state.)
Meanwhile, Sir James Douglas, the first governor of British Columbia, wanted to encourage settlement of his frontier province to discourage potential American annexation. Douglas, whose own mother was a free woman of color from Barbados, learned of the situation in California, and invited San Francisco’s Black community to settle in Canada, with the promise of equal rights as British subjects. Giscome joined nearly 600 Black people who accepted the offer.
Once in Canada, Giscome caught gold fever, and joined in the Cariboo Gold Rush along with another Black prospector, Henry McDame. While traveling north of Prince George, an Indigenous guide showed Giscome a shortcut through the woods; Giscome popularized the trail, which today bears his name. Unlike many other miners, Giscome not only found success in the gold fields, but managed to keep his earnings, leaving the equivalent of $500,000 to his landlady upon his death in 1907.
For his distant cousin in Berkeley, Giscome’s story had a special resonance. Giscombe’s work has frequently centered to themes of identity, race, nature, and place, all of which are central to John R.’s story. Giscombe has returned to the subject several times. His 1998 poetry collection Giscome Road won the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry. And his 2000 memoir, Into and Out of Dislocation, follows the writer’s family through a winter in British Columbia as he interrogates his preoccupation with “otherness” and the meaning of national, racial, and psychological borders. As quoted in a book review by John Harris, published in The Capilano Review, what fascinates Giscombe is how John R. got “all outside the lines that geography, race, and the languages of white people had made for him.” Giscome’s story, raised from obscurity, says much about how shifting narratives of Canadian history can complicate well-worn stories, and shine light on what unusual cases can reframe how we talk about the familiar – and the extraordinary. |
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Slavery and Self-Emancipation in Colonial Canada
Tues., Feb. 13 | 12:30 pm | 223 Philosophy Hall | RSVP
The US-Canada border played a central role in the history of slavery in North America. Yet, while Canada is remembered chiefly as a haven for those fleeing slavery in the United States via the Underground Railroad during the mid-nineteenth century, it is less well known that many people enslaved in colonial Canada during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gained their freedom by crossing the border into the United States. Early Canadian and American anti-slavery laws did remarkably little to free people enslaved within their respective jurisdictions. But their enactment – and the proximity of a permeable border between rival regimes – afforded an unprecedented opportunity to enslaved men, women, and children. Laws on both sides of the Great Lakes inadvertently established free spaces, where fugitives from the opposite side could find sanctuary. By passing from one jurisdiction to another, enslaved individuals could exploit competing slavery laws and emancipate themselves simply by crossing the border, a development that destabilized and ultimately destroyed chattel slavery in the borderlands.
In this talk, Dr. Gregory Wigmore will provide a broad overview of slavery in early Canada, especially in the Great Lakes region. His talk will explain how both slaveholders and the enslaved, along with British and American authorities, responded to the emergence of the new Canadian-American border after the American Revolution. While slaveholders in Upper Canada (now Ontario) begged the colonial government to help them protect their valuable human property, their enslaved laborers were among the first people in North America to understand the political significance of the new international boundary, using it as a portal to freedom.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr. Gregory Wigmore is a lecturer in the Department of History at Santa Clara University. He received his B.A. in journalism and history from Carleton University, and his Ph.D. in history from UC Davis. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of social and political history and foreign relations, especially the role of frontiers and borders. His article, “Before the Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom in the Canadian-American Borderland”, received the Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Ontario Historical Society’s Riddell Award. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, “The Limits of Empire: Allegiance, Opportunity, and Imperial Rivalry in the Canadian-American Borderland.” |
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Homelessness in Canada: A Complex Policy and Governance Landscape
Thursday, February 8 | 12:00 pm | Online | RSVP
Western Washington University’s Center for Canadian-American Studies invites you to the inaugural talk of their new series, “Populations Rendered ‘Surplus’ in Canada”. Anna Kopec, an assistant professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, will discuss the challenges in addressing the homelessness crisis in Canada. Homelessness includes a complex policy landscape that requires integrated and cooperative policy approaches. Unfortunately, Canada’s current approach often includes fragmented and siloed responses that lead to a patchwork of services and policies. Using comparative findings from Melbourne, Australia, and Toronto, this interactive seminar will present the effects of Canada’s current policies and assert the need for integrated, collaborative responses.
This talk is sponsored by the WWU Center for Canadian-American Studies, The Ray Wolpow Institute, and the Foundation for WWU & Alumni. |
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Native Studies, Public Intellectualism, and Seizing Opportunity in Crisis
Thursday, February 8 | 1:30 PM | Multicultural Community Center / Online | Learn more
Dr. Kim TallBear (University of Alberta) will discuss her work in building up an effective Native Studies intellectual ecosystem. Dr. TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is a public intellectual and commentator on Indigenous peoples, science, sexuality, and environmental topics. She has always understood research as a vehicle for social change. At the University of Alberta, she founded two Native Studies research groups that prioritize deliberately interventionist and public-facing approaches. This unique approach to research and training has helped the programs weather fast-tracked and traumatic restructurings in public higher education. This talk highlights how she finds opportunities to center Native Studies theory and Indigenous peoples’ analytical frameworks (as well as feminist and queer theory analyses) to disrupt traditional knowledge silos and hierarchies. |
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Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 