INDIGENIZING AFRICANS - DISAPPEARING INDIANS Black/Mi 'kmaq Relations in Nova Scotia
A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science
TRENT UNIVERSITY
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© Copyright by Paula C. Madden 2008
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ABSTRACT
INDIGENIZING AFRICANS - DISAPPEARING INDIANS Black/Mi'kmaq Realations in Nova Scotia
Paula C. Madden
This thesis explores the relationship between the self-named "indigenous black" community and the Mi'kmaq communities of Nova Scotia. The Nova
Scotia Human Rights Commission serves as a site of inquiry. It is interested in
exploring and understanding the idea of "indigenous blackness" in Mikmaki. It examines the role and meaning of human rights declarations and legislation within the racial state. David Theo Goldberg's conception and articulation of the racial state serves as the major theoretical foundation underpinning this project.
We learn that the relationship between black and Mi'kmaq people in Nova
Scotia is complex. While in some instances they shared a common ancestry racism and racial violence had negative effects on their relationship. Government intervention through human rights legislation including the creation of the Nova
Scotia Human Rights Commission was inadequate and fixed them as "other" while doing little to change their material reality. Ill
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank Dr. John Wadland for his care, guidance and
unwavering support throughout this project. He has been steadfast in his
commitment and belief in the possibility and importance of this work. Thank you
Dr. J.W. I would also like to thank Dr. James Struthers and Dr. Davina Bhandar
for their support. Each provided me with the theoretical foundation that was
critical to my articulation of the state and racial subjectivities. This work could not exist in its present form without their guidance. I wish to thank Dr.
Barrington Walker for reading my thesis and agreeing to be the examiner. I am
also grateful for the editorial changes he suggested.
I would like to thank the six men and women who allowed me to interview them for this project. They gave me their time and ideas generously and I hope that I have honored their contribution.
I would like to thank Boyce Richardson for his unintentional but powerful lesson on the importance of locating myself in this settler nation.
My friends and family have supported me throughout my work on this project thank you. Thank you also to my Frost Centre friends and family for your generosity and care.
Importantly I would like to thank my son Ngozi Richardson. Thank you,
Ngozi for your time, patience and loving support. IV
TABLE OF CONTENTS Page
Abstract ii
Acknowledgements iii
Table of Contents iv
Chapter 1
Introduction 1
Chapter 2 33
Citizenship Race and Identity
Chapter 3 50
The Mi'kmaq People and the Descendants
of the Pre-Confederation Black community: A Brief History
Chapter 4 96
Racial Subjects and Human Rights
Chapter 5 126
Black/Mi'kmaq Relations in Nova Scotia
Chapter 6 146
Conclusion
Works Cited 151 1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
This project examines the relationship between the self-named
"indigenous black" community and the Mi'kmaq communities of Nova Scotia.
My emphasis will be on the period from 1960 to 1980 but I will be alluding to the
1950s and subsequent periods as well as examining the state of the relationships in 2006. The Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission serves as a site of inquiry.
Human rights legislation and discourse within the province is placed within the context of Canadian rights discourse with brief glances at conversations and legislation in Ontario. I begin with an examination of the idea of "indigenous blackness" and the construction of black identity. What are other constructions of black identity? I argue, "indigenous blackness" accomplishes the same erasure of indigenous peoples as assertions of indigenous whiteness and on that basis it must not stand unchallenged. I assert that at the heart of claims to indigeneity by descendants of African slaves, United Empire Loyalists and refugees of the War of 1812 is a sense of exclusion from the nation and the absence of their stories from the national story. I argue further that efforts towards inclusion within a racial state, as conceptualized by David Theo Goldberg,1 are unattainable as it is the very nature of such a state to include and exclude at will.
What is the role and meaning of human rights declarations and legislation within the racial state and specifically within Nova Scotia? What conditions necessitated the creation of a commission to "protect" human rights? Whose
1 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 2 interests did it serve? Through interviews with members of the Mi'kmaq and the previously identified black community members we get a sense of life from their perspective and the meaning of the legislation in their day to day lives and the life of their communities over time. Legislative records, minutes from the Human
Rights Committee and Commission meetings, and other government sources, as well as newspaper articles and secondary sources assist in the examination. In using the Human Rights Commission as a site of inquiry this project necessarily asks the questions, what is the condition of the relationship between Mi'kmaq peoples and the state and what is the relationship between "indigenous Black"
Nova Scotians and the state?
In chapter two I explore the issue of black identity, its construction and articulation. I pick up on the discussion initiated here in the introduction with
W.E.B DuBois and Frantz Fanon and move to more recent expressions in Canada by M. Nourbese Philip and others. I interrogate and analyze the idea of
"indigenous blackness" and its meaning in the work of George Elliot Clarke. I conclude that "indigenous blackness" can best be understood in the context of place, and belonging to and within the nation. Chapter three lays out the conditions that may have given rise to a black claim of indigeniety. It also locates black and Mi'kmaq people in a parallel historic and contemporary trajectory. It looks at the black liberation struggle in Nova Scotia and Canada and connects it to the movement in the United States. The human rights legislation, discourse and program in Nova Scotia taken up in chapter four cannot be seen outside of the context of the local, national and international black liberation struggles. What is 3 the meaning and effect of rights legislation in the province? This question is taken up in chapter four. It concludes that human rights legislation and discourse in the province was and is a failure in dealing with the issues of inequality faced by both groups.
In chapter five we end where we began, seeking to understand the relationship between the two groups. Given that both shared a common experience of oppression, were there collaborations, alliances and or moments of collective action? This inquiry leads to an often unspoken and unexamined conclusion far away from the rather erroneous assumptions marking the project's inception.
Genesis
In February 1992 I attended a conference at Dalhousie University in
Halifax, Nova Scotia on racism in the education system. The conference was a joint project of the black and Mi'kmaq communities. It focused on the effects of racism on Black Nova Scotian and Mi'kmaq students. Later that week I visited
North and East Preston, Cherry Brook and Beechville. I visited those communities because when my friend insisted that separate, segregated black communities existed in Canada I was surprised. I was well aware of Reserves and thought them to be the only segregated communities within Canada. These experiences led me to think about the similarities between the two communities and I began to wonder about historic or other contemporary examples of collaboration between them. My interest in the Mi'kmaq community and black 4 communities, in particular the community that calls itself "indigenous black" deepened. I first came across the term "indigenous black" in some of the writings of the Canadian poet, George Elliot Clarke, himself a member of that community.
This project is a manifestation of that interest.
Reflections on Naming
As I began to think about the project it became immediately clear to me that I could not write about the relationship between these two groups until I had a better understanding of the idea of "indigenous blackness" in Mikmaki, what we now call Nova Scotia. I found the very assertion of it to be inescapably disturbing. How does it differ from assertions of "indigenous whiteness"? If not this construction of Black Canadian identity to differentiate and give place to those whose history predates confederation, then what? What are other constructions of "black" identity? What is black? What is African? What is
African Canadian? Am I black, African Canadian, African, Canadian, Jamaican,
African-Jamaican-Canadian? Which one comes first?
While there is a full discussion of black identity in the following chapter it is necessary here to help the reader to understand my use of the terms black and white over other less essentialist choices. I begin first with my relationship to the term "black" and other descriptions of identity employed by descendants of
African slaves living in Canada perhaps to expose the bias beneath the surface of my choice. Several years ago a partner who had a particular fondness for New
Orleans took me on a "road trip" through the southern United States. As we drove through what we (and perhaps others) had constructed as the belly of the beast in terms of racial identification and epic battles for civil rights, we pondered the question of race and racial identification. We both recalled many incidents in which we were dismissed as "white washed" because we did not heed a particular position that signified our blackness. Preoccupation with the essentialist idea of blackness became from time to time an annoyance for me though I was sure about my position; I had never quite articulated my own feeling about my "blackness"
(or lack thereof in the eyes of some). One day my partner asked me if I considered myself black (I think perhaps a challenge to my blackness). I responded by saying, "by expectation". He asked again and I stated: "I am black by expectation". Perhaps this assertion was my scorn for unbridled black nationalist fervor, the kind to be found in M. Nourbese Philip's Frontiers? and what I saw as my partner's nationalist sympathies. On reflection perhaps what would have been a more accurate statement of my relationship to that word as identifier of who I am is, "if you take me to be".
1 spent the first eleven years of my life in Jamaica where in retrospect my blackness was always contested. Though I must qualify that statement by saying that in Jamaica, I was Jamaican and the term black to describe people of African descent had less meaning there in a context in which most of its inhabitants were of African descent. This is not to say that manifestations of race or perhaps racialism were not present, but that they were manifested differently. It is from this location, Canada, where I understand that the terms used to describe me were in fact challenges. I would be sometimes called red gal, mulatto, mongoose (go figure!) and tun cola (indicating that my colour was perhaps a bit - "off).
2 M. Nourbese Philip, Frontiers (Stratford: Mercury, 1992). 6
In my early experience I identified myself as, "Jamaican" rather than
"black". Within the Canadian context black was either fraught with notions of inferiority or something controlled by others to give or take away based on a predetermined way of being. I have no real commitment to naming myself as black (though I have no particular objection to anyone referring to me or identifying me as black). My lack of commitment to black as a descriptor of myself is of course not a statement of the liberal notion of colour blindness as I recognize that black in this society was and is a signifier of inferiority and a host of deficits. It is also not an attempt to distance, conceal or otherwise remove me from my own understanding of myself as a descendant of African slaves who were brought to the Americas and my connection to that history and that diaspora.
I name myself black politically in resistance to racism in all of its manifestations and when the descendants of African slaves are constructed as blight.
In Odysseys Home, Clarke writes:
some African Canadians call themselves Black to signal their affiliation with some larger African universe; but others call themselves African, choosing to accent their ancestral heritage. Some add the adjective Canadian, to express a Canadian identity modified by 'blackness'. ... Still others asks to be classed solely as Canadian. ... "black" is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category .. .3
Clarke goes on to say that the indefinable nature of blackness and a definition of people based on the dubious category of race might give rise to objection to his essays. I share Clarke's concern with using race as if it were a unified and credible category.
3 George Elliot Clarke, Odysseys Home: Mapping African Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002) 16. Italics appear in original text. 7
In Looking White People in the Eye Sherene Razack confronts the same or similar issues when she writes:
In working on how histories of oppression regulate what happens in the classrooms and courtrooms, I have concentrated on narratives about culture, race, and gender. This leads me to use a language of colour to describe the politics of domination and subordination. White, as my title indicates, is the colour of domination. Two things need to be said about this language. First, it wraps my arguments in a mantle of race even while, simultaneously, I attempt to theorize how racial subjects come into existence...4
Like Razack, I find arguing racial subjectivity through the language of race unsettling. The problems of arguing within race are complex and at times contradictory. I do not manage to resolve the tension and contradictions inherent in speaking through race nor do I attempt such a task in this project. I call attention to it to alert the reader of my understanding of the problematic nature of speaking of race as if it were coherent but also to ask for indulgence because I believe the discussion at hand is worthwhile. While I accept the falseness of the construct of race I submit to the necessity of engaging with it to aid (ironically) in the discussion of the topic at hand.
The meaning of things
I use the term "black" in this project as descriptor of people of African descent. I choose this term over all the others noted by Clarke because it is the term used in newspaper articles and many of the sources that support this project.
I have made this choice pragmatically and in the name of simplicity. I follow
Sherene Razack, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998) 11. 8
Clarke's lead and "capitalize Black [sic] when it modifies nationality or language
- as in 'Black Canadian'.. ..5 I do this because my own system was so chaotic I could not keep straight when I capitalized and when I did not - in short, it is again a matter of simplicity. I have also chosen to elide the differences between all those who are of European descent by casting them in the essentialist category of white. I do this with the same motivation as stated above and again I will capitalize in the same way.
The Racial State
David Theo Goldberg opens his path breaking study with these words:
... this book is about racial states, as a set of projects and practices, social conditions and institutions, states of being and affairs, rules and principles, statements and imperatives. Inevitably, then, it is about the racist expression of states, state directed racial exclusions, and so about racist states. ... the state is inherently contradictory and internally fractured, consisting not only of agencies and bureaucracies, legislators and courts, but also norms and principles, individuals and institutions.6
I accept enthusiastically Goldberg's definition of the racial states and laud the breadth of his conception and his analysis. In leaving room for the inclusion of individuals within the racial state, Goldberg's perspective is then able to embrace
Mi'kmaq elder Tom Brand's assertion:
The discrimination was initiated by the Department of Indian Affairs and I always say that those employed under the Indian Act under the Department of Indian Affairs are racist themselves.. .and they practice racist policies and they should be tried under the Human Rights Commission for violating those principles.7
5 Clarke, Odysseys Home xi 6 Goldberg 5-7. 7 Tom Brand (pseudonym), Personal interview, 12 June 2006. 9
He goes on to say that because these employees are working for Indian Affairs
"they think they are doing what's right and they are not."8 Brand's position is that the Indian Act is racist legislation and that those who enforce it are perpetrators of racism and racial violence.
In theorizing the racial state Goldberg speaks of historicism as a
"progressivist commitment concerning itself with... claims of historical immaturity" and naturalism as "the claim of inherent racial inferiority.9 These terms are used to mean the same in this project.
Province, state, what's in a name?
I answer this question by saying "not much". I make little distinction between the province and the state. In not distinguishing between province and state I take them to be one. Though they are different in name, jurisdiction, and responsibility the province is part of the state apparatus. Louis Althusser writes:
"... we can for the moment regard the following institutions as Ideological State
Apparatuses .. .the educational ISA (the system of... private and public
'Schools'),.. .the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties.. .."10 So, while this lack of distinction may seem to convey ignorance of the function or role of the state and province I am, in reality, taking a particular philosophical or theoretical stance.
8 Ibid. 9 Goldberg 74.
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (London: Western Printing Services, 1971) 136-137. 10
Theoretical Framework
Razack writes there is a "paradox of liberalism as articulated by David
Goldberg: race is irrelevant but all is race."11 By using Goldberg's framework to support her arguments Razack recognizes the importance of his work in theorizing the state and the place and meaning of race. Similarly, Eva Mackey gives a nod to Goldberg by seeking his assistance to reinforce her own theoretical assertions of liberal tolerance and power.12 I agree with both these scholars in recognizing not only the importance of Goldberg's voice in theorizing what he aptly names the racial state but also with the relevance of his work in explaining the Canadian condition. I have found no better lens through which to view the subject at hand and it is for this reason that Goldberg's conception and articulation of the racial state serves as the major theoretical foundation underpinning this project. Both
Mackey and Razack help to localize and particularize the Canadian racial state.
Mackey, for example, helps me to understand that the identification "Canadian
Canadians"14 is at once an act of signaling White Canadians as belonging to the nation (and indeed as indigenous to the nation), while all other Canadians exists outside of that belonging.
11 Razack, Looking White People in the Eye 17. 12 Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) 16.
13 Himani Bannerji's work also particularizes the Canadian state. See especially chapters 2 and 3 of The Dark Side of Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender (Canadian Scholar's Press Inc., 2000). 14 See Mackey 19-22 for a full discussion of this idea. 11
Black Identity
Black identity and in essence black belonging has been articulated most profoundly by W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon. We find representations of their theoretical positions in the works of George Elliot Clarke and M. Nourbese
Philip respectively. W.E.B. Du Bois writes:
.. .the Negro is sort of the seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others ... One ever feels his two-ness,- an[sic] American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.15
In an interview with Maureen Moynagh Clarke asserts:
... Africadia since it isn't in a sense a real physical place it becomes, therefore, very much a mythical notion, an intellectual construct, a soulful notion. And I've defined it as a place where the free self can live, a green space where the free self can live ... It's in us and that's my view of Africadia.16
Du Bois' double-conciousness is Clarke's Africadia. Clarke reconciles the two strivings to borrow Du Bois in this way:
... but it is important that we understand that we have this unique vantage point which does exist within ourselves and which is manifested in different ways at different times in different places with different groupings of people of African descent in this place that on paper we call Nova Scotia. But I don't think we have to accept these standard notions and that it is important to claim the place for ourselves, and rename, reorder, rethink the whole thing.17
15 W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folks (New York: Penguin 1996) 5.
16 Maureen Moynagh, "Mapping Africadia's Imaginary Georgraphy: An Interview with George Elliot Clarke", A Review of International English Literature 21 A, October (1996): 77. 17Ibid 12
Clarke rejects seeing himself through the eyes of the other world or rejects the gaze of the other and instead creates and looks to his world - Africadia - thereby seeing himself through his own eyes (so to speak). He looks into the mirror through his Africadian eyes and Africadia is reflected back at him.
As Du Bois is to Clarke so Fanon is to Philip. Franz Fanon writes:
What! When it was I who had every reason to hate, to despise, I was rejected? When I should have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known.
And Philip writes:
Should we African Canadians, therefore, turn in our passports as some have suggested, since we have shown ourselves so ungrateful as to criticize our benefactors? We ought to leave, some urge politely and not so politely- the theme of "nigger go home" is a persistent one. Those who think like this, however, will not see such a simplistic solution. Their worst nightmares have been and will continue to be confirmed. In the words of my only mother tongue, the Caribbean demotic, we ent going nowhere. We here and is right here we staying.19
In both Fanon and Philip, we see an assertion of "this is what you've created so deal with it." There is an absolute refusal to disappear in what each perceives as the "other's" desire to disappear their black selves. In opposition to the other's desire, Philip follows Fanon to inhabit and create a fully authentic and exclusive
BLACK SELF (borrowing Fanon's emphasis). In Philip's construction of the
BLACK SELF we see such notions as "continuity of style" among other black people. She writes:
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967) 115.
Philip 20. 13
On a lighter note, one only has to take a walk along Eglinton Avenue20 here in Toronto to see how we wear clothes differently - just the angle of the hat, perhaps, the slight crawl or sashay - to know that even in something as apparently superficial as dress, the continuities of style run deep.21
While there do exist other representations of Black Canadian identity, I choose to privilege Clarke's and Philip's. Both ground black identity in a location, the former in Canada and the latter in Africa.22 While one can suggest, as Clarke does, that black people in Canada have more in common with each other than with those in remote homelands such as the Caribbean, even those remote homelands localize black identity.23 There are other choices for articulating identity beyond Clarke and Philip, for example Rinaldo Walcott. Walcott conceives black identity in terms of black ethnicities, one of which he then terms
"discontinuous diasporic identification."24 It refuses to ground itself locally except for the purpose of contesting nation. Walcott writes:
I am going to make a case for a Black ethnicity which might be understood through a lens of diasporic desire, identification, and sensibility. It is an ethnicity forged in a moment looking beyond
Eglinton Avenue in Toronto is home to a two or three blocks strip of mostly Caribbean businesses, primarily restaurants, clothing stores and grocery stores though recently these have been joined by a few businesses representing goods from continental Africa. This area has come to represent in some ways a Caribbean Canadian cultural centre (so to speak). I suppose in much the same way that College Street functions as little Italy Caribbean languages mixed with English and among themselves are the official languages of the area. One can access cultural productions of all kinds along Eglinton. 21 Philip 19. 22 See Philip's Frontiers and Clarke's Odysseys Home for an understanding of how Black Canadian identity is articulated in each. 23 Clarke articulates black identity and black belonging to the nation in many of his works whether fiction such as George and Rue, poetry such as Whyllah Falls, essays such as those in the work previously mentioned or in others such as "Must all blackness be American?: Locating Canada in Borden's 'Tightrope time'" or nationalizing Gilroy's "The Black Atlantic" found in Canadian Ethnic Studies (1996).
24 Rinaldo Walcott, "Rhetorics, of Belonging: The Politics of Representation in Black Canadian Culture", Canadian Review of American Studies 29.2 (1999): 1-24. 14
the too rigid boundaries of nations, their narratives and myths of belonging...25
Theorizing belonging, then, with an assertion that not only contests nation but the very idea of black belonging to a particular locality, seems to me unworkable.
While I agree with Walcott's stance of making nation a problematic idea and his assertion earlier in the piece that justice is rendered impossible in configurations of the nation state, I disagree with his implicit conclusion that our attention to diaspora leads to a greater possibility of justice.
I would also argue against Walcott's assertion: "At stake here is a kind of belonging which requires that we understand the political beyond the narrow confines of immigrant sociologic construed through the politics of enterism and admittance."26 While Walcott is arguing here against the idea of black belonging to the nation what he is also suggesting is that we pay less attention to the confines of the immigrant. I would argue instead, rather than limiting the immigrant and paying less attention to "enterism and admittance," that we in fact do the opposite. I would assert that if we were to include all those who are not indigenous to the Americas, and for our purposes Canada, as immigrant and pay more attention to when and how they entered and were admitted, we might create the possibility of not only seeing beyond the confines of a racial hierarchy of belonging and racialized belonging but also of making more visible the
Walcott 4. Ibid 7. 15 indigenous peoples of this land.27 As long as our conversations are black in relation to white or other in relation to white we conceal and close ourselves off to the possibility of the very idea of justice that Walcott entertains. For, after all, how is justice possible if we are unable to see (beyond a perfunctory glance) from whose land we speak whether we claim belonging to nation or not?
Clarke and Walcott in articulating their idea of belonging to the nation have been engaged in what I refer to as a brawl.28 Each dismisses the other's articulation of blackness and black identity as inadequate. The exchange is rancorous and an entry point into reasoned conversation is difficult to imagine if one chooses to enter at all. What seems apparent in reading and rereading these exchanges is that above all they are about who is black or blacker. Walcott, I believe, strips Clarke deftly of his blackness or claim to blackness. He writes: "In this regard Clarke lacks a diasporic sensibility: his love is not so much for black people as it is for nation." In essence he calls him a race traitor for what does it mean to be black and not love black people? In this duel, Clarke's mixed race status does not help and without question makes what Walcott assumes his lack of love for black people understandable given "who" he is. In Jamaica, it might be said in this way: "likkle red skin bwoy 'bout im black." It is an ordering of blackness, a rendering of who and what is authentically black. What African
American thinker Harold Cruse refers to as 'a pecking order of blackness -1 am
271 do not mean to suggest or ignore the fact that Canada practiced slavery and therefore some people were brought here against their will and that they now have descendents here. I am suggesting that we understand their "enterism" as forced immigration. 28 See the introduction to Walcott's Black Like Who 13-23, "Rhetorics of Blackness, Rhetorics of Belonging" in Canadian Review of American Studies 1-24, and "Treason of the Black Intellectuals" in Clarke's Odysseys Home 182-210. 29 Walcott 22. 16 more black and more pure than thou - in which case the enemy ceases to be whiteness but other less black breeds.'
Daniel McNeil writes:
Black Liverpudlians of mixed racial origins do not have a long established Baptist church to call their own but have actively challenged Caribbean immigrants who seek to exclude them from respectable venues. For example, when "dark-skinned" professionals like Frederick Reese, ... used light skin and racially mixed features to signify a lack of culture rather than cultural capital,... Liverpool blacks dismissed his "West Indian slave mentality"... .31
In the vernacular of a hierarchy of blackness, Canada and Britain (represented here as Liverpool) are not, in the Caribbean sensibility, authentic sites of blackness. It follows then, that in these places there are no authentic black people outside of the immigrants from the Caribbean who brought consciousness and political activism while those mixed raced others remained in their "house slave" paradise, or as Jamaican-born long time Nova Scotian resident Gus Wedderburn puts it, "wallowed in their poverty."32 As demonstrated by the different locations where the conversations take place, this ordering of blackness is not specific to
Canada; it also positions Clarke's and Walcott's "debate" within an international context.33 This debate complicates and runs counter to those impulses that would assert and call for a cohesive or uniform Black Canadian, diasporic or nationalist existence. It makes clear that even when speaking about a group of African
qtd. in Clarke, Odysseys Home 190 31 Daniel McNeil, "Finding a Home while Crossing Boundaries: Black Identities in Halifax and Liverpool," InternationalJournal of Canadian Studies 31 (2005): 197-235. See McNeil for another exploration of Black Nova Scotian identity in "Afro (Americo) centricity in Black (American) Nova Scotia," Canadian Review of American Studies. 35.1(2005): 57-85 32 Ibid 33 See also Katherine McKittrick, "Their Blood Is There, and They Can't Throw It Out":Honouring Black Canadian Geographies" Topia Spring 7 (2002): 27-37. see also David Chariandy's "Rude Necessity" for the author's take on the Walcott-Clarke debate. 17 descended peoples in a particular location, one elides differences and dismisses the nuances inherent in individual positions.
In Black Skin White Masks Franz Fanon writes:
It is obvious ... that the quest for disalienation [sic] by a doctor of medicine born in Guadeloupe can be understood only by recognizing motivations basically different from those of the Negro laborer building the port facilities in Abidjan. In the first case, the alienation is almost of an intellectual character. Insofar as he conceives of European culture as a means of stripping himself of his race, he becomes alienated. In the second case, it is a question of a victim of a system based on the exploitation of a given race by another, on the contempt in which a given branch of humanity is held by a form of civilization that pretends to superiority.34
Through his example of what might lead two black people to the same point of alienation Fanon points out the importance of individual differences such as class in the conversation about black identity. My project fails to take into account these differences and makes no mention or gives any analysis of class and gender issues.
In doing so it mirrors the interest in race as is demonstrated in human rights legislation and conversations in the province at the inception of the Human Rights
Commission and throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s. Discussions of black and Mi'kmaq people in the province were overwhelmingly conversations about race and racial inequality.
While Fanon illustrates the need for an analysis of a situation or two different reactions to a situation in the works mentioned above, there are times when he too speaks broadly of the black man or the native to make a cohesive whole out of individual parts. This does not, however, render his insights on the
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 224. 18 development of black identity and an articulation of such identity any less profound or critical to employ in works in which questions of black identity are raised.
Beyond Theory and Identity
Given the fact that the members of the black community that calls itself indigenous can place their ancestors in Mi'kmaq territory pre-Confederation it is also necessary to include the works of writers who provide a historic understanding of black settlement in Canada and specifically Nova Scotia. These writers include Robin Winks, James Walker and Colin A. Thompson, among others. We learn for example, from James Walker, in The Black Loyalist that:
... Black Loyalists were isolated from the rest of Nova Scotian society. They were settled, most of them, in segregated communities, they suffered from cruelty and injustice at the hands of officials who treated them differently in allocating lands and provisions, and even before the law.35
In this, we are able to understand the origins of segregated black communities such as North Preston, Beechville, Cherry Brook and others. The historic material also gives us information on the nature of the relationship between the state and
Black Nova Scotians. We can see, for example, that the state (represented by the law and its officials) was complicit in the "cruelty and injustice" suffered by
Black Nova Scotians. It also provides information on what historical issues might have been carried forward that impact the contemporary relationship between the two groups. One such issue might be how the Mi'kmaq peoples understood and
35 James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783 - 1870 (London: Longman and Dalhousie University Press, 1976) 86. 19 understand Black Nova Scotian claims to their land. Even though it was promised to blacks, whites did not rightfully own the land. It was therefore not theirs to promise. Much of the information gleaned from these sources is most useful to this project for the descriptions of the conditions of life they provide and for providing a context for contemporary relationships and for the issues under exploration. The same can be said about the works of Charles Saunders who offers his book Black and Blue Nose as documentation of the contemporary situation for Black Nova Scotians.36
Both contemporary and historical works at times portray Black Nova
Scotians as either lacking in initiative and ambition or being poor unfortunate creatures who have never received their fair share of either land, recognition or respect. Sometimes these attributes existed even where the evidence in the same work contradicts them. For example, Walker writes: "Instead, the same 'slave mentality' was perpetrated and reinforced by their experiences in Nova Scotia.
They continued to feel dependent on whites, in the economic sphere, neither encouraged nor capable to strike out on their own."37 Though the decision of
Black Loyalists to fight on the side of the British brought them to Nova Scotia,
Walker is unable to see this as striking out on their own. In his book he demonstrates, in fact, how capable they were of assessing the reality of their
There are other contemporary works that help to provide a fuller picture of Black Nova Scotians when taken together. These include the works of Frances Henry Forgotten Canadians: The Blacks of Nova Scotia}, Dennis Magill and Donald Clairmont. Africville The Life and Death of Canadian Black Community, Nova Scotia Blacks: an Historic Overview, Fred Wein (with Clairmont) "Race Relations in Canada". 37 Walker 57. 20 situation for, after many months of waiting for land grants, they took action on their own behalf. He writes:
When Brindley Town Black Loyalists were removed a second time from their farm lots in July 1785, Thomas Peters despaired of ever having his land promises fulfilled in Nova Scotia. He had been a sergeant in the Black Pioneers and had assumed a leadership position among Digby-area blacks, organizing their first petition for lands in August 1784 and taking charge of the distribution of provisions later that year.38
Organizing a petition for land within one year of their arrival and organizing a system of distributing needed supplies to their community hardly seems like the act of people who were incapable of striking out on their own. It is necessary to read much of this literature with caution and with very clear questions of what can be extrapolated to paint as accurate a picture as possible of the community under study.
A Note on Jurisdiction
The appointment of a Superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1783 and the passage of the Indian Act in 1876 created jurisdictional boundaries in dealing with the people classed as "Indian". They were wards of the Crown. While the federal government through the Indian Act had jurisdiction over all matters pertaining to
Ibid. 94. In the 1992 edition of The Black Loyalists, Walker states in the preface in response to similar criticism on this issue: "I fully agree that the term is misleading and might more accurately be assigned to white society, whose refusal to regard the blacks as anything but slaves was the primary barrier to Black Loyalist independence" (xix). Though there is a retraction of sorts it is in the preface and easy to miss and the original 1976 text remains unchanged. It continues to be a part of the historical record.
39 All Loyalists both black and white were provided with provisions given the difficulty in settling a group that was at that time larger than the number of settlers who had already been there. Both black and white Loyalists were dependent on the government due to the economic situation at the time. 21 those who it recognized as "status Indians" and reserves, throughout this research there is evidence of ongoing federal and provincial collaboration. For example, the Department of Indian Affairs provided funding for the Transitional Year program at Dalhousie University though the program was for Black Nova Scotian and Mi'kmaq students. The federal government supported the province in its policy of assisting black students though it had no constitutional responsibility to this group. Another example of federal and provincial collaboration can be seen in the folk school (discussed in detail later in chapter 3) developed for Mi'kmaq students with participation of the federal immigration department, the provincial education department and other departments at both levels of government.
Members of the Mi'kmaq community were also appointed to the Nova Scotia
Human Rights Commission though the Commission did not have jurisdiction on reserves. It applied only to the off reserve Mi'kmaq populations and was superseded by the Indian Act on and off reserve.
The seeming fluidity and flexibility on the issue of jurisdiction between the federal and provincial governments contained the possibility of an effective response to crises in some areas such as education given the province's education infrastructure and the location of reserves within its boundaries. The lack of adherence to strict jurisdictional boundaries meant that either the provincial or federal government was able to initiate action on an issue in collaboration with the other. This situation that was at times beneficial and positive, might have concealed the Mi'kmaq people's Treaty relationship with the Crown. 22
The Mi'kmaq Peoples
I have not taken up the issue of identity in regards to the Mi'kmaq people in this project. While it was necessary to do so for those who call themselves
"indigenous black", I was interested in exploring the claim of indigeniety in
Mi'kmaq territory by people of African descent. So the omission is deliberate because in this instance it is unnecessary; there is no contestation of Mi'kmaq identity as indigenous.
I read with trepidation the literature construed as Mi'Kmaq history with this Fanon observation in mind:
The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regards to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.40
Nova Scotia historians, Peter L. McCreath and John G. Leefe, in their work A
History of Early Nova Scotia, demonstrate well Fanon's point when they write:
The story of Acadia really begins on April 13, 1598, when Henry the IV of France issued his famous Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed religious freedoms to Protestants as well as Roman Catholics. This brought peace to France after over a half century of religious strife and war.41
We learn little about what the French called Acadia, instead we learn about some of the social and political issues in France in 1598.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Middlesex: Penguin, 1963) 40.
41 Peter L. McCreath and John G. Leefe, A History of Early Nova Scotia (Tantallon: Four East Publications, 1982) 7. 23
While books such as this one can be important in describing the material conditions of life for Mi'kmaq peoples during the early years of contact, as it is used in this project, to take it as more than a (re) construction of Mi'kmaq history filtered through European languages and culture is problematic. The work by
L.F.S. Upton presents the same challenge even though the author seems to recognize that the nature of his work is reconstruction. He writes:
He had brought trade goods that replaced the Indian's artifacts and challenged the rationale for much of their daily labour, and bought furs and created a demand which caused unprecedented destruction of the animal population. All these things had occurred before the first descriptions of Micmac society were penned; yet these late accounts must serve as the basis for re-constructing the Micmac life before white contact.42
L.F.S. Upton, Micmacs and Colonist: Indian-White Relations in theMaritim.es, 1713- 1867 (Vancouver: British Columbia Press, 1979) 1. 24
While he acknowledges reconstruction as his task he seems untroubled by the fact that the documents he relies on are written entirely from the perspective of Europeans, shaped by their worldview, and as mentioned previously, interpreted based on their language and culture. Upton misses the point when he names the problematic to be all the things that occurred before the first written descriptions of Mi'kmaq society. The idea that what is being re-constructed might be less of an account of Mi'kmaq life pre-contact and more a construction of pre-contact Mi'kmaq existence based on observations and interpretations which were never tested or substantiated, is in part based on the problematic of language and cultural difference between the observer and the observed.
James Sakej Youngblood Henderson questions whether historians and other scholars can rely on the descriptions said to be the Aboriginal past. He writes:
European visitors, traders and guests to Mikmaki lived in a cognitive solitude, separate from the Mikmaw worldview and language. They may have shared a space but never the same context. Although they could observe, speculate about and describe within their own context much of what the Mikmaq43 did, the Mikmaw worldview or ecological context was usually incomprehensible to them ... ,44
The question of whether or not what is recorded is a true reflection of the
Aboriginal past is a valid one that has not been given much consideration in the literature, except in the main by First Nations scholars. In reading and reconstructing the Aboriginal past it is important to include writers such as
Henderson who, while reading the same historic documentation as other modern
43 Mi'kmaq is the plural form of Mikmaw. 44 James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson, The Mikmaw Concordat (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1997)23. 25 historians, will interpret the information reflecting also an Aboriginal understanding of the past. Since the historical information is recorded, interpreted and read through cultural filters, Mi'kmaq language and culture are important tools in helping to piece together a fuller but necessarily incomplete picture of
Mi'kmaq History.
Including the work of Aboriginal scholars in understanding Mi'kmaq history is also important because of the critique they offer of scholarship that is constructed on a singular cultural foundation. History written from the perspective of people who were once colonized can be strikingly different from that written by those who were once colonizers.45 These works often include information on the process and effects of colonization on a people. Bonita
Lawrence writes:
... northeastern North America was invaded by hundreds of trade ships of different European nations engaged in massive competition for markets; an invasion instrumental in destabilizing existing intertribal political alliances in eastern North America. It is impossible, for example, to discount the central role that competition for markets played in the large-scale intertribal warfare that appears to have developed, relatively anomalously, throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in much of eastern Canada and northeastern United States.46
In these writings we see how field notes, journals and other historic documentation of white anthropologists, historians and missionaries can be read and interpreted to support different views of practices, time periods and events.
Indigenous scholars such as Henderson, Lawrence, Daniel Paul, Olive Dickason
Bonita Lawrence, "Rewriting Histories of the Land: Colonization and Indigenous Resistance in Eastern Canada", ed. Sherene Razack, Race Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto Ontario: Between the Lines, 2002) 27. 46 Ibid. 40. 26 and others challenge the existing interpretations of the Aboriginal past with new theoretical and methodological approaches. Lawrence writes:
For Indigenous peoples, telling our histories involves recovering our own stories of the past and asserting the epistemological foundations that inform our stories of the past. It also involves documenting processes of colonization from the perspective of those who experienced it. ... It relies primarily on the endeavors of Indigenous elders and scholars who are researching community histories to shape its parameters.47
This project attempts to avoid some of the problems outlined by Youngblood
Henderson and Lawrence by asking three members of the Mi'kmaq community in
Nova Scotia to participate in the interpretation of primary and secondary sources that give a picture of their contemporary history in Nova Scotia and specifically about their relationship with the state and the "indigenous black" community.
The Commission
The Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission was created in 1967. It replaced the Human Rights Committee that was initiated in 1962 by Premier
Robert Stanfield. Its role was and continues to be primarily to provide research, education and enforcement in the area of human rights. Historically the
Commission has been at the forefront (whether intentionally or not) of producing black subjects. Much of the literature reflects the racialized nature of Nova
Scotian society and makes clear the inseparability of the individual and the racial state. One might ask and answer the question who is unscathed or uncorrupted by racism within a racial state - the answer is, no one. Those hired to enforce, study, educate about racism and discrimination are at once implicated in that racism and
47 Ibid. 25. 27 racial discrimination. This is demonstrated well in some of the reports produced for the Human Rights Committee. We read, for example, in a Committee survey:
It is difficult to pin down the attitude of the white population towards the coloured population in view of the comparatively low economic level of nearly all the coloured residents in the county. Generally white residents seemed favourably disposed as long as Negroes stayed in their own areas. Mulgrave is an exception to this rule where Negro employment is fairly high and coloured residents well regarded, with no evidence of discrimination.
The implication of this statement seems to be that when Black Nova Scotians are productive the community "embraces" them. It is only when they are non productive or perhaps appear to lack industry that white residents are unsure about them. This is characterized not as racism but as a failure to contribute to society.
It is also lost on the author of the report that requiring people to stay in their own areas is not at all a position that is "favourable."
Complicit in the production of black subjects is The Dalhousie Institute of
Public Affairs that has contributed to the literature on Black Nova Scotians from the 1960s to the present through its government-funded studies and reports. One report from 1961 reads: "Even though Negroes are almost certainly in some aptitudinal sense, as intelligent as whites in general, they are far less likely to be capable of receiving the advantages of education".49 We learn from the report that blacks are not entirely as intelligent as whites and they most certainly would not
Survey of the Negro Population of Guysboro County Under the Terms and Reference Laid Down By The Interdepartmental Committee on Human Rights, 1963. 4. 1992-718/001 1962- 1963 Public Archives of Nova Scotia.
49 Gwendolyn V. Shand, "Adult Education among the Negroes of Nova Scotia," The Conditions of the Negroes of Halifax City, Nova Scotia, Dalhousie Institute of Public Affairs, Dalhousie University (Halifax: 1961-1963) 1. Emphases mine. 28 be able to take advantage of educational opportunities due to this deficiency.
Gwendolyn Shand, the report's author, concludes:
The members of a depressed social group cannot expect improvement of their position except through personal self-help and mutual help. The maintenance and even intensification of present efforts of the Negroes themselves, as individuals and through their own formal and informal organizations, are essential to their advancement.
We see Negroes produced as people needing to take responsibility for the condition that is by implication created by them. We also see that they are not, in this view, seen as citizens of the province with whose circumstances the province must actively engage but rather are viewed as outsiders whose individual members and organizations must act on their own behalf.
In addition to the Dalhousie University reports for the Commission we are able to get a sense of the Commission's programs, priorities and inner workings through the minutes of meetings and internal communication. For example, we learn from the September 8, 1969 minutes of the Commission meeting that at the beginning of the summer there was an expectation of social and racial upheaval in the province during the Canada games. It did not occur, but Marvin Schiff, the
Commission Director, warns the group not to be overly confident:
.. .We need only look to the United States to realize that a peaceful summer does not necessarily presage a fall or winter free of rather serious conflict. ... both the Commission and our allies in Nova Scotia - have made advances in our fight against racial and other forms of social inequity. But the advances we have made pale into insignificance when we match them against what remains to be done.51
50 Ibid. 23.
51 Nova Scotia. Human Rights Minutes and Records. Director's Report to the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management 1992- 718/001 (1968-1970). 29
Schiff s attention to the upheavals in the United States places Nova Scotia's human rights discourse in the context of black struggles beyond the Canadian border.
There were also provincial influences on the Nova Scotia Human Rights
Commission. Daniel Hill who was the Director of the Ontario Human Rights
Commission acted as an advisor. Schiff writes: "Dr. Hill held lengthy discussions with our staff, both as a group and individually, and gave us general insights into techniques of investigation, general complaint handling, the use of various kinds of programs and other matters related to Commission operations."52 While it is clear from the above quote and other human rights records that Ontario's
Commission influenced Nova Scotia's development in the area it is unclear the extent to which activists or those organizing for human rights in both provinces engaged in such sustained and close collaboration. We know from the work of
Dominique Clement that in 1962 Alan Borovoy, one of the leading human rights activists in Ontario, visited Halifax. He reports that Borovoy "mobilized a group of activists to agitate for the rights of blacks in Africville".53 In 1964 the group that was brought together in support of Africville residents held a Human Rights conference that was sponsored by B'nai B'rith and the Jewish Labour Congress of
Canada (among others) two organizations which were instrumental in the Ontario and Canadian human rights and anti-discrimination efforts. Beyond Borovoy's visit and the sponsorship of the conference, ties between activists in the two
52 Ibid. 6.
53 See Dominique Clement, "Canada's Rights Movement: A History," www.historyofrights.com/ngo/nova_scotia.html 30 provinces are undocumented. The group at that time was known as the Halifax
Advisory Committee on Human Rights. Ontario's role as advisor to Nova Scotia makes sense both on the level of activists to activists and government to government given that it led the way in providing comprehensive rights protection ahead of all other provinces. The work of Ruth Frager and Carmela Patrias as well as Brian Howe outlines the development of the Ontario Human Rights
Commission, and allows for some points of comparison between the two
Commissions as well as charting the Ontario Human Rights Commission's influence on Nova Scotia.54 The language of rights in Canada, including human rights, can also be seen in the works of Alan Cairns and Cynthia Williams.55
Williams' essay "Constitutionalism, Citizenship and Society in Canada," provides an excellent lens through which to examine the debates across the country.
Writing Black/Mi'kmaq/Indigenous Relations
In reviewing the literature I came across only one Canadian book that touches on the relationship between black and Mi'kmaq peoples. It is a children's story written with grades 3-6 children in mind. The story is of a girl named
Rachel and her family who come to Canada after her stepfather fights on the side of the British in the War of 1812. Rachel's mother and her newborn baby develop an illness. Rachel meets a girl whose mother is half Mi'kmaq and the girl's mother cures Rachel's mother and sibling.56 In his work George Elliot Clarke,
54 See Ruth A. Frager and Carmela Patrias "This is Our Country, these are our rights': Minorities and the Origins of Ontario's Human Rights Campaigns" Canadian Historical Review, 82.1, Mar. (2001) also R. Brian Howe, "The Evolution of Human Rights Policy in Ontario," Canadian Journal of Political Science 24.4, Dec. (1999). 55 Alan Cairns, Cynthia Williams eds., Constitutionalism, Citizenship and Society in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985) 56 Lynne Kositsky, Rachel A Mighty Big Imagining (Toronto: Penguin Books, 2001) 31 references his Mi'kmaq ancestry or makes reference to black characters and their
Mi'kmaq relations.57 Daniel McNeil interviews Black Nova Scotians on race and identity.58 Many of the participants talked about their Mi'kmaq ancestry.
However, none of these studies offers a sustained conversation about the two groups simultaneously or explores the circumstances of life for both groups in detail. In a review of the literature on the broader topic of indigenous/black relations in Canada, I was unable to find any sustained inquiry into the relationship between these groups. This project offers an examination of the contemporary relationship between the two groups and each group with the state.
It adds to the literature that analyses Canada as a national project. It disrupts the indigenous/white, black/white conversation, allowing for nuanced conversations that unmask complicity in the oppression of First Nations peoples. It wrestles with and finally names "black as the colour of complicity"59 (to borrow Razack's terminology).
The following chapter explores issues of citizenship, race and identity. In an environment in which one is produced as outsider even in the face of a significant historical presence of one's ancestors and in an environment in which
See works by Clarke including Odysseys Home, Whyllah Falls, George and Rue. 58 McNeil, Finding Home. 59 While this project deals specifically with the relationship between black and Mi'kmaq peoples one can choose any racial group in Canada and name them complicit in white domination over First Nations people's and their lands. We are all occupiers, the majority of who carry on unmoved (at least visibly) in the face of state sponsored violence and degradation against First Nation's peoples. If I am fighting with the state for redress over lost land - land taken from me by the state without fighting equally for the return of First Nations lands, I am complicit. 95% of British Columbia is un-ceded territory, the Mi'kmaq peoples have a claim on all of their traditional territory including Nova Scotia. If I argue the terms of my belonging to this nation only with White Canadians and the state I render invisible the peoples whose lands I occupy, I am complicit. If I disregard, set aside, or distance myself from their stories of violence and ownership of the land on which the Canadian nation stands in favour of my own story of oppression and injustice, I am complicit. 32 one is often constructed as "less than," how do identities develop? What shapes identities and how and by whom are they fashioned? 33
Chapter 2
CITIZENSHIP, RACE AND IDENTITY
... consideration of this or any other urban development must recognize its prior occupancy and revisit the colonial past to retell some of the histories of initial dispossession of the land involved ... The issue is not only one of initial invasion, but of ongoing dislocation and exclusion.60
Jennifer Nelson opens her discussion on Africville using the quote above.
Nelson chooses it as her starting point for telling, "some of the histories of initial dispossession", the brief history of black occupation or settlement of the land. In doing so she begins the story of the land renamed Africville61 without attention to the "colonial past" that created a black settlement on Mi'kmaq territory. While it is important to tell the story of Africville and the black settlers on that land, this is also a story of early settlement in North America, which is necessarily tied to dispossession. It would seem, then, that the initial dispossession was that of the original inhabitants of Mikmaki, the Mi'kmaq peoples. Further on in her essay
Nelson asks some poignant questions regarding the monument erected on the site, which was known as Africville:
In the compression of time and space embodied in the monument and in the park, what might prevent us from seeing space as possessed of a history, of seeing the land we stand on as intimately problematic? What is buried beneath this symbol of remembering, or what truths does it hold down?
Sherene Razack, Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002) 214. 61 There is now a park where the black community of Africville once stood. The site is now called Seaview Park. 62 Jennifer J. Nelson, "The Space of Africville: Creating, Regulating, and Remembering the Urban 'Slum'," ed. Sherene Razack, Race Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto Ontario: Between the Lines, 2002) 228. See also Nelson's most recent work on 34
Is it not possible to pose these questions substituting the monument in the park with black presence and occupation of the site? What is covered under the story of Africville? As blacks and in particular "indigenous blacks," can we imagine a vibrant Mi'kmaq nation unsettled by the presence of settlers and violently dispossessed of their lands? The lands that belonged to the Mi'kmaq nation, which we rename Africville, Preston, Beechville and Cherry Brook. While black settlement was sometimes forced by the necessity of fleeing slavery and enslavement itself, and life was made difficult by racial violence, what erasures occur when black dispossession is understood as an original dispossession? After all, the land purchased for the site of Africville in the 1840s was part of Mi'kmaq territories, which had been violently taken over by white settlers. Lawrence writes that, during the 1840s:
Those who struggled to acquire individual land plots were denied title; as a result it was not uncommon for Mi'kmaq families to engage in the backbreaking labour of clearing and planting a patch of land, only to find that when they returned from fishing, hunting or gathering excursions white squatters had taken the land.63
The story of Africville and other stories of dispossession cannot be fully told and understood outside the context of the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. To do so would be to erase and cover over Mi'kmaq stories and their very existence within the territory/nation.
the subject Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).
63 Razack, Race, Space and the Law 35. 35
This chapter explores themes of citizenship, identity, place and belonging, and it challenges and seeks to contest "indigenous blackness." The nature of
Canadian citizenship has been racialized, gendered and class-based. We see in the
1885 citizenship debates racist discussions of the inferiority of "Chinamen". In the Franchise Bill of 1885 Sir John A. Macdonald himself proposed "inserting ... the words .. .excluding a Chinaman."64 Macdonald argued for the inclusion of
Indians and the exclusion of the Chinese. He continues:
Indians are sons of the soil; they are British subjects; and there, they have the proper qualifications ... they ought to be treated as other British subjects. The Chinese are foreigners ... [with] no British instincts or British feelings or aspirations.
At the end of the debates, the Franchise Bill passed with the exclusion of all
Chinese and the majority of First Nations (with the exception of private individual landholders) and all women.
The early exclusions emerged, Veronica Strong-Boag suggests:
.. .as one critical measure of how those in authority imagined the humanity of those who came beneath their gaze. Those measured and found wanting were to remain subject to the government of those who were seen to wield authority naturally and properly.65
While she writes about the exclusion of First Nations and Chinese groups from the Franchise, there existed a racial hierarchy within the nation with all racial groups subordinate to and governed by whites.
Veronica Strong-Boag, "The Citizenship Debates" ed., Robert Adomski, Dorothy E. Chunn, and Robert Menzies, Contesting Canadian Citizenship (Peterborough: Broadview Press Ltd, 2002) 88. 65 Ibid. 90. 36
The Articulation of Black Canadian Identities
In a climate of racial rale and subjugation how are identities fashioned and articulated? Who do Black Canadians and "indigenous Black" Nova Scotians imagine themselves to be?
In her book, Frontiers, Philip writes:
I carry a Canadian passport: therefore I am Canadian, though, how am I Canadian above and beyond the narrow legalistic definition of being the bearer of a Canadian passport and does the racism of Canadian society present an absolute barrier to those of us who are differently coloured, ever belonging? [...] how to belong - not only in the legal and civic sense of carrying a Canadian passport, but also in another sense of feeling at home and at ease. It is only in belonging that we will eventually become Canadian. How do we lose the sense of being othered?66
This ambivalent sense of Canadianness, of being Canadian and not quite being
Canadian, of which Philip writes, is not an uncommon among Black Canadians.
The connection and disconnection in relation to the nation resembles at once forced estrangement from the nation and a resistance to the very idea of belonging to the nation.
This unrootedness to nation and sense of elsewhere expressed by Philip can also be seen in the works of Black Canadian writers such as Dionne Brand,
Rinaldo Walcott, Afua Cooper and Ahdri Zhina Mandiela. Mandiela writes:
speshal rikwes fi dih bones in dih sands of dih Carrybeyan lands fi wih urtin spirits debri... fih dih skills of dih uprooted ones widout birtlan wukkin fih fahrin investment plans inna Merrica, Sout Afrikka Canada an Inglan inna dis babbilan.67
M. Nourbese Philip, Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture (Stratford: Mercury Press, 1992) 16. 67 Ahdri Zhina Mandiela, "Speshal Rikwes" ed. Ann Wallace, Daughters of the Sun, Women of the Moon (Stratford: Williams-Wallace Publisher's Inc., 1991) 78. 37
Though trained, living and working in Canada Mandiela expresses her sense of elsewhere by writing entirely in Patois.68 She references the bones in the sand in the Caribbean and places the "uprooted ones" without birth land in Canada,
England and elsewhere. They have no place. They are here and there wherever economic necessity takes them, but they are clearly unrooted. The word
"babbilan" in Patois has many meanings.69 It is imagined as a place that lacks freedom, where there is death and destruction, debilitating work that eventually kills (perhaps more of a spiritual than physical death). A place that steals your labour power and then disregards you as it has no other need for you. The hope is always that babbilan kingdom will to fall - however that kingdom is constructed in the moment. Mandiela's choice of the word babbilan is telling. No outsider can ever belong in babbilan. It is indeed a strange land.
Goldberg suggests that:
subjection in both (and related) senses of the term promotes its resistance; imposition from outside - the external - calls forth at least the redefinition internally, in terms of the already (pre) existing sum of defining conditions of self and at most outright, explicit rejection, denial, dismissal. The self accordingly is always caught - split - between the past and the present... between self- assumption and imposition, in short, between "my"- self and its
Perhaps belonging requires a self constructed on and constrained by racial subjection, a subjection that requires in some way an exile from self, a former or
Jamaicans refer to their everyday language as Patois. They do not call it Jamaican or qualify it in anyway - it is simply Patois. 69 See Holy Bible King James Version. World. Babbilan mimics the biblical city of Babylon cast in the image of a woman: "Mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth" (Revelation Chapter 17 verse 5). There is a detailed description of Babylon elsewhere in Revelation beginning at Chapter 14 verse 7 — Chapter 19 verse 21.
Goldberg 107. 38 an imagined self. Then, resistance to the idea of belonging to the nation can be seen as resistance to subjugation. Philip contemplates her questions and offers some thoughts on becoming Canadian. She writes:
To become ambivalently British or Canadian is to forget the history of empire that defined England and produced a Canada, and honed the beliefs of white supremacy; it is to forget that our people and Europeans first met as equals ... Not to remember those things ... is simply to collude in our own erasure, our own obliteration.71
Philip argues for what she calls "a subversive role for memory" one that impels us to action. In this articulation of Black Canadian identity, belonging to the nation is necessarily ambivalent, for what is at stake is our survival, our culture, customs and languages (or at the very least our memory of them). Our primary belonging in this articulation is to Africa as African people and our belonging elsewhere threatens our erasure as Africans and our memory of Africa.
In the works of Canadian poet George Elliot Clarke we see a much different articulation of a Black Canadian identity, one rooted in the soil of his
Africadia. Writing black in and onto the soil is an assertion of black belonging on the landscape as well as resistance to the narratives which imply a recent Black
Canadian presence. While at times Clarke considers other Canadian Black identities, at the heart of his project is a desire to create space and place for his own "indigenous Black" Nova Scotian community. In Whylah Falls,. Clarke writes: "Every word we write is a breath - perhaps our last - against oblivion."72
In an interview with Maureen Moynagh, he says: "I feel I am constantly writing
71 Philip 19.
72 George Elliot Clarke, Whylah Falls (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2000) xxiv. 39 against our erasure, and yet the erasure continues." Clarke's poetry is replete with place names and images that locate black characters, lives and stories in historic and contemporary Nova Scotia and, of course, Canada. For example, he calls our attention to a historic black presence in his book Blue by naming the poem "Africadian Petition," alluding to the Black Loyalist presence in Nova
Scotia.74 In Execution Poems, urban and rural Black Nova Scotian geographies meet and are located in the north end of Halifax on Gottingen Street, in the
Halifax Market, in Hants County and Three Miles Plain.75
In his sumptuous and sensual work of poetry, Whylah Falls, Clarke roots his characters by the shores of the Sixhiboux River, Jarvis County and in the geography of southwestern Nova Scotia, connecting them to other parts of Canada or things Canadian. For example, in his poem, "The River Pilgrim: A Letter," he writes:
At eighteen, I thought the Sixhiboux wept. Five years younger, you were lush, beautiful Mystery; your limbs - scrolls of deep water. Before your home, lost in roses, I swooned, Drunken in the village of Whylah Falls, And brought you apple blossoms you refused, Wanting Hank Snow woodsmoke blues and dried smelts, Wanting some Milljerk's dumb, unlettered love. That May, freights chimed xylophone tracks that rang to Montreal. I scribbled postcard odes, Painted Le Fleuve Saint-Laurent comme la Seine - Sad watercolours for Negro exiles. .. .77
Maureen Moynagh, "Mapping Africadia's Imaginary Georgraphy: An Interview with George Elliot Clarke", A Review of International English Literature, 21 A, Oct. (1996): 73. 74 George Elliot Clarke, Blue (Vancouver: Polestar, 2001) 14. 75 George Elliot Clarke, Execution Poems (Wolfville: Gaspereau Press, 2001) 18-25. 7 Jarvis County is actually what Europeans renamed Digby County. Clarke might have renamed this County for Graham Jarvis who as Moynagh notes was a young Digby County man killed by a neighbour who was acquitted by a judge who was accused of being racist. Clarke also believes that one should and could rename places in the province - this is very much a part of his strategy for creating and articulating an Africadian geography both provincially and nationally. 77 Clarke Whylah Falls 5. We see in this quote that in addition to locating blackness m southwestern Nova
Scotia and Canada Clarke also inserts and asserts mythical Whylah Falls onto the landscape to also serve as a representation and marker of black presence and space. In doing so he creates a space and place where none existed before.
In Odyssey's Home Clarke asserts: "To be Black in Canada is an existential experience. A constant interrogation of our belonging inculcates within us, not just a 'double consciousness' that superb African American intellectual W.E.B. Dubois ... posited for Black Americans, but a 'poly consciousness'."78 Clarke recognizes what he calls the 'poly consciousness' of
Black Canadians because of the hues in their blackness and their affiliations to many different languages, cultures, ethnicities and religions. In spite of the differences, Clarke prefers to call Canada's Black communities African-Canadian and Africadian interchangeably when referring to the "indigenous black" community in Nova Scotia. While Clarke honours the African connection in black identity, he privileges the Canadian. He writes: "In Canada, the increasing numbers of second-generation blacks, living now within a white-majority context, have more in common with the experiences of indigenous African Canadians than with an increasingly remote 'Caribbean homeland'."79 It is perhaps safe to assume that if Clarke sees Caribbean countries as remote homelands then the centrality of the connection to Africa asserted by Philip must seem to Clarke unimaginably remote.
Clarke, Odyssey's Home 279.
Ibid. 81. 41
Clarke seems to draw distinctions between the categories of African
Canadian identities - there seem to be African Canadians and "Indigenous
African Canadians". In reviewing a study of the Black Canadian experience by
McGill University Professor of Social Work, James L. Torczyner, et al., Clarke points out that identity is complex. He cautions against talking about Black
Canadians lest we elide their differences and he tells us that the study barely escapes this problem. He says of Torczyner:
.. .he tends to take the immigrant black experience, especially in Ontario and Quebec as the norm (where 86.9 per cent of all 'Blacks' live), even arguing that 'Black immigration will determine something of the collective identity of Black persons in Canada'. Yet, the centuries old African-heritage populations in the Maritimes, Quebec and southwestern Ontario are jealously insisting upon recovering and rejoicing in their histories.8
Clarke appears to be calling Torczyner out (so to speak) for not affording the
"centuries old" African Canadian communities their place in determining the collective Black
Canadian identity. It is in rare circumstances that minority populations determine collective identity, and since the Black Canadian population is largely immigrant, it follows that the most significant impact on collective identity would be theirs.
After all, in Canada Aboriginal peoples are the first inhabitants of this land - the
"heritage populations" ~ to borrow Clarke's term, but they do not determine the collective Canadian identity.
One is forced to ask what underlies Clarke's reminder of his genealogy and those "heritage black communities" he speaks of. Torczyner writes over
"indigenous blackness" with "immigrant blackness" forcing Clarke to write 42
Africadians back into existence. Here again Clarke is writing against the erasure of his community. Clarke is also establishing a hierarchy of belonging to the nation or Black Canadianness. In the same way that white informants in Eva
Mackey's The House of Difference distinguished between "Canadian Canadians"
(understood to be White Canadians) and other Canadians, Clarke's attention to genealogy, place and his naming of some Black Canadians as indigenous, asserts a claim to the nation that is positioned as more authentic. This claim to indigeneity, I would argue, accomplishes the same erasure of Indigenous or
Aboriginal Nations' primary claim to this land as does Euro-Canadians' refusal to acknowledge their "elsewhere" - in other words their origins in foreign lands.
Just as Africville, Beechville, Preston, Cherry Brook and other such communities cover over Mikmaki, so too does "indigenous blackness" cover the truly indigenous Mi'Kmaq nations and other First Nations in parts where "indigenous blackness" purportedly exists. For this reason, the construction of "indigenous blackness" must not be left unchallenged.
"Indigenous blackness" asserts itself and demands equal place with "indigenous whiteness". Clarke asserts: "I'm interested in rewriting the map of Nova Scotia. I mean, why should I call Hants 'Hants County'?" I'll call it 'States County', after a black family surname. Same thing with Digby County; that's Jarvis County for me. ..." There is no more space in "indigenous blackness" for Mi'kmaqpeople than in "indigenous whiteness." Both are discourses of exclusion, and in the context of the Americas, erasure.
1 Moynagh 75-76. 43
In Clarke's work there is an almost exclusive focus on one's group to the detriment of others. We see this in his assertion of Africadia onto Mi'kmaq territory and in his uncritical adaptation of the strategy of renaming the places within. Clarke asserts: "We are interested, I think like postcolonial writers elsewhere, in domesticating these so-called foreign or imperialist influences."
In re-mapping Nova Scotia and rewriting Nova Scotia's history with one-sided attention to the history of Black Nova Scotians Clarke does more than domesticate imperial influences, he employs imperialist strategies unaltered against the Mi'kmaq peoples, their history and territory. While the effect of
Clarke's use of these strategies is mitigated by the limited power held by Black
Nova Scotians at this time in the province's history, it is nonetheless disturbing.
African or European names are unsettling and should be unsettled in Mikmaki. If we leave unchallenged this assertion from a group, even one that has been brutally victimized by the governing majority, we leave open the possibility of repeating injustices.
Both the assertion of an African centred identity as articulated by Philip and an "indigenous black" identity as articulated by Clarke are reactions to racial violence, dispossession and erasure. Clarke's assertion of identity perhaps also echoes a resistance to Ontario-centric articulations of Canadian identity - in this we see the particularity of place - the place of regional localities in shaping identity. In short, they are responses to oppression and marginalization. Fanon writes: ".. .the first impulse of a Blackman is to say no to those who attempt to
82 Moynagh 86. 44 build a definition of him. It is understandable that the first action of the black man is reaction. ...83 Philip agrees with Fanon and asks: "... when much around conspires against these very realities"... why shouldn't one react?'"" Goldberg supports these assertions about black identity:
Black folk fashion an identity in relation to but not reducible to the identity created "for" them informally through state formation. Black identity - as social identity more or less generally - is one created and recreated for itself in negotiation with the definition and meaning of blackness extended to it by broader social forces and relations.85
Clarke and Philip put forth articulations of identity that are unsatisfactory.
Clarke's articulation is attractive in one sense because it asserts a claim that is equal to that of Euro-Canadians and therefore directly challenges their assertion of being more entitled. Paradoxically, while arguing equality of claim with Euro-
Canadians Clarke also asserts one that is of greater significance than those of the
"immigrant black" population, and one might argue immigrant populations with a shorter genealogy than that of his "centuries old African heritage populations."
While Clarke provides a challenge to the dominant narrative of nation, which articulates only a historical European presence and industry in developing
Canada, he argues for inclusion within a colonizing project and lays claim to the
Indigenous North American territory we call Canada. Philip in contrast, sees belonging to the nation and rootedness as unattainable given the central role of
Africa in articulating black identity. The specificity and particularity of place eloquently and skilfully articulated in Clarke's work cannot be found in Philip's.
Fanon, Black Skin^ White Masks 36. Philip 66. Goldberg 163. 45
Identities cannot and do not develop without the markers and particularities of place and locality.
If we could, as suggested by James SakejYoungblood Henderson,
".. .attempt to stand outside of Eurocentric thought, its hegemony, its partial
or disciplines and its hidden structures," we might move farther away from essentializing racial identities. I qualify "away from" by using "farther" because of the impossibility of standing outside of Eurocentrism, which for many would also mean standing outside of their own experiences and worldview. I make this assertion because the system of European education, both formal and informal, remains intact in many former colonies and children in many countries with majority black populations still receive a decidedly Eurocentric education. I define and understand Eurocentrism as a way of seeing, a way of knowing, a set of beliefs and system of thoughts and the languages used to support them. These ways of knowing and seeing, the beliefs and thoughts are grounded or rooted and expressed in European cultures and languages.
Goldberg writes:
Ranging between the promisingly reactive and a reactionary politics, race-based anti-racism may be pragmatically necessary in some historical moments, but it clearly reifies under the weight of its own logic into racial essentializing once those historical openings close down.87
I would like to suggest that we substitute the words "race-based anti-racism" with
"race-based identification". If we accept what Stuart Hall asserts, "Race is more like a language more than the way in which we are biologically constituted. The
Youngblood Henderson 24. Goldberg 115. 46 meaning of skin colour is not always the same. The meaning of skin colour floats and slides."88 We see that racial identification is unstable because it shifts.
Inclusion in a racial category is arbitrary and, at times, assignment to one category or another defies logic. This is illustrated well in Goldberg:
Alabama, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas define one as a person of colour who is descended from a Negro to the third generation inclusive, though one ancestor in each generation may have been white. ... Nebraska and Oregon say that one must have as much as one fourth Negro blood in order to be classed with that race. ... shortly after this Alabama nevertheless ruled that a person descended on the part of the father or mother from Negro ancestors, without reference to or limit of time or generations removed would be Negro.89
Constructing racialized identities traps us in this conundrum that is race. While it is desirable to find a way out of this problem with race as a central part of identity, it is difficult to imagine how we might succeed in doing so.
The Politics of Place and Belonging
In Canada, as in many other liberal democratic societies, there exists a tension between majority mainstream populations and those "others" within the nation-state. Nations and minority groups within those nations have struggled with the recognition (or lack) of group rights. Will Kymlicka calls these rights
"group differentiated rights." He writes:
"... the members of certain groups are incorporated into the political community not only as individuals but also through the group, and their rights depend, in part,
88 Race: The Floating Signifier, exec, prod., dir, ed Sut Jhally, VHS, The Media Education Foundation, 1996.
89 Goldberg 186. 47 on their group membership."90 He sometimes describes these group rights as a form of "differentiated citizenship." Kymlicka argues that the demand for
"representation rights" by minority groups is a demand for inclusion within the larger society based on their feelings of being excluded.
First Nations self-government campaigns in Canada can be seen as an assertion of rights to territory and resources which were never clearly ceded and reparations or redress for abuse, loss of territory and stolen resources. These campaigns, it could be argued, while appearing to be ordered along racial lines, reflect whose lands and resources were stolen. In this way they differ significantly from inclusion campaigns organized around particular racial interests. If self-government campaigns challenge the stability, and, I would suggest, the racial order and underlying racial assumptions of the state, then it could be argued that inclusion and redress for minority racial groups is only possible if self-government campaigns are successful, thereby reordering the racial state and relations within. If, as Goldberg suggests, "the actions of the racial state are representative mostly of those belonging to the ruling class, whose racial status as privileged - indeed, as ruling - the state in its racial configuration has helped to define, refine and promote",91 then the state's response to demands for self-government would necessarily be weighed with regard to what is best for the ruling class. How then can self-government and inclusion campaigns be largely or entirely successful without the support of the ruling class or the creation
90 Will Kymlicka, "Multicultural Citizenship" ed. Gersnon, Shaffir The Citizenship Debates: A Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 167.
91 Goldberg 111. 48 of such discomfort for this group, which would then force the state to react on its behalf?
Racial groups organizing against the state cannot expect that they will gain inclusion and full citizenship given the necessity of exclusions within a racially ordered state. Groups with significant economic and political power may be granted inclusion but the vast majority will never realize the benefits of full citizenship or experience a sense of belonging and rootedness to and within the nation. The possibilities of inclusion and self-government rely on the degree to which citizens or subjects within the state are prepared to collaborate beyond racial boundaries (and perhaps a host of other subjectivities). In Canada inclusion, or more broadly an egalitarian society, is not possible without the dislocation of race as an ordering or organizing principle within the state and the liberation of Indigenous peoples and their lands from the state.
Citizenship, identity, place and belonging are contested ideas within a nation. The meaning of who belongs and how they belong is never fixed, but continuously negotiated among citizens, and, as we see, also between the state and its citizens. Racial identification, whether fashioned in response to or with limited independence from, external definition, though sometimes useful in historic moments as a transformative or organizing tool, fails to dislodge the racial order that marginalizes, disembodies and dispossesses many of those seen as "other." It also risks being implicated in the marginalization, dispossession and erasure of others through (re-) creating a discourse of exclusion and a hierarchal belonging to and within the state. Perhaps working our way out of our racial conundrum requires a new way of imagining and reorganizing the state or perhaps even more dramatically dismantling the racial state and building "something else" organized around egalitarian principles.
The following chapter briefly explores Mi'kmaq life in the province pre- contact and during the early period of black settlement in Nova Scotia. It also examines the conditions of life for both groups after 1950 that might have necessitated the creation of human rights legislation and the Human Rights
Commission. In contesting the construction of "indigenous blackness" and pinning it to a colonizing project, I move decisively away from that term and dub the community, "descendants of the pre-Confederation black community". They will be referred to as such throughout the remainder of this work. 50
Chapter 3
THE MI'KMAQ PEOPLE AND THE DESCENDANTS OF THE PRE-
CONFEDERATION BLACK COMMUNITY: A BRIEF HISTORY
From the beginning of knowing, the Aboriginal people of Atlantic Canada, have existed as distinct people, allied with yet separate from those who lived around us. 2
This chapter provides a brief history of the Mi'kmaq people and the descendants of the pre-Confederation black community of Nova Scotia. It is also interested in examining and writing comparatively the contemporary history of the condition of both communities that might have necessitated the creation of legislation that was said to provide protection against discrimination. Education, land, housing and employment emerge as areas of common concern that can be examine to understand the shared experiences of these communities. We begin first with the original inhabitants of Mikmaki.
Daniel N. Paul states that the Mi'kmaq people have lived in America, or what we now know of as the four Atlantic provinces, parts of the Gaspe peninsula and the state of Maine, for approximately 5,000 - 10, OOOyears93. There were seven districts within the territory; Kespek, Agg Piktuk, Epexiwitk, Unama'kik,
Eskikewa'kik, Sipekne'katik and kespukwitk (what is now known as Nova Scotia is really the five nations or districts of Agg piktuk, Unama'kik, Eskikewa'kik,
Sipekne'katik and Kespukwitk.94 A chief and a governing body consisting of the
Youngblood Henderson 13. Daniel N. Paul, We were Not the Savages (Halifax: Fernwood, 2002) 15. 51 chief and council headed each district. This governing body resolved disputes, decided whether to make war and apportioned hunting and fishing territories. The district government provided each family with hunting and fishing rights to certain lands and waters. Another layer of governance was the Grand Council headed by one of the district chiefs. The Grand Council's role was to mediate disputes between districts and to bring all the districts together to solve mutual problems. The Grand Council functioned with little or no power beyond its ability to convince parties to accept its counsel.95 This system of governance remained intact well after the first French settlements were established in
Mi'kmaq territory. The change in the system occurred with the arrival of the
British and the onslaught of their genocidal practices that led to the destruction and suppression of Mi'kmaq language, culture and many traditions.96
Prior to the British occupation of Mi'kmaq territories European fishermen and adventurers visited Mikmaki. Upton asserts that a trading relationship between Europeans fishermen and Mi'kmaq peoples began "at some point in the first quarter of the sixteenth century."97 What began as seasonal visits and trade led to French settlements in what the French began to call Acadie. In 1604 Pierre du Gua Sieur de Monts became the first governor of Acadie. Accompanying
Sieur de Monts was Matthiew da Costa, a Black African who acted as an
See Paul chapter one for a full description of Mi'kmaq government/governance structure. 96 See Youngblood Henderson, Upton and Paul for details of the effects of European occupation on Mi'kmaq society. "Upton 18. 52 interpreter, and Samuel de Champlain. Da Costa had been in Mikmaki prior to
go this with Portuguese traders.
The relationship between the Mi'kmaq and the French seemed beneficial to both at the beginning of the trading relationship and early settlement.
Commercially and financially it was advantageous for the French. They were able to sell the furs they acquired to a European market with an appetite for it.
The Mi'kmaq people benefited from acquiring tools and other merchandise that simplified daily tasks." The trading relationship between the two engendered a respect that led to the Baptism of Grand Chief Membertou and by the end of the seventeenth century all Mi'kmaq people became Catholic.100 The Mi'kmaq people signed an agreement with the Catholic Church to protect the explorers and missionaries they brought to Mikmaki. It was likely this relationship and the agreement with the Holy See that led the Mi'kmaq people to fight on the side of the French in 1689 in the face of British ambition to establish a major presence in the territory. Though France surrendered to the British one year after the war, the
Mi'kmaq people continued to fight for nearly ten years.101
Treaties
The defeat of the French by British forces and the unabated development of permanent settlement by the British decimated the Mi'kmaq population and
98 Henderson 77. 99 Upton 18. 100 Donald Marshall Sr., Alexander Denny, Simon Marshall, "The Mi'kmaq: The Covenant Chain", ed. Boyce Richardson, Drum Beat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country (Toronto Ontario: Summerhill Press 1989) 78. 53 brought immense hardship to the people of Mikmaki. The British established a policy that required that land be purchased by the Crown for settlers from
Mi'kmaq people before it could be occupied.102 This policy was ignored as settlers indiscriminately took over Mi'kmaq lands. The British Crown entered into treaties with the Mi'kmaq people in which it was guaranteed that they would be free to continue to have use of their lands undisturbed and unmolested by settlers in their territory. In return the Mi'kmaq people agreed to leave undisturbed the settlements already established. While they agreed not to disturb these settlements they refused to surrender any additional land.103 In 1748 when the British began to build Halifax the Mi'kmaq people waged war against them in opposition to the takeover of their territory and more permanent settlements. In
1752 in order to stop the hostilities the British again renewed the treaty they made in 1725 promising to build no new settlements and to keep settlers from taking over more of the territory. Again the Mi'kmaq people agreed. The Royal
Proclamation of 1763 affirmed the validity of the treaties between the Crown and the Mi'kmaq (all indigenous nations in the territories occupied by the British were included in this guarantee).104
The influx of Loyalists some twenty years after the Proclamation resulted in a total disregard of the terms of the treaties. In 1841 after Mi'kmaq protest, the
Crown required Nova Scotia to set aside 50, 000 hectares of land for Reserves but only half of that was set aside and settlers continued their encroachment unabated
Ibid. Ibid. See also Upton and Paul 54 even on these protected lands.105 The Mi'kmaq people did not surrender their lands to the British nor did they lose control over it in war. They made peace with the British as represented by treaties. The British did not honour those treaties. In
1867 the British North America Act gave control of land to the provinces. The
Crown gave to the province control over land that it was not legally entitled to and in direct contravention of its own law and policies vis a vis Mi'kmaq territory.
Land
The British imposed a system of land ownership in Mikmaki in which they assumed control of the land they desired for settlements and resources and administered it at their discretion. The Europeans paid little attention to the settlement patterns of the Mi'kmaq peoples and erected permanent homes on lands that the Mi'kmaq peoples used either as traditional summer or winter settlements. This situation increased conflicts between the settlers and the
Mi'kmaq peoples. A superintendent of Indian Affairs was appointed in 1783.106
The people of the territory once known as Mikmaki now had to apply to a foreign government on their territory to receive land grants.107
Some were given land grants, license of occupation and others had to purchase land, as was the case with a Mi'kmaq man by the name of John Peter. In a letter found in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, dated May 8, 1866, one
Robert Leslie wrote to the Commissioner of Crown Lands in Halifax on behalf of
105 Richardson 86. 106 Upton 82. 107 See Upton 81-97 for a full discussion of Mi'kmaq and government relations in Nova Scotia during the early establishment of British settlements in Mikmaki. 55
John Peter who was seeking to take over two hundred acres of land left unoccupied by another Mi'kmaq man who left for New Brunswick. He explained to the commissioner that Mr. Peter was prepared to pay the government's price for the land.108 Settlers had not only displaced the Mi'kmaq people by taking over their settlements, they were also able to force them to pay for land which had been passed to them by their ancestors.
Between 1815 and 1820 Reserves were established in the province.109 In
1876, the Indian Act was passed and the Department of Indian Affairs was created to regulate the lives of the Mi'kmaq peoples and other First Nations groups.
Under the Indian Act reserve lands were for communal use and held in trust by the Crown. They could not be sold, leased or severed and no individual was permitted title even to the land on which his house stood. Initially these reserves were located province wide and were one of a number of land schemes on which
Mi'kmaq people lived. They also lived on "privately owned" land, and on
"Crown lands". A 1944 decision to "encourage" all Mi'kmaq peoples to relocate to two major reserves - one in Cape Breton and the other in mainland Nova
Scotia, isolated the communities from the non-Aboriginal population.110 This decision placed reserves outside of cities.
The colonial government and white settlers imposed racist laws and regulations aimed at justifying their takeover and occupation of Mi'kmaq
108 Robert Leslie, letter to Commissioner of Crown Lands, 8 May 1866, MG 15.18. 17, Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management, Halifax. 109 Upton 86-87. 110 George Brand, "The Indian in Nova Scotia," Fourth Annual Conference of the Indian- Eskimo Association of Canada, Regina, 24 Oct. 1963. 56 territory. The indiscriminate theft of Mi'kmaq land that began before
Confederation continued even after the government set some land aside for reserves. Both individual citizens of the province and the provincial government participated in a practice that continued well into the 1970s. In the October 21,
1971 edition of the Truro Weekly News we learn: "The residents of the Millbrook
Indian Reserve agreed.. .to go ahead with their threatened blockade of highway
102 if they were unable to obtain an injunction against the Nova Scotia
Department of Highways... ."1 x' The department had begun expanding the current highway that was built on reserve land without the band's consent or an indication that there was a process of expropriation undertaken. The original project and the expansion amounted to a blatant disregard of the boundaries and territory set- aside for the Mi'kmaq peoples.
Just as the province built a highway on Mi'kmaq territory without their consent so too did the white residents of Victoria County build their homes on reserve land without consent. In a 1974 incident, white residents living in the
Victoria County area of the province resisted and rebutted statements made by the
Union of Nova Scotia Indians that the lands they occupied were part of a reserve.
The local newspaper, CB Post, reported: "white residents... are holding firm to their property rights and they're not giving in to aboriginal claims by Indians without a fight."112 Though according to the article the federal government acknowledged that some of the lots in question were occupied contrary to the
111 Tom McDougall, "Indians set deadline on highway injunction," The Truro Weekly News2\Oct. 1971:1. 112 "Holding Firm To Property Rights," CB Post 1 Feb. 74:1. 57 provisions of the Indian Act, the residents insisted: "they are not prepared to
1 1 T
'surrender one square inch of land'."
While white residents later went on to say that they were interested in
resolving the issue in a "spirit of goodwill" (though they offer no specific
proposal towards this end) clearly one of the terms of engagement - no surrender
of any of the occupied lands - would ensure that only their interests were
protected. The lack of goodwill in a solution that would protect one side and give
the other nothing was clearly lost on the residents of this community. It would
seem, then, that working things out amicably would preclude a return of the stolen
property to the lawful owners and the expectation that "Indians" act reasonably.
After all, as the property owners pointed out, they had "been occupying" the land
"for a century or more." This conflict over land mirrors the situation in the
province at about the same time the residents declare as the beginning of their
occupation on the site in question. During that period (and since the beginning of
British settlement in Mikmaki) the colonial government and settlers acted
ruthlessly and contrary to the treaties they signed with the Mi'kmaq people. The
government of the day and settlers ignored Mi'kmaq ownership and occupation of
the land since "the beginning of knowing", but their descendants were now
arguing for an exception based on the length of their tenure. Even when the laws
imposed by their governments on the Mi'kmaq peoples found their occupation
illegal or supported Mi'kmaq right to the land they refused to relinquish their
claim just as their ancestors had done. They reminded the Minister that he must
honour the obligation made at the time of confederation to both the "Indians" and 58 whites. They insisted that they should be given paid representation and expenses for travel and research - the same benefits offered to the "Indian". While they demanded the same "benefits" and treatment as the "Indian" they were unable to see that it was the unequal, unjust and brutal treatment of the Mi'kmaq people that resulted in the windfall of the land they occupied and gained from financially and economically. This land stolen from the people of the Middle River band was one of many outstanding claims in the province at that time.
In January 1974, the leaders of the Mi'kmaq communities launched a formal claim to Aboriginal title for all of Nova Scotia. After years of investigating the long-term theft of their lands, it was revealed that an astonishing
11,510.5 acres ofreserve land had been taken over by the non-Mi 'kmaq population.114 This calculation of the acreage did not include the communities of
Milton, Lequille, Berwick, Middleton and Springhill, which were reserves prior to
1867 and were to be turned over to the crown at the time of confederation.115
Linden Maclntyre, "Indians want Aboriginal title to all of Nova Scotia," The Mail Star 12 Jan. 1974:4. 1 The following thefts of Mi'kmaq Reserve lands occurred in Nova Scotia as of 1974 according to the research, investigations and records of the Mi'kmaq people as reported to Linden Maclntyre, staff reporter of The Mail Star. "2,200 in Kejimkujik Indian Reserve No. 7; St Margaret's Bay Indian Reserve No. 16; New Germany Indian Reserve No. 16; Bear River Indian Reserve No.6; Pomquet Indian Reserve No. 23; Middle River Indian Reserve No. 1; Whycocomagh Indian Reserve No. 2; Fisher Grant Indian Reserve No. 24; New Liverpool Road Indian Reserve No. 8; Franklyn Manor Indian Reserve No. 22; Sambro Lake Indian Reserve No. 15; Ship Harbour Indian Reserve No. 18; St. Croix reserve No. 34.. - 1,325 acres of Reserve land in the Roseway and Clyde River area of Shelburne County. - 200 acres in the Ship Harbour Indian Reserve No. 18; -55 acres in Kejimkujik National Park; ... unlawful alienation of 150 acres of land on the Wildcat Indian Reserve; ... Loss of 100 acres of land in Bear River reserve; - 30 acres of land on the Hansport Indian Reserve. - Unlawful alienation of 85 acres of land the Shubenacadie Reserve; ... Unlawful alienation of 60 acres on the Sheet Harbour, Beaver Dam Lake, and Cole Harbour Indian Reserves; ... - 100 acres unlawfully alienated from Chapel Island Reserve; ... Unlawful alienation of 200 acres of Reserve land at Port Hood. - Unlawful alienation of 515 acres of Reserve land on Whycocomagh reserve. ... -Unlawful alienation of 3900 acres of Reserve land at Middle River; - Unlawful alienation of 245 acres of Reserve land at Margaree; ... - Unlawful alienation of land on the Lingan Reserve (near Sydney). ... - Unlawful alienation of 59
Housing
While some reserve lands were coveted and stolen by individuals, corporations and the state, not surprisingly there were no such reports concerning the wholesale or limited coveting and theft of Mi'kmaq homes. Housing conditions on reserves were substandard with many families living in crowded quarters that lacked the basic necessities such as running water, indoor plumbing, heat and appropriate construction to keep the elements out. According to a report in the April 19,1965 edition of the Mail Star, "most homes on the Shubenacadie reserve are 'not fit to live in', ... only three families had sewer and running water facilities. The houses were warped and sagging because green wood was given us to build them with."116 Beatrice recalls: " People don't understand how we were living; in 1968 when I was going to the reserve, we didn't have running water, we
117 didn't have bathrooms...." The statements attributed to Chief Simon Nevin of the reserve and to Beatrice demonstrate the dire condition of homes on reserves.
In 1976, Mi'kmaq Priest Maurice Lewis conducted a survey to document the state of housing for Mi'kmaq people on and off reserve. Lewis took a reporter on his survey to the Middle River Reserve and they found: .. .one of the deceptive ones that sits at the edge of the Trans-Canada. Inside, the house was almost, structurally a skeleton. The floors were bare plywood and the gyproc walls were covered with holes and stains from rain. A small wood burning stove sitting almost alone in the kitchen
1,200 acres of the Eskasoni Reserve. ... - Unlawful alienation of 300 acres of Malagawatch Reserve;" (4).
116 Ed Walters, "Mi'kmaq Indians Face a New Wilderness," The Mail Star 19 Apr. 1965. 117 Beatrice (pseudonym), Personal interview, 13 June 2006. provided the only heat for the whole house. There was no running water, and there were no toilet facilities ..."
And in another home Lewis found that: "Seventeen people share one three- bedroom bungalow. The basement in that house, like many others, was a mess of mud and sewage."119 The article goes on to outline many more instances of this absolute crisis in the housing conditions of Mi'kmaq peoples. Lewis cites the practice of Indian Affairs to fund only two houses per year on reserves when the need far outpaced that number as a major problem in trying to address the issue.
The federal government created the crises in housing by providing inadequate materials with which to build the homes and in not ensuring that there were enough homes for everyone on the reserve. Government imposed controls and solutions caused undue hardship for Mi'kmaq peoples in this and other areas of life, such as building economic self-sufficiency.
Employment
Mi'kmaq people had been excluded almost entirely from employment and self-employment opportunities within the province. Their remote location outside of cities, as mentioned previously, made employment more difficult to obtain. In the 1960s the Mi'kmaq people subsisted on part-time employment, selling handicrafts, working in the potato and berry harvest in Maine or through welfare or family allowance and "make work" projects funded by the federal government.
In the December 19, 1965 edition of the Mail Star, staff reporter Ed Walters
118 Pauline Janitch, "Indians Exploiting other Indians, says Maurice Lewis: Government, Band Council Fail to Tackle Housing Crisis," 4th Estate 17 Jun. 1973: 10-11. 61 wrote: "Every September hordes of them travel to Maine to work as blueberry and potato pickers. Big families sometimes make more than $100 a day." Beatrice remembers her family engaged in this seasonal work. She states:
.. .and of course another big part of life was going from the reserve back to Maine and my mother and aunts and uncles working as migrant labourers in Maine picking potatoes, picking blueberries, living in little shacks basically while you worked for some big company. Children were also working in the fields at that time, it wasn't until in the early 80s that children were not allowed to work 191
in the fields but I remember us working in the fields.
While the article points to the fact that it was possible for a large family to make
$100 per day, it would have been many hours of backbreaking labour. Beatrice
states: "I remember getting paid 50 cents for a barrel of potatoes or $2 for a box of
blueberries, and I mean a box was 3 feet by 2 feet that was like five inches
deep."122
The Mi'kmaq people sought to address some of the issues of
unemployment within their communities and among members with different
proposals to the federal government. Many of these suggestions were met with
resistance and/or deemed inappropriate or unworkable by the Indian Agents in the
communities. For example, Chief Nevin of the Shubenacadie reserve suggested
encouraging industries to locate on reserves by giving them tax breaks. B.C.
Clench, the Indian Agent on the reserve was quoted as saying, "... this would be
impractical because Indians, who pay no taxes, would have an unfair advantage
over, white, tax-paying manufacturers."123 While this idea was seen as
120 Walters 22. 121 Beatrice (pseudonym), Personal interview, 13 June 2006 122 Ibid. 123 Walters 22. 62 inappropriate and unworkable, many of the schemes proposed and implemented by the government then and in subsequent years have been unsuccessful in dealing with high unemployment rates and the resulting poverty in Mi'kmaq communities.
Dorothy E. Moore, who undertook a study of the underdevelopment of the
Black Nova Scotian, Mi'kmaq and Acadian communities, has described the employment situation for Mi'kmaq people as disastrous. Moore writes:
In 1969, the Department of Indian Affairs estimated that 64% of Indians in the Maritimes received Public Assistance during a given month, in [sic] 1977 Micmac leaders estimated that unemployment was as high as 90% on some reserves, and was rising. In 1978, an unemployment rate of 95% among Indians under 25yrs [sic] in Nova Scotia was reported.124
In December 1975, the Chronicle Herald reported "New wave of optimism, on
N.S. Reserves," telling of a government program that would provide an economic
I AC boom for Mi'kmaq people in the province. The editor's note at the beginning of the four part series, featuring government ventures under an employment - self- employment scheme, reads: A new wave of optimism, combined with the strong medicine of economic development, appears to be leading Nova Scotia's Indian population onto a path that could take them once and for all away from the trap of poverty, unemployment and welfare.... 126
124 Dorothy E. Moore, "The Economics of Micmac, Acadian and Black Community Underdevelopment in Nova Scotia," Management MG15 (unknown year) 19.11: 26. Public Archives of Nova Scotia 125 Stan Fitzner, "New Wave of Optimism on N. S. Reserves", The Chronicle-Herald 29 Dec. 1975:17. 126 Ibid. 63
Yet, in spite of this "new optimism" and the government program, we see from
Moore's study that unemployment numbers remained extraordinarily high three years later.
Moore cites the discrimination against Mi'kmaq people (and minority groups) for this situation. She noted that all of the government (provincial and federal) job creation programs over the years were essentially the same programs with different names. They were temporary in nature and produced little long- term effect:
Direct employment programs that produce low paying, short term jobs in a vain effort to get people to do something, anything ... Government strategies ... have been directed mainly to upgrading the employment base in certain 'growth' areas. These areas ... have been most heavily populated by members of the British dominant group in Nova Scotia.127
Beatrice reports that more than thirty years after she made the trip to Maine for seasonal work, families are still making that trip to earn money to buy school supplies for their children and basic necessities like food.
Education
Mi'kmaq children and their families were, like other First Nations groups across the country, victims of the brutal Residential School system in which they were taken from their parents and sent to institutions to be "educated". Education was one of the tools used in the ongoing efforts of provincial and federal governments to assimilate Mi'kmaq people into mainstream society. Mi'kmaq children were not permitted to speak their language or continue any of their
Moore 7. 64 cultural practices. Instead, they were in many cases forced to adopt Euro-
Canadian cultural practices. In the November 24th, 1958 issue of the Chronicle
Herald, under the headline, "Helping Indians Find Own Social Leaders," we are told that a folk school for "Indians" of the Maritimes had just concluded a six day session dealing with issues such as family relations, home management, recreation and several others. The Department of Indian Affairs, Department of
Immigration and the Nova Scotia Adult Education Division organized this program. Thirty-six students from twenty-one reserves attended sessions to
"develop qualities of further leadership and to make the students aware of the needs which exist within their communities".128 The article goes on to say that discussion of the selected topics reflected the present conditions and "desirable changes for the future".
Just as education envisioned as part of the residential school system was focused on civilizing and "de-indianing" the "Indian" so too was the folk school of the 1950s focused on Europeanizing the "Indian".
Fanon writes:
The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.129
The folk school in all that it teaches and about which it remains silent, clearly let
Mi'kmaq children know that among other things, the qualities of leadership, the possibility of meaningful relationships and the ability to care for one's family and
128 Bob Lyons, "Helping Indians Find Own Social Leaders," The Halifax Chronicle- Herald 24 Nov 1958:8 129 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth 29. 65 community are embodied outside of the Mi'kmaq people and communities.
These values and attributes are embodied in the European who represents "the apex of development."130 This violence perpetrated by administrators of the state apparatus is not recognized as violence but as what is necessary to help "Indians" make "a better future for their people."131
There were many challenges to Mi'kmaq children receiving an adequate or even a basic level of education. Though there was a concerted effort on the part of the government to force Mi'kmaq children to abandon the use of their language, amazingly many were able to remain conversant in it. For many children living on the reserve, English was not their first language, consequently it was difficult for them to grasp information presented in that language. This was particularly acute in Cape Breton where the Mi'kmaq language was more commonly used. Lawrence Paul cited this situation when he suggested:
"Unintentionally [sic] qualified teachers lowered their standards when they go to teach children who only speak Micmac."132 Children who went from "Indian" schools to integrated schools were not able to move forward at the same rate as other children within that system in part because of these difficulties created by a lack of fluency in and understanding of the language of instruction.
The overall environment of Mi'kmaq people in Nova Scotia has been hostile or indifferent. Instruction at schools on reserves ended in grade eight and students wanting to pursue higher education were forced to do so in institutions and among people who generally treated them poorly. In January 1976, having
130 Goldberg 82. 131 Ibid. 132 Barbara Hinds, The Mail Star 26 Mar 1969:2 66 traveled from the Shubenacadie reserve to an integrated school in a predominantly white community, eight Mi'kmaq students were confronted by armed white students who carried pipes and other weapons. The unarmed Mi'kmaq students were said to be the targets of racism and racial violence perpetrated by the eight white students involved in the incident. According to the article there were 65
Mi'kmaq students in the school with a student body of 1,150. The parents of these 65 students came together to ensure a fair outcome for their children though the threat of violence remained. The school suspended eight students, of whom two were Mi'kmaq though the article clearly stated that they were unarmed.
Some progress has been made towards improving the quality of and access to education for Mi'kmaq students through the 1950s to today. The meaning and the focus of education have also changed. While in the past education was focused on making pseudo-Europeans of Indigenous or First Nations peoples, it has now become in some cases a powerful tool used to benefit First Nations
Peoples. We see engagement with higher education by indigenous scholars such as Bonita Lawrence, Daniel Paul, James Sakej Youngblood Henderson, Olive
Dickason, Marie Battiste, and others to communicate and assert a Mi'kmaq and
First Nations worldview, understanding of the indigenous past, and to examine the experience, processes and meaning of colonization for indigenous people in the
Americas, and specifically Canada. Blatant segregation in education had decreased by the 1970s and there were programs created in some quarters to address the apparent disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes between the White Nova Scotian and Mi'kmaq populations.
133 Azzo Von Rezori, The Daily News 20 Jan 1976:1. 67
In 1970 Dalhousie University started a program called The Transitional
Year Program (TYP) to address some of the inequalities faced by Mi'kmaq and black students in the province. This program has had some positive results in supporting students to achieve good educational outcomes. Of the over 700 graduates since 1970 some have gone on to obtain PhDs, practice law, become band councillors and social workers, and are represented in a host of other fields.134 In 1989, the university also introduced a program called the Indigenous
Black and Mi'kmaq program to reduce discrimination and to increase the number of lawyers in the province from the two named groups. Over 90 black and
Mi'kmaq students who gained access to the Dalhousie law school through this program have become lawyers since its inception.135 The Dalhousie TYP program has spawned many other similar programs both on and off reserve in other universities and community colleges within the province. This has led to an increase in access to post secondary attendance in part due to the fact that students would no longer be forced into moving to Halifax in order to study.
Life for Mi'kmaq people, in their territory, from the 1950s to the present has been and is concerned with many of the issues that were acute in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their lives were imperiled by the presence of settlers, racial violence and the racist policies of the settlers. There are still outstanding and unsettled land disputes while the influx of many new settlers from all over the world has continued in their traditional territory. Housing, access to education and employment, high levels of poverty and racial violence
Dalhousie University www.dalhousie.ca 68 continues to be a part of the everyday experience and life of Mi'kmaq peoples in the territory now known as Canada.
Mi'kmaq people continue to resist state violence, marginalization and efforts to assimilate them just as they did at the beginning of European aggression towards them and beyond. Just as the state remained committed to the assimilation of the Mi'kmaq peoples into white society, so too did the Mi'kmaq hold to their rejections of attempts to strip them of their traditions, culture and identity. The issues of land, access to habitable housing, education and access to resources that would ensure the Mi'kmaq people's ability to be self-supporting remained unresolved for centuries. In a country where individual land ownership can provide access to capital and resources upon which to build self-sufficiency, the Mi'kmaq people were and are left out of this opportunity, as individuals did
and do not own reserve lands so therefore cannot use them to secure capital.
Conflict and confrontation over land exploded in the 1970s. This was demonstrated in the actions taken to block the provincial government from encroaching on reserve land and claims made on the land in Victoria County, and later for all of Nova Scotia, by the Union of Nova Scotia Indians. It was also
evident in 1973 when activist Greg Johnson and nineteen other Mi'kmaq people
from the Eskasoni Reserve in Cape Breton demonstrated to regain control of land that was set aside as a reserve prior to 1867. They set up camp in what had become Kejimkujik National Park to assert s Mi'kmaq ownership of their traditional territory.
136 Arlyene Corkum, "Mic Mac Indians Staging Demonstration At Kejimkujik National Park," The Advance 25 Jul. 1973: 1. 69
Settlers and immigrants continued to occupy Mi'kmaq lands, both the land designated as reserves and throughout their traditional territory. Daniel Paul,
Mi'kmaq scholar and elder, tells us:
But the most incomprehensible thing for the Mi'kmaq would have been the land-grab section of the Treaty of Utretcht used by the British when drafting the Treaty of 1725137 ... Their lack of understanding of how people can "legally" transfer land that was stolen under the guise of religious beliefs is evidenced by the fact that to this day the Mi'kmaq Nation has consistently refused to recognize foreign ownership of their traditional territory.138
European and other geographies that have been deliberately written to make claims to the territory have obscured Mi'kmaq ownership of Agg piktuk,
Unama'kik, Eskikewa'kik, Sipekne'katik and Kespukwitk.139 Improvements to the conditions of life and justice for the people of Mikmaki depends to a large degree on the cooperation of those who occupy the territory recognizing Mi'kmaq right to the land and their willingness to negotiate the terms of their occupation with the Mi'kmaq people.
Blacks in Mikmaki
The Negro - Coloured - people come from black slaves freed by red coats down in Maryland and Virginia, then transported, like convicts, to 'New Scarcity' during the War of 1812. They bore names like Johnson, Croxen, Grey, States and Hamilton - the surname of John, a hellish master back on hellish St. Simon's Island in hellish Georgia. They arrived just like two thousand others who came with nothing to nowhere, were landed with indifference and plunked on rocky, thorny land (soon laced with
See Paul 79-123 for a description of Treaties between the Crown and Mi'kmaq Peoples which were to govern the relationship between the British and Mi'kmaq Nations. 138 Paul 81. 139 What has been renamed Nova Scotia. 70
infants' skeleton), and told to grow potatoes and work for ale. They was so poor, they supposedly didn't even have history.140
Since Mathieu da Costa's arrival in Mikmaki there have been many other black settlers to the territory. Mathieu da Costa is widely believed to be the first black person to travel to and have contact with the Mi'kmaq peoples, though historian
Colin A.Thompson suggests a "Chronology of Blacks in Canada" beginning in
1492 with one Alonso Nino. According to Thompson Nino accompanied
Columbus to America.141 He also dates Mathieu da Costa's arrival as 1608, which differs from other sources that place him in the territory in 1604. This earlier date seems more likely given the fact that he was a translator for Sieur de
Monts who arrived in 1604 and that he was one of the first inhabitants of Port
Royal, built or erected in 1605. Da Costa was said to be a member of one of
Canada's oldest clubs, The Order of Good Cheer.
The earliest and longest sustained presence of black people in Agg piktuk,
Unama'kik, Eskikewa'kik, Sipekne'katik and Kespukwitk were slaves who likely arrived first in the 1600s and later in large numbers with their white United
Empire Loyalist masters. The next and most significant migration was that of
Black United Empire Loyalists who arrived from some time between 1775 and
1783. They were followed by Refugees of the War of 1812 and then by the
Maroons from Jamaica who arrived in 1796.1 2
George Elliot Clarke, George and Rue (Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2005) 14. 141 Colin A. Thompson, Blacks in Deep Snow: Black Pioneers in Canada (Don Mills: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1979) 95-107. 142 James W. St.G. Walker, A History of Blacks in Canada: A Study Guide for Teachers and Students (Hull: Canadian Government Publishing Centre, 1980) 19-36. 71
Land
Black Loyalists were promised land, freedom and equality if they fought on the side of the British in the American War of Independence. All the promises and assurances made by the British proved to be false. Though in some cases their petitions for land were granted they were given in most cases infertile, barren plots that could not provide sustenance or meaningful support for them.
Black Loyalists were supposed to be treated equally to their white Loyalist counterparts in the granting of land and given all the rights of a British subject, but this was not to be the case. The total number of those gaining grants was no greater than one third of the total.143 These grants were also far less than the 100 acres per head of household and 50 acres for each subsequent family member that was promised. The land grants that resulted in all black Loyalist settlements were received in the Mi'kmaq territory renamed Birchtown, Little Tracadie and
Brindley Town. They were also given lots along with their white counterparts in exclusively Loyalist settlements.144
The system of land grants and license of occupation used in allotting lands to Mi'kmaq people were also used for black people in the territory. White
Loyalists took over land surveyed for Birchtown which was built next to
Shelburne, so many did not get the farm lots they were promised but much smaller city lots that would ensure their economic dependence on whites.
Subsequent settlements of Refugees of the War of 1812 in Mikmaki proceeded in
143 James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783-1870 (London: Longman and Dalhousie University Press, 1976)23. 144 Walker, The Black Loyalists 28. 72 much the same way as for the Loyalists. Refugees who assisted the British (there was no expectation that the refugees fight on the side of the British in order to receive these land grants) were also promised land. Some received grants on infertile and barren land that could not be farmed and others received none at all.
They were also largely settled outside of the city in communities that could not be self-supporting based on their proximity to the centres of industry. Settlement of the Maroons proceeded in a different way. As the colonial government sought to keep the Maroons as allies in the defense against any attacks that might come from the French, they were provided with land and housing as they worked on the
Citadel in Eskikewa'kik district.145 The government ensured Maroon settlement at Preston. The government might have also ensured their transportation back and forth to the Citadel given its distance from Preston and the hardship of both the historic and contemporary black communities in securing and maintaining employment so far away from their homes.
Employment
One of the consequences of having black communities located outside of urban centres or as mentioned above, outside of centres of industry, is the inability of communities to avail themselves of the economic opportunities necessary to provide support to their members. Men worked mainly as seasonal labourers and women as domestic servants. Walker describes the work situation for black people in the 1780s in this way: ".. .with most white people pioneering their own farms and businesses, the blacks supplied the bulk of the casual labouring force
145 Walker, A History of Blacks in Canada 37. 73 engaged in clearing lands, laying roads and erecting public buildings."146 In a
1959 article published in Saturday Night under the heading "Nova Scotia: Model in Race Relations", Marcus Van Steen writes: "The father is usually an unskilled labourer, earning good money when he is working but subject to periodic spells of unemployment."147 The seasonal nature of employment and type of employment opportunities had not changed significantly for many Black Nova Scotians in that time.
In addition to seasonal employment there has been a very high rate of unemployment in black communities. In 1973, the Nova Scotia Human Rights
Commission sponsored a research project on the black population in New
Glasgow. The survey was interested in information related to housing, education, and employment among other topics. The survey included 83 households and that number is said to be 2/3 of the New Glasgow black households. It showed that over 30% of the adult population was unemployed.148 A 1981 report by Fred
Wien and Joan Browne from the Institute of Public Affairs at Dalhousie
University established "by a conservative estimate" the rate of unemployment of
Black Nova Scotians to be: "at least twice as high for the provincial labour force.. .and in certain regions much higher."149 In 1988, the Focus section of the
Globe and Mail ran two articles on Black Nova Scotians. It reported a 60-80% unemployment rate in Nova Scotia's black communities while the provincial
146 Ibid. 32. 147 Marcus Van Steen, "Nova Scotia: Model in Race Relations" Saturday Night Magazine June 6, 1959: 40. 148 Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, "Black Community Profile: A Survey of the Black Population of New Glasgow Nova Scotia" 1973. 149 Fred Wien and Joan Browne, "A Report on Employment Patterns In The Black Community Of Nova Scotia," Dalhousie University Institute of Public Affairs 46. 74 average sat at 10%. In Halifax the unemployment rate was 6.6%. It remained at
80% for Preston which is within a manageable commuting distance to Halifax for those with private transportation.150 These reports of extraordinarily high unemployment rates and the inability of black communities to be self-sustaining, which persist decade after decade provide a clear linkage of this situation to racism and racist attitudes towards Black Nova Scotians. The communities' inability to be self-supporting due to historic and contemporary inequalities and injustice has created crises in other areas of life. Adverse effects on health and in obtaining and maintaining safe, habitable housing are but two of the many areas impacted by the lack of job opportunities.
Housing
The dire economic situation and the location of black communities on the outskirts of cities and towns in Nova Scotia ensured not only their isolation but also the absence of the financial means to replace or rehabilitate inadequate housing. A 1983 survey of the black communities across the province revealed that in addition to the previously mentioned issues, 68% of homes in the black communities have no indoor plumbing, 50% had no central heating and some had no heating at all.151 Though many Black Nova Scotians owned their homes their economic situation made it difficult to maintain and improve them. Public housing stock was also in conditions described as deplorable. The government
150 Deborah Jones, "N.S. blacks: A heritage of poverty," The Globe and Mail 2 Jul. 1988. Dl-2. 151 V. Wayne MacKinnon, "Report of Housing Survey of Black Communities in Nova Scotia," Mar. 1983. 75 departments responsible for public housing had allowed it to deteriorate to such an extent that it had become unlivable and in some cases these housing units were built without services.
In 1972, the Black United Front organized a weekend meeting in Halifax.
Members representing most of the province's black communities attended, as did officials from every level of government. Special attention was paid to the circumstances related to housing such as lack of running water and of polluted water throughout many communities.152 The conference delegates resolved to do a study of the problem in cooperation with the three levels of government.
Undoubtedly these problems have created difficulties for children related to school and educational attainment, for as we learned from Mi'kmaq communities, the ability to focus in crowded living situations and to study in unheated homes proved to be barriers to education.
Education
Educational outcomes were poor for Black Nova Scotians and many in the communities had not completed high school. Black children were often streamed into non-academic programs.15 Racial discrimination resulted in schools with inferior standards when compared to schools attended by white children. Efforts were made to keep black children out of these schools that were better equipped.
In a letter to the Director of Social Development, J. Henry MacNiel, an officer
152 Reid MacLean, "Black United Front convention told: 'Government has failed Black people'," The Chronicle Herald 26 Jun. 1973. 153 Moore 12. 76 within the department outlines the concerns of a black resident in Guysborough
Village respecting the education of his children. He wrote that black parents within the village were told on the first day of school that their children would not be admitted due to overcrowding. While these children were being excluded from the school in their village, white children from another community were being bused in and provided with spaces.
The children were taken to the school in any case on his advice and they were asked to leave by their teachers. MacNiel sought the assistance of the school board trustees and area councilors to remedy the situation but all remained supportive of the school board's decision. MacNiel concludes that the experiences of these families were based on racial discrimination perpetrated by the teachers, school officials, and the school board. The school board fought vigorously to exclude these children and brought significant pressure to bear on
MacNiel by writing to the director of his department and the Premier of the province.154 While this incident represents the experience of a few black families in the province, the racism apparent in this situation was not an uncommon experience for black children and their families in trying to access education.
In the legislative debates of 1984 Alexa McDonough challenged the
Minister of Education on his denial of racism within the province and challenged his government's cutbacks to ethnic education services. Implicit in this challenge, it seems, was an accusation of racial discrimination in the department's allocation of funding to that area of the department. While McDonough's comments were
154 J. Henry MacNeil, "To Geo. H. Matthews," 1 September 1966. Human Rights Minutes and Records. 1964-1966. Public Archives of Nova Scotia 1992-718/001. 77 measured, Iona Crawley, identified as a former Halifax School Board member and former member of Nova Scotia's School Boards Association, was explicit in her condemnation of the racism in the department and system. She wrote in a letter to the Minister:
I would say that you should be ashamed of the 'racism and discrimination' [sic], in the education system in this province. Having served for eight years as a member of the Halifax School Board and Nova Scotia School Board Association from 1970-1978, I tell you there are many, many problems.155
The Council of Christians and Jews weighed into the controversy by asking the
Minister to provide any information on the number of minorities represented on the board, and encouraged him to press for those appointed to the board to reflect the Nova Scotian community.156 Though greater opportunities exist today for black students significant barriers to access to education are also still present.
While individual blacks were able to gain more economically, to access educational opportunities, and to gain meaningful employment and find good habitable housing, Black Nova Scotians as a group were impeded by the racial order of the society in which they lived. We see this situation demonstrated in conditions of life for the pre-Confederation community and in the concerns laid out in the letter from Crawley in 1984. The years between Confederation and
1984 were also marked by these issues, as is seen in this example from 1959. The legislative record of 1959 clearly lays out the racialized nature of Nova Scotian society. During the February 16, 1959 legislative debates Gordon S. Cowan, the
155 Iona G. Crawley, "To Terrence R.B. Danahoe," 1 April 1984. Public Archives of Nova Scotia RG 85 1.18 156 Brenda E. Taylor, "To Terence Donahoe," 4 May 1984. Public Archives of Nova Scotia RG 85 1.18 78
Liberal MPP from Halifax Centre, told the members of a story relayed to him by a professor at Saint Francis Xavier University who was traveling with five black
PhD candidates:
... they had made reservations at a certain place - ... and he had made reservations for six people, and they arrived there late at night tired and hungry, and he had with him these five coloured students. And the proprietor said that he could take Monsignor MacKinnon, but he could not take the others. ... He said he learned in traveling about with these students that there were places in Nova Scotia, towns that should be avoided and places in certain towns which should be avoided.
While black students were able to engage at the highest level in the education system there were nonetheless black people living in Nova Scotia subjected to the racial violence within that society.
Black Nova Scotians continued to fight for equality just as their Loyalist and Refugee ancestors had done before them. The passage of the Human Rights
Act in 1963 and the creation of the Human Rights Commission in 1967 provided little assistance to Black Nova Scotians in their struggle for justice and equality.158
The 1960s and '70s was a dynamic time in the history of what could be considered the black liberation struggle in Nova Scotia. The Black Panther movement of the United States had reached Nova Scotia. Indeed, it was a significant time in the black liberation movement in Canada. In 1968, Montreal was the site of the Congress of Black Writers.159 The conference theme, which appeared in the promotional material, was "towards the second emancipation the
Nova Scotia House of Assembly Debates and Proceedings^ Feb. 1959:507. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Royal Gazette Extraordinary 1959. 158 See the following chapter for a detailed discussion of human rights legislation and the Commission in Nova Scotia. 159 David Austin, interview with Alfie Roberts, A View for Freedom: Alfie Roberts Speaks on the Caribbean, Cricket, Montreal, and C.L.R. James (Montreal: Alfie Roberts Institute, 2005) 75-76. 79 dynamics of black liberation".160 Present at the conference were international figures involved in the black power movement from England and the United
States. Nova Scotia student activist Burnley "Rocky" Jones was also present at this conference. The national and international nature of black activism and organizing within the province was punctuated by the presence of Montreal student activist, Roosevelt "Rosie" Douglas (who later became the Prime Minister of Dominica) and members of the US Black Panther Party. These visitors to
Nova Scotia were also at the Congress and received their invitations from Jones, landing them in the province two weeks before the Human Rights Conference organized by the Nova Scotia Human Rights Federation.161
The presence of the members of the Black Panther Party in the province created a lot of tension and fear. Nova Scotians and perhaps all Canadians at the time were well aware of the militancy associated with the Party and that brand of the black liberation movement. Soon after their arrival one member of the group was arrested on a charge of possessing a firearm. He was pulled over for what the
Atlantic Advocate termed "a minor motor vehicle offence."162 A search of the car produced three rifles and a handgun. He was charged and jailed. The Black Nova
Scotian community convened a historic meeting which four hundred members of the community attended. During this meeting presentations were made by the
161 Gretchen Pierce, "Negro Defense Fund Started," The Chronicle-Herald 5 Dec. 1968: 1&6. 162 Barbara Hinds, "Black Power: Has Halifax Found The Answer," Atlantic Advocate 19 Jan. 1969: 12&13. 163 This black community meeting was the first of its kind ever convened in Nova Scotia or in Canada. These meetings continued under the auspices of The Black United Front and were called the Black Family Meeting. They often occurred in the summer. I attended one in July or August 1993 and found that each community within the province sent delegates or representatives 80 members of the Black Panther Party on the party and its program for black liberation. It was an in camera meeting and all of Nova Scotia anxiously awaited the outcome.164 Shortly after the meeting Rosie Douglas who was speaking to youth was arrested for loitering as he refused to leave the area when told several times by the police. He was charged and released but later found guilty and fined.
Douglas and the members of his party decided that he should serve the five days in jail rather than paying the five-dollar fine. The fear produced not only by the presence of this militant group in the province but by the discovery of the rifles and handgun in the car (which it was later learned belonged to Rocky Jones) led the Chief of Police for the City of Halifax to commute Douglas' sentence to a five hour conversation with him. At the end of the conversation both men held a press conference with the optics of them shaking hands and making peace for all to see.
The years 1968 and 1969 seemed seminal in the articulation of a collective
Black Nova Scotian voice. Strong, powerful, young voices like that of Jones moved to the forefront of the fight for justice and equality. Black struggle in the province was linked to black struggles in other parts of the world and new and dynamic approaches were brought to bear on the movement. The linking of the local, national and international was evident not just in the presence of Douglas from Montreal and Lafayette Surney, the Panther member from the state of
Mississippi, but also in the discourse of the time as demonstrated in the way that the men understood and framed the arrest of the Panther member and Douglas.
Jones stated: "The white community does not understand what their role is - you and the agenda was made up of issues affecting individual communities as well as the larger black community. 164 Ibid. 11. 81 must understand, he is a political prisoner, a black man who is organizing black people." This sentiment is echoed by Surney: "We have a racist court system here. .. .He is a political prisoner." Douglas also expressed the same point of view: "He was really arrested for being a black man."165 The men seemed to have been asserting the idea that if black people were targeted when defending their rights or organizing a black liberation movement, they were necessarily political prisoners. This position is taken within the context of what, at that time, was seen
as a racist war against black people as articulated by most of the leaders of the black liberation struggles. Even if they disagreed on tactics Martin Luther King,
Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver agreed that black people were under attack and
Canadians such as Jones involved in that struggle also took that position. Ozzie
Parker a member of the pre-Confederation black community states: "... so in the
60s what was happening in the States became known in Nova Scotia and people
adopted similar positions.. ,"166
There was a new optimism and determination and perhaps as the headlines
of a December 9, 1968 article in the Mail Star read, a sense that the "Time for
Freedom is Now." In that article the Director of Afro-American Studies at
Boston University suggested that blacks had talked about black power for "... too
long, ... It was time to define a program to gain it...." He suggested a seven-
point plan that included:
growth of Black political power; building Black economic power; improvement of self-image of the Black people; attainment of
165 Pierce 6. 166 Ozzie Parker (pseudonym), Personal Interview, 12 June 2006. 167 Sheila Urquahart and Jim Robson, "Time For Freedom Is Now," The Mail-Star 9 Dec. 1968:11. 82
federal law enforcement; knowledge of how to spend money as a group. ... self-defense ... you can't have White people practicing violence and expect Black people to remain passive.1
It seemed as if Black Nova Scotians had already begun to lay the groundwork for some of these ideas to take shape. The Nova Scotia Association for the
Advancement of Coloured People established after the second World War, gained prominence in the late 1950s and during the 1960s. Still other organizations were founded during this period such as The Black Cultural Centre, The African
Canadian Liberation Movement, Kwacha House1 an organization for black and white children founded by Rocky Jones and his first wife Joan Jones as well as an umbrella organization for black groups in the province, the Black United Front
(1968), and other smaller organizations.
Perhaps the activism and some, might suggest, the radicalism of the late
1960s and 1970s was fed by decades and indeed centuries of inequality, hostility and neglect as represented by state policies and communicated by its practices and institutions and by the majority of white citizens of the province of Nova Scotia.
Publications of all manner spoke of the dire conditions of black people in the province. Government surveys and reports, newspaper articles and legislative records revealed a black population that lacked employment, education and adequate housing. We see that, like their Mi'kmaq neighbours, and in some cases family, issues of education, employment and housing continued to be unresolved and at the forefront of concerns for black citizens within the province.
Hymn to Freedom: Nova Scotia Against the Tides. Prod. David States. NFB. Halifax, Nova Scotia. Date unknown. 83
The Human Rights Conference that took place on December 6,1968,
and titled The Black Man in Nova Scotia provided a focal point and a context for
coming together in a new way. There had been discussions of human rights in the province and country prior to 1968. For example, there is mention in the 1959
Hansard of a human rights conference that year but no details were given.
Another conference was organized by the Halifax Human Rights Committee in
1964.171 A year before the 1964 conference an article in the December, 1963
issue of The United Church Observer caused a furor for the government and the
Dalhousie Institute of Public Affairs.172 In that article, which was the cover story
for that issue, reporter E. L. Homewood tells of the Nova Scotia he found almost
four years after his first visit. He reports that the slum-like housing conditions,
discrimination preventing people from accessing habitable housing, lack of
educational opportunities and the high unemployment rate among Black Nova
Scotians had remained. The usefulness of the Dalhousie University report entitled
Nova Scotia's conference occurred December 6-8 inclusive and the National Human Rights conference was held December 1-3, 1968. This highlights the level and place of Human Rights discussions and activities in the country at that time. 171 "1964 Human Rights Conference," Halifax Human Rights Advisory Committee in association with Nova Scotia Legislative Library, Province House (Halifax: Nova Scotia) 1964. In 1964 the Halifax Human Rights Advisory Committee held a conference in Halifax. Gus Wedderburn was Chairman of the Committee at that time. The conference was supported by nineteen organizations some financially and some by other means of support such as Dalhousie University's Public Affairs Institute that provided space for the conference and a conference report. The forward to the conference reads: "It is appropriate that the sixteenth anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration on of Human Rights should be observed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by a human rights conference concerned with the education, housing, and employment needs of the region's largest racial minority"(l). The Committee is described as an "inter-racial group of citizens that has been concerned primarily with matters relative to the implementation of the Rose Report adopted by the City of Halifax. The Rose Reports refers to a report written by Dr. Albert Rose who was a Professor of Social Work at the University of Toronto. The Committee had requested that he study the city's recommendations in regard to expropriating the land known as Africville and relocating the community. Rose supported the city's recommendations and expropriation was to begin on April 1, 1964. The human rights conference was held December 4 - 5 of that year. This conference and its focus no doubt related to the plight of Africville residents. 172 The Conditions of the Negroes of Halifax City, Nova Scotia, Dalhousie Institute of Public Affairs, Dalhousie University (Halifax: 1961-1963). 84
"The Conditions of the Negroes of Halifax City, Nova Scotia," was questioned by some members of the black communities and dismissed by others. The report focused on the issues faced by Black Nova Scotians in housing, employment, income and education. It essentially placed the responsibility for the dire conditions of the black communities on its members. While it argued that black organizations must take responsibility for changing the circumstances of the community it also warned that black people did not have the ability to look after themselves or their own affairs. A.J. (Gus) Wedderburn173 had this to say about the report: "they attempted to convey that the Negro can do nothing without outside help, and that's just not true".174 The Dalhousie Institute of Public Affairs and its recommendations to the government would have been accepted as credible given the role it played as the expert body upon which the government relied for information concerning black people in the province.
Though these events preceded the gathering in 1968 the level of debate had changed and there seemed to be a new clarity of purpose. The conference
attracted seven or eight hundred Nova Scotians two hundred of whom were said
1 nc to be from the black community. Perhaps people listened in a way they had not before because of what might have seemed to be the imminent threat of the arrival
Gus Wedderburn was not of the black community under study. He was "from away", a phrase commonly used among Maritimers to describe people whose ancestry cannot be traced back several generations. Gus was Jamaican born but he was very involved in the politics of Nova Scotia - his home province - just as other blacks of Caribbean origins had been. He served as chair of the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, he was a member of the Halifax Advisory Committee on Human Rights/Human Rights Federation, the Nova Scotia Human Rights Committee and Commission and perhaps his most contentious and notorious role was the one he played in participating in the government's (City of Halifax) decision to raze Africville. 174 E. L. Homewood, "The Maritimes' Race Problems," The United Church Observer 1 Dec. 1963: 16. 175 Pierce, "Black Power: Has Halifax Found The Answer," 13. 85 of the radical Black Panther party and its partiality to the Malcolm X "by any means necessary" approach over "the turn the other cheek" mantra of the Martin
Luther King's non-violent movement. Maybe it was taken up differently by youth who were impatient with the pace of change and equality, youth who linked their condition and struggle with other black people internationally.
The reports and newspaper articles indicting the government and people of
Nova Scotia for the undeniable racism that blighted communities and individual aspirations might have shamed the government and populace into action. In the days leading up to, during, and after the conference the entire province and sometimes the country was focused on Black Nova Scotia. In the December 6,
1968 edition of The Chronicle-Herald two MPs and the Mayor of Halifax commented on the situation of black people in the province, it is as if they were seeing these issues and circumstances for the first time.176 The MP for Halifax,
Robert McCleave, urged all levels of government to set an example for other employers by hiring Black Nova Scotians. He called for "a new approach to housing," improving the legal system, better educational opportunities and a change in "public attitudes towards the Negroes". The MP for Dartmouth-Halifax
East, Michael Forrestal, added: "The Negro must get equal billing in the fields of education, housing and municipal services. .. .Precious darn little has been done for the Negro in Nova Scotia for the first 200 years".177 Another article on the
same page adds: "Mayor O'Brien attributed the slow development of opportunities for Negroes in the city to lack of awareness and concern about the
"Government Must Lead," The Chronicle Herald 6 Dec. 1968: 45. 86 conditions of others ...". While each of the elected representatives pointed to the problems, they also recognized the efforts of government organizations such as libraries, police and fire departments and other sites where blacks were employed in the city. The two MPs paid tribute to the Canada Manpower Centre on
Gottingen Street for the "tremendous work it has accomplished in finding both
White and Negro jobs".178 This recognition of efforts, even if progress had been slow, appears in all of the literature concerning Black Nova Scotians, even in much of the work produced by the Dalhousie Public Affairs Institute. While
White Nova Scotians were willing, when "called out" or when they found themselves in the spotlight, to admit to the deplorable condition of Black Nova
Scotians, there was almost always mention of the good intentions of the whole community and the state and there was always space for white innocence.
Inherent in this position was a denial of responsibility for the situation and the role of white supremacist attitudes and racism in creating it. Conversely, black culpability is implicit in this denial.
The optimism and momentum of the 1968 Human Rights Conference carried over into the following year. The Black United Front (BUF) was founded at the end of the conference and by August of 1969 it had received $470,000 in
funding from the federal government. BUF's founding chair W.P. Oliver had
assured the Mayor of Halifax Allan O'Brien that the organization intended to work with the establishment. Black activism and the threat of radicalism had
178 Ibid. 179 Some of the support for this funding allocation might have come from former Premier Robert Stanfield who had become leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and leader of the opposition. Stanfield's government had been responsible for much of the rights legislation in the province prior to his departure for Ottawa in 1967. 87 motivated the municipal, provincial and federal governments to at least appear to be acting honourably by attempting to rectify the situation for Black Nova
Scotians. Both the municipal and provincial governments had already received unfavourable publicity and considerable criticism for the destruction of the
Africville community. Africville was a black community of 80 families located on the Halifax waterfront. The city of Halifax razed the community citing the deplorable conditions of the homes, the lack of services and its slum like appearance in a modern, developing urban centre. Residents of the community were relocated to rent-geared-to- income-housing throughout the city despite the fact that they preferred to be kept together as a community in homes they owned.
The community had been there for over one hundred years. While the city criticized the conditions of Africville as deplorable, it had provided no water or sewage services to the community which created some of the concerns around health and sanitation highlighted as justification for relocating the residents. After the destruction of the community the city needed to publicly redeem itself following the unfavourable media attention it received. The provincial government appeared to have stayed in touch with what was happening with organizations such as BUF but they also kept an eye on student activists such as
Rocky Jones.
Among the documents of the Deputy Minister of Public Welfare F.R.
MacKinnon, is a copy of an interview with Jones conducted by Campus
Magazine. MacKinnon was the deputy minister responsible for the Human Rights portfolio in the conservative government of G.I. Smith. The Minister's interest in 88
the interview becomes clear once one reads the document. In this article, Jones
talks about the Panthers, the national and international struggle for black
liberation and his belief that change cannot happen without armed confrontation.
Campus Magazine editor Bob Strupat asked: "Are you saying that there can be no
reorganization of society without armed conflict?" Jones responded: "I'm saying
that if you are talking about total change, as I am, total change cannot occur
without armed struggle. Historically this has been proven and I would suggest
that the people in control now will not give away the control non-violently".
Jones and his activities must have represented a threat to be contained by the
government since his activities were responsible for the presence of the Panthers
in Nova Scotia and he openly talked of armed struggle and the fact that he was
part of an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggle that was
- connected to other struggles worldwide. Perhaps Jones was being provocative
when he stated: "I'm involved in a People's Movement. The structure of it is not
known. The amount of people involved is not known - or not openly known.
Those who do know don't tell and those who tell don't know".181 Though given
his beliefs about the change that was necessary in the society, how it would be
achievable and his associations, the statement was likely cause for great concern
to some.
The January, 1969 Teach-In held at Saint Francis Xavier University,
chaired by the Executive Secretary of the Human Rights Commission, Gordon
Earle, with closing remarks by the university's president, Rt. Rev. M.A.
180 Human Rights Minutes and Records, 1992-718/001 1968-1970. Bob Strupat, Campus Magazine 16. Public Archives of Nova Scotia. 181 Ibid. 15. 89
MacLellan, perhaps signaled goodwill and a commitment by some in the society to continue the conversation begun in the previous year and to tackle the problems head on.182 At Saint Francis Xavier a student organization, X-Project, involved in social action work with minority groups, organized the Teach-in, which had a wide range of participants from within and outside the black community. Two months after the Teach-in Premier G.I. Smith, in a speech to a Conservative audience, talked of the discrimination suffered by the province's "Negroes and
Indians". He stated that he would like to believe that much of the discrimination was unconscious and simply a case of people not thinking about what is morally right or wrong. Smith counseled that although human rights legislation can support those who are affected by discrimination the solution lay in the hearts and minds of individual members of the community.183
Far from the limited unconscious acts, as envisioned or imagined by
Smith, perpetrated by the few, it could be said that the 1970s demonstrated poignantly the conscious and deliberate nature of the individual and the state's racism towards Black Nova Scotians. By 1971 the goodwill and optimism had dissipated and the racial order of things had once again been reasserted. Alerted to ongoing issues of racial discrimination in Annapolis Royal by a letter in a daily newspaper, a television station proposed doing a program on the relationship between the black and white communities there. An editorial in the Annapolis
Royal Spectator warned the black community in an article titled "Black Man -
182 "Teach In Report: Black Man of Nova Scotia" Saint Francis Xavier University Extension Department Library 1969. VF 311: 21 Public Archives of Nova Scotia. 183 "Nova Scotia Premier seeks end to racial discrimination problem," Globe and Mail 14 Apr. 1969: page unknown. 184 "Black Man - Stand Up And Be Counted," editorial, The Spectator 8 Dec. 1971: 2 90
Stand Up and be Counted",185 to oppose a request from the television station to do the story. It spoke of the dire consequences that could be associated with such a , decision, including loss of employment opportunities, and "the goodwill the black man has spent years in creating."186 Three months after that editorial in April
1972 the Chief of Police of the town resigned. He attributed his resignation to a case in which he was accused of racial discrimination by the town solicitor. There was also a television expose that alleged racial discrimination against him and the possibility of an investigation by the Human Rights Commission. Members of the community supported him with a petition of 800 signatures and the town placed an ad in the newspaper declaring that there were all kinds of discrimination in
Annapolis Royal:
... against the poor, sick, the maimed, the blind, the mentally retarded ... There may even be some against the blacks, the whites, [sic] reds. .. .But we have lived in harmony with these minor discriminations for the past 365 years and left to our own devices we can survive that many more...."187
They were apparently not left to their own devices because the following month the town had been found guilty of discrimination against a black employee and ordered by the Human Rights Commission to reinstate him and pay compensation for his lost income. The town again took out an ad in the newspaper but this time they told the citizens that they were not guilty of racial discrimination charges laid against them. By June 1972, the Mayor, Deputy Mayor and Clerk-Treasurer of the town resigned.188 The white community and the government of Annapolis
185 Ibid. 186 Ibid. 187 "No Discrimination in Annapolis Royal," The Spectator 26 Apr. 1972. 188 "Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Clerk-Treasurer Resign," The Spectator 7 June 1972: 1. 91
Royal had committed itself to maintaining the status quo. They complained bitterly about the involvement of government agencies in their affairs. Perhaps the calls of the editor for the black man to stand up and be counted were heeded in a way he and the town had not been prepared for.
The town of Antigonish was also experiencing racial strife beyond the boiling point and some of the headlines of April 1972 warned that blacks and whites were carrying knives and guns for protection against attacks from one another. The violence had apparently started when a black youth was attacked by whites and was taken to the local hospital by police. Black residents of the town called for action from the police to ensure their protection or they would have to take matters into their own hands. The Black United Front made clear the position of the resident in a town meeting on the issue.
In 1972 at the Black United Front convention delegates complained of the lack of progress on issues affecting the black communities. They were urgently focused on the critical issue of the polluted water systems in the communities and were attempting to get answers from the government representatives in attendance. Rather than the spirit of cooperation suggested in 1968, municipal, provincial and federal government officials refused to take responsibility for the lack of progress by asserting jurisdictional division. The government's neglect of black communities, escalating racial violence and tension of Annapolis Royal and
Antigonish might have again reminded blacks of their place in Nova Scotian society. The promise of the 1960s went unrealized into and beyond the 1970s.
"At Antigonish: Some Blacks And Whites Carry Knives And Guns For Protection," New Glasgow Evening News 10 Apr. 1972: 1. 92
The racial incidents ebbed and flowed. The black communities remained consistent in their expectation of, and their struggle and demand for justice and full inclusion in their society.
High unemployment, low levels of education, substandard housing and inadequate healthcare remained in the face of government commitment, usually after public shaming, to improve the opportunity for and overall outcomes of black people in the province. The racism that denied Black Nova Scotians full participation in the society remained though it took, in some cases, a different face.
The lives of Black and Mi'kmaq people in the province ran a parallel course; both groups were, from the beginning of their contact with whites, subjected to unequal treatment and racial violence. They were forced into communities outside mainstream society and lacked the means and opportunities to support themselves and their families. Though the government did not identify black spaces as reserves, if one looks only at the material conditions of life in these communities it is difficult to tell the difference between them. Mi'kmaq elder Patrick states:
Sure, there is certainly black reservations in Nova Scotia.. .and it is not called reservations but when you look at Preston and all of these places where black people were deliberately delivered to. You can come into town.. .you can look after our kids and maybe cook for us, but once you do that, you get the hell out of here and go back where you belong.190
Patrick is referring to both the remoteness of black communities in terms of their proximity to the urban centres (in the case of Preston, Halifax is the closest urban
190 Patrick, Personal Interview, 13 June 2006. •93 centre) and their deliberate separation from white communities. Beatrice in some ways supports Patrick's assertion of the meaning of black community locations and conditions. She asserts: "It may not have been legally set aside but the big implication and the impact was the same".191
There were, however, differences between the groups in how land was assigned. Black people, who were granted land were, just as their white counterparts, granted individual plots and title, though they were settled in many cases as a group and they often also received land for communal uses such as churches and schools. Blacks just as whites were settlers and occupiers of
Mi'kmaq territories. The land granted them belonged to the Mi'kmaq peoples and though they were settled on unproductive and barren plots, these plots were located on un-ceded, stolen and occupied territories. While it is important to acknowledge the inequality inherent in the system that white settlers used to disadvantage black people in Mi'kmaq territory it is also important to note that white settlers promised land that did not belong to them. As Cherokee activist
Pamela Kingfisher points out, whites were only in the position to offer the mule but the forty acres belonged, in this case, to the Mi'kmaq peoples.192
Both relied heavily on the very people who created the perilous conditions in which they lived, for their survival. The historical record reflects a state often
191 Beatrice, Personal Interview, 13 June 2006. 192 Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005) 47. Kingfisher made her comments at the "UN Conference Against Racism in 2000". Smith writes: "Although a wide variety of demands are articulated under the banner of "reparations," indigenous peoples generally oppose the demand that the US government give land to African Americans and other people of colour.. .At this meeting Roma and African descendant groups called for 'self-determination over their ancestral landbases in the Americas'. Of course, indigenous peoples took issue with this demand as it implicitly denied indigenous title to these same landbases [sic]" 47. 94 more concerned with living conditions for Black Nova Scotians than for the
Mi'kmaq people, though one should be cautious not to overstate the level of concern demonstrated by the state. The 1968 Human Rights Conference is a good example of the state's focus on Black Nova Scotians with little regard for the situation of the Mi'kmaq communities who lived with similar and in some cases worse conditions. A young welfare officer from the Shubenacadie reserve named
Greg Johnson pointed to this situation at the beginning of the 1968 Human Rights
Conference. He asked: "Will it take a cry of Red Power to get equality for the
Indian, Mr. Premier?" He went on to say that the Mi'kmaq peoples were legally discriminated against in the same manner as black people. Johnson argues powerfully that there were no black reserves in the province and that unbelievably but undeniably true, blacks had "better schooling, and job opportunities as well as complete access to welfare services".194 The Chairman of the Human Rights
Federation, Chief Justice Cowan, the sponsor of the conference, responded by saying that it was felt that the problems of Black Nova Scotians: "were more to the fore... most important to emphasize at this time".195 Justice Cowan goes on to say that perhaps there will be another human rights conference dealing with the issues facing Mi'kmaq peoples but he qualifies that statement by saying that it is likely that future conferences will deal with several different "problems" rather than one. The injustice apparent in the approach taken by those involved in the conference is lost even on its organizers, including, one could argue, the leading
193 Sheila Urquhart and Jim Robson "Indian Discriminated Against Too, Says Welfare Officer," The Mail-Star 9 Dec. 1969: 11 194 Ibid 195 "Little Likelihood MicMacs' Problems Will Get Airing," The Chronicle-Herald 6 Dec. 1968: 45 95 human rights organization in the province at the time. The Human Rights
Conference was an annual event held by the Nova Scotia Human Rights
Federation. The focus of the 1968 Human Rights Conference was to provide a forum for discussion of the issues affecting black communities. It seems as though it was also intended to demonstrate to Black Nova Scotians that the government and White Nova Scotians were interested in the issues that affected them.
Just as the 1968 conference focused on Black Nova Scotians to the exclusion of the Mi'kmaq people and minority groups within the province so too did the Human Rights Committee of 1962 that later became the Commission. In the following chapter we explore human rights discourse and legislation in Nova
Scotia. The consequences of legislation on the day-to-day lives and long-term prospects of the "protected" is interrogated and, importantly, the question of the true meaning and intent of legislation is explored. 96
Chapter 4
Racial Subjects and Human Rights
"Historicism makes it possible for proponents of modernity to hold
on to privileges of racial configuration of state and civil society
without abandoning the expressed commitment to universalism".196
David Theo
Goldberg
"Since the native is subhuman, the Declaration of Human Rights
does not apply to him; inversely, since he has no rights, he is
1 07
abandoned without protection to inhuman forces ...
Jean Paul
Sartre
"The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion".198
Toni Morrison
How do we move from colonization to equality? Can we will ourselves from one place to the other? What is the point of transition, what does it look like, when will/does it happen? Can we go from believing that someone is subhuman to
196 Goldberg 156 197Jean-Paul Sartre, in Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and The Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957) xxiv. 198 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1993) 43. 97 seeing them as a fully humanized person? What happens to transform that person in my eyes, consciousness, and psyche? Have I always known about their humanity but acted against what I knew and am I now reconnecting with what I have always known? Can you be (regarded as) equal while an Indian Act regulates your life? Does legislation necessitating your protection make you less than those not in need of protection? Or can you be protected and equal? Can a declaration of your humanity or human rights make you human to those who have considered you otherwise for centuries?
The issue of discrimination and the need for human rights protection became a preoccupation for Canada and the world during and after the Second
World War. The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights lent support to the movement in Canada for rights protection. The issues of the internment, deportation and abuses suffered by Japanese Canadians, the discrimination against Jews, Black Canadians, other racial minorities and a growing sense in some quarters that the state needed to be proactive in ensuring a level of equality between citizens helped to crystallize the movement.
Cynthia Williams identifies the 1933 Regina Manifesto of the Co operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) as the clearest in expression of interest in protecting civil liberties.199 It advocated, "equal treatment before the law' regardless of race, national origins, religious or political affiliation.200 The manifesto of 1933 became CCF policy and in 1945 a CCF motion for a Bill of
Alan Cairns, Cynthia Williams ed., Constitutionalism, Citizenship and society in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985) 4. 200 Carmela Patrias and Ruth Frager, "This is Our Country, These Are Our Rights': Minorities and the Origins of Ontario Human Rights Campaigns," The Canadian Historical Review 82.1, Mar. (2001): 8 98
Rights was introduced and defeated in the House of Commons.201 Perhaps the defeat of the Bill of Rights led those organizing provincially for human rights to an understanding of what obstacles laid in the way of success.
In Ontario human rights activists belonging to organizations such as the
Jewish Labour Committee/Labour Committee for Human Rights and the
Association for Civil Liberties pursued rights protection through the passage of individual pieces of legislation to minimize the opposition they may have faced from critics.202 This strategy led to the first and most comprehensive rights legislation in the country. By the mid 1960s the Canadian and provincial governments enacted human rights laws and created Human Rights Commissions to administer the legislation.
Fred R. Mackinnon, the Deputy Minister of Public Welfare in Nova Scotia from 1959 -1980, cites the appointment of Reverend Dr. William Pearly Oliver to the Department of Education in 1945 as the provincial government's first attempt in "improving the lot of visible minorities".20 Oliver's appointment under the
Liberal government of Angus L. Macdonald to "organize and promote self-help" among the Black Nova Scotian communities, can perhaps be seen as the province's first step towards human rights action or legislation.
This chapter explores human rights legislation and discourse in Nova
Scotia, through an examination of the written record as well as through interviews
201 Caims, Williams Ibid. ' 202 R. Brian Howe, "The Evolution of Human Rights Policy in Ontario," Canadian Journal of Political Science 24 4 Dec. (1999): 791 203 Fred R., MacKinnon, Reflections: 55 Years in Public Service in Nova Scotia (Halifax:Femwood Books, 2004) 95. 99 conducted with some of the descendants of the pre-Confederation black community and the Mi'kmaq community.
Human Rights in Nova Scotia
The idea of full citizenship and equality for all remains unfulfilled in Nova
Scotia. But I have argued that full citizenship and equality is unattainable in the modern state which is characteristically and unavoidably racial in nature. In The
Racial State, Goldberg writes: "Naturalism increasingly gave way to the common sense of historicism, the violence of an imposed physical repression to the infuriating subtleties of a legally fashioned racial order".204 If as Goldberg suggests, the shift in the state's modus operandi was from naturalist to historicist modes, then race has not been dislodged as an organizing principle. Moving from naturalist to historicist perspectives means effectively disguising, covering over and rendering racism and racist violence less visible. From this vantage point human rights legislation can then be seen as a tool employed in an effort to minimize the worst manifestations and effects of racial violence within the
204 Goldberg 203. 205 See for example Alan Borovoy, Human Rights and Racial Equality-The Tactics Of Combat (Toronto: Ontario Woodsworth Memorial Foundation, 1960) 5-7. Borovoy distinguishes between the private and public realm in his discussion of the tactics employed in organizing the Ontario Human Rights campaign in the late 1940's, 1950's and 1960's. Borovoy argues that the law is an appropriate way to deal with discrimination in the public realm but not in the private. He writes: ".. .the private snob club enjoys and ought to enjoy the legal right to discriminate in its membership policies. However, we must not confuse legal right with ethical propriety. Even though we have the legal right to choose our associates by ethnic origin, we are committing an ethical impropriety to do so". Advocates for human rights in Ontario were not campaigning for a deracialized society they were arguing for restraint in the "public" sphere. This is significant to Nova Scotia and other provinces since Ontario was at the forefront of the fight for human rights legislation and introduced what is said to be the country's first such legislation. In March 1963, following the passage of the Canadian Bill of Rights in
1960 and one year after Ontario consolidated its Human Rights legislation, the
government of Nova Scotia introduced new rights legislation to provide greater protection from discrimination to the province's racial minorities. This legislation, also incorporating anti-discrimination bills passed in the 1950s,
constituted the province's new Human Rights Act. The page one headline of the
March 7, 1963 Halifax Chronicle Herald reads: "Bill to Ban Colour Bar
Introduced". We learn from the article that discrimination on the grounds of race will be prohibited in rental dwellings with more than four units and in the work force regardless of size. The article reports that the prohibitions in
employment would not apply to domestic service in a private home, to charitable,
religious, philanthropic, educational, social or fraternal organizations not operated
for private profit, or to organizations which operated to foster the welfare of
specific religious or ethnic groups.207 In other words, the ban on the colour bar
doesn't materialize. We see instead the confirmation of racial inequalities and
unequal, racialized citizenship enshrined in the law.
The inadequacy of the protection afforded by the new legislation was not
lost on all. The Debates and Proceedings of the House of Assembly for March 14,
1963 showed that a vigorous discussion occurred in the Nova Scotia Legislature
between the members who supported the bill as it was presented and those who
"Bill to Ban Colour Bar", Halifax Chronicle Herald 7 Mar. 1963: 1 101 felt it did not go far enough to end discrimination against the "Negro". Liberal
MLA Clyde Nunn208 stated:
... with the barring of people from housing groups where there are self-contained apartments and this is superior in that regard to Ontario legislation which limits it to six, nevertheless the people by and large who live in these larger apartments where rents run from $125 to $150 and $200 a month, are not by and large members of the Negro population. They do not customarily seek accommodation in these larger apartment houses.209
Mr. Nunn continued to outline the reasons why the "Negro" did not rent the type of accommodations covered by the legislation. He pointed out that economically those accommodations were out of reach and that fact alone would keep them from gaining access to that type of housing. He concluded his presentation on the housing loophole by saying:
If there are not more than four self-contained apartments the law does not apply,... the element of our population that this law is designed to protect, house themselves in apartment houses, individual houses where there are less than four.210
Nunn pointed to other areas of discrimination not covered by the Human Rights
Bill. For example, he raised concerns about advertisements, which under the bill could not mention preference for creed, colour or religion. He pointed out that the bill covered only the public press and that advertisements by other more effective means than the public press were used to recruit teachers and others. The Nova
Scotia Human Rights Act, with all of its loopholes and areas where there was no protection afforded from racial discrimination, was among the most progressive and comprehensive in the country. Nova Scotia and Ontario were the only
J. Clyde Nunn was the Liberal Member of the Provincial Legislature for Inverness. 209 Nova Scotia House of Assembly, Debates and Proceedings 6 Mar. 1963: 880-881. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Royal Gazette Extraordinary 1963. 210 Ibid. 881. 102 provinces with a Human Rights Act that offered protection from discrimination in housing (however limited).
In 1959 or I960,212 Premier Robert Stanfield wrote to Fred R. MacKinnon,
Deputy Minister of Social Services and Dr. Hardy Moffat, Deputy Minister of
Education, asking them to investigate the social and economic situation of Black
Nova Scotians. He further instructed them to make recommendations on
improving their social and economic conditions.213 Those requests led to the
formation of the Interdepartmental Committee on Human Rights in 1962, which
evolved into the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission.214 The Human Rights
Commission Act received Royal Assent in 1967.
21' Ontario passed the Fair Accommodation Practices Act in 1954 which dealt with discrimination in rental housing, it was applicable to buildings with six or more units. Ontario was well ahead of all other provinces in implementing Human Rights legislation, consolidating all of the rights legislation into a code and establishing a Human Rights Commission to administer the code. For an excellent discussion of the development of human rights legislation in Ontario see Howe 1991 and Patrias and Frager 2001. Williams in Cairns and Williams 1985, presents a good overview of the development and discourse of "citizen rights" in Canada. 212 In the Preface to Volume 1 of Human Rights Minutes and Records 1962-1963, Fred R. MacKinnon informs us that the letter of request from the Premier which gave rise to the Human Rights Committee went missing as part of a Human Rights file he was putting together for the Provincial Archives. The minutes of committee meetings were loaned to someone who never returned it and this letter was part of the missing files, consequently he is unsure of the exact date. 213 Stanfield's timing coincided with several events, including the passage of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's Canadian Bill of Rights. Perhaps Diefenbaker influenced Stanfield given that both men were members of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and at that point Stanfield was still a strong Diefenbaker supporter. See Geoffrey Stevens, Stanfield (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited 1973) for a discussion of the relationship between the two men before and during their contest for leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1967. As mentioned earlier this was also the year that Ontario consolidated its human rights laws into one act and established its commission. Also important at the time was the US civil rights movement which provided Stanfield and others with ample evidence of the effects of a black liberation movement. The similarities between Nova Scotia's segregated black communities with their inferior housing stock, the lack of employment and inferior educational opportunities and the black communities in the southern USA could not have been lost on anyone alive in Nova Scotia at the time. Stanfield's actions and decisions regarding to human rights were no doubt also informed and influenced by the militancy and effects of black struggles in the US that reverberated well beyond that country's border. He was politically astute and could no doubt see the similarities between black people in both countries. 214 MacKinnon 101. MacKinnon credits Stanfield and his request as the impetus behind the creation of the Human Rights Commission. MacKinnon states: "Without Premier Stanfield, human rights legislation might not have been introduced for at least another decade". This seems 103
At the time of Premier Stanfield's request there were three pieces of legislation in Nova Scotia which could properly be called Human Rights
Legislation. The Fair Employment Practices Act of 1955 provided protection from discrimination in employment and membership in Trade Unions on the grounds of race, national origin, colour or religion. This Act applied to work places with five or more employees. The second piece of legislation, the Equal
Pay Act of 1956, sought to equalize the pay of men and women doing the same work in the same establishment. In 1959, the Province also enacted the Fair
Accommodation Practices Act. The Human Rights Act of 1963 repealed the Acts of 1955,1956 and 1959, becoming the single piece of legislation that offered
Nova Scotians some protection from discrimination.
As indicated earlier, all of the rights legislation including the Human
Rights Act contained glaring loopholes that provided only partial protection from discrimination.215 For example, The Fair Employment Practices Act of 1955 did
unlikely for a couple of reasons. The first is that Stanfield won the provincial election in October 1956 and took over the office of the Premier in late November of that year. The Fair Employment Practices Act of 1955 and The Equal Pay Act of 1956 both predated Stanfield's tenure. In fact The Fair Accommodations Practices Act of 1959 passed three years after Stanfield took office was crafted and introduced by Gordon S. Cowan, the Liberal MLA for Halifax Centre. On the second reading of the bill on February 16th 1959, Premier Stanfield felt that while "we may very well have some prejudice in this province, .. .generally speaking our people get along very well with each other" (509). The only Acts that could be attributed to the Stanfield government are The Human Rights Act of 1963 and the Human Rights Commission Act of 1967. In fact the pace of implementing Human Rights legislation slowed under the leadership of Premier Stanfield. It is however fair to say that the Stanfield government implemented a comprehensive program under the banner of human rights. Secondly, the Acts of 1955 and 1956 were in step with what other provinces, and later the federal government, were doing to enact rights legislation and since though they were out of office the 1959 legislation was a Liberal initiative, there is no evidence to suggest that the Liberal government if they had remained in power would suddenly forgo progress in the area until the 1970s as MacKinnon suggests. Stanfield's only contribution was to consolidate the Acts into one and create a Commission which was not even charged with enforcing the Act. It was in fact the government of G.I. Smith that brought enforcement of the Act under the jurisdiction of the Commission. 215 Patrias and Frager, and separately Howe also cite loopholes in the Ontario legislation. In Ontario human rights legislation occurred or was enacted because of the work of a varied and 104 not apply to workplaces with fewer than five employees. This effectively meant that some employers could not be prosecuted for racial discrimination even if they were found to be perpetrators of racism. In the Proceedings and Debates of the
House of Assembly for February 16,1959, J. Clyde Nunn points to a situation where an employer was indeed found to have discriminated against a job applicant who was not "white".216 He relayed this to his colleagues in the legislature:
An employer of labour ... advertised for certain clerical help. When the applicant appeared after a telephone call,... he ascertained for the first time that the young lady was not of the white race. And then he made some sort of a faltering excuse that the job has already been filled.217
He goes on to say that because of the required five or more employees for the act
to apply this employer "was able to escape the penalty of the law".218 Given its
limited scope and the loopholes contained in the province's Human Rights
Legislation one is forced to wonder about its true intent and purpose.
Goldberg writes: "The elevation of racial historicism was not simply
coincidental but co-constitutive with the rule of law as a principal medium
fragile coalition of groups and individuals. While most of these individuals (see Patrias and Frager 4-10) found anti-semitism abhorrent they also believed in the superiority of "Anglo- Saxons" and "the need to maintain Canada's British character". Some activists within these coalitions believed that racial differences were real. Perhaps loopholes in the legislation reflected the compromises necessary for each group to realize its desire for their particular human rights goal which might not have been attainable through its own effort. As expressed in Howe there was also a lot of what he calls "counterpressure" brought to bear on efforts to strengthen or expand a human rights program. The balance between individual rights (including for some the rights to discriminate, see Borovoy), minimizing the state's intervention in the lives of citizens and importantly a lack of commitment to human rights, or perhaps more accurately equality, created legislations which was symbolic in the treatment of minority concerns but lacklustre in real effect. 1 In the Debates and Proceedings of the House of Assembly for February 16, 1959 (515), Nunn refers to an investigation conducted by an investigator sent from Halifax by the "appropriate body in the government". He does not name this body or department. 217 Nova Scotia House of Assembly. Debates and Proceedings 16 Feb. 1959 Halifax, Nova Scotia. Royal Gazette Extraordinary. 515. 218 Ibid. 115. 105 through which racial dominance was henceforth to be maintained." If this is so, then the passing of the legislation in spite of its exceptions, limitations and loopholes can be understood as an act of enshrining in law the unsuitability of
Black Nova Scotians for equal citizenship, rather than legislation geared to guaranteeing their equality.220 In this view, Nova Scotia was able to lose or step out from its reputation as an outright racist society with its racist expression of
Black inferiority to a more "liberal" manifestation, masquerading as conviction or commitment to the idea of the inherent equality of all. The province gained a new reputation and becomes part of the "civilized" world without substantively changing the circumstances of Black Nova Scotians, or, as Fanon suggests, its
"fixed concept of the Negro",221 simply by declaring its belief in human rights. In a 1963 speech, W.S. Kennedy Jones, Chairman of the Nova Scotia Human Rights
Committee, supported this notion of an improved reputation for the province. He wrote:
There are some who say that the Human Rights Act does not go far enough and this may be so, but it does represent progressive thinking and action. Our legislation is as enlightened (emphasis mine) as that of any other Province in Canada and some of our provisions go farther towards preventing discrimination than those of other Provinces."222
During the March 14, 1963 Legislative Debates all of the members of the legislature congratulated the government on the introduction of the Human Rights
nv Goldberg 143. 2 ° While the legislative records demonstrated that members like Nunn pushed for rights legislation to go further, the Human Rights Act was nonetheless supported and passed unanimously by the house. 221 Fanon, Black Skinx White Masks 35. 222 Honourable W.S. Kennedy Jones, "Address By The Honourable W.S. Kennedy Jones To The Nova Scotia Association For The Advancement Of Coloured People", Fifteenth Annual Provincial Conference of The Nova Scotia Association For The Advancement of Coloured People, Halifax, 18 May 1963. 4. 106
Act. Even if they felt it could go further they generally agreed that it was good legislation. The presentation by the member identified as Mr. Ahern was different; though he congratulated the government on the bill, it seemed perfunctory as three pages of the record is taken up with a plea to his colleagues to do something immediately for the people of Africville. He begins:
I am delighted to support this bill and I would like to join with the other members of the House in congratulating the minister upon his able exposition of the things that should be done. But I like to see things done overnight. I did appeal to the House some time ago. When I asked that a $750,000 bond issue be issued, somebody thought I was in a jocular mood. I wasn't and I feel that we could make quite a move if we immediately went to Africville, provided them with a decent school, a better church and better homes.
Ahern goes on to detail the facts of inequality of circumstances and opportunities that thwarted the aspirations of these citizens of the province. He speaks of the fact that "everyone" knows that water for this community was taken from dirty wells and the lack of action on the part of the city [Halifax] to provide the meagre thirteen thousand dollars necessary to rectify the situation. He advises his colleagues that the people of Africville wanted to stay in their homes and needed support in finding more jobs, and establishing a school closer to their homes so that their children would not have to be bussed to other communities. In the middle of Mr. Ahern's presentation the member identified as the Hon. Mr.
Donahoe interrupts him, "You want to segregate them".224 Mr. Ahern denies this charge and challenges the government to "... take immediate action - if this government is sincere, and I think probably this government is sincere - to
Nova Scotia. House of Assembly, Debates and Proceedings 14 Mar. 1963: 889. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Royal Gazette Extraordinary, 1963. 224 Ibid. 891. 107 provide that $750,000 and give these people out there a start - the first start in
Nova Scotia, a decent place to live".225 The debates end with no comment on his presentation from any other members of the house besides Mr. Donahoe and the speaker who cautions Mr. Ahern that he is to stick to the bill in question. If human rights were more than mere optics at this point in Nova Scotia, the members of the legislature might have acted on the situation presented to them by member Ahern.226
The consequences, and true intent of Human Rights Legislation in Nova
Scotia (and I would argue elsewhere), was to conceal, manage and maintain inequality227 rather than enshrine the sentiment so eloquently cited in Hannah
225 Ibid. 891-92. 226 Ahern's party affiliation is unclear in the Hansard as is his constituency. What is clear in the Hansard records is that he was a member of the Halifax City Council and later the Mayor of that city. He had supported the thirteen thousand dollar loan to improve some of the conditions in Africville. He became an MLA and continued to meet with people in Africville and asked other members of the house across political party affiliation to join him at the meetings. His comment on page 891 of the March 14, 1963 Hansard records that: "I called a meeting out there one night and I didn't ask only Liberals but I also asked Conservatives, we asked everybody else", suggests perhaps that his conservative colleagues did not participate. 227 This is not to deny the agency and action of Black Nova Scotians and Mi'kmaq people in bringing about changes in their situation through resistance to racial violence nor is it to deny the efforts of members of the B'hai Faith, the Quakers, Fran and Don McLean and others who Ozzie credits for organizing to pressure the provincial government to institute a commission to investigate police actions towards Black people in Halifax. "Teach In Report: Black Man of Nova Scotia" Saint Francis Xavier University Extension Department Library 1969. VF 311:21 Public Archives of Nova Scotia. The report'stated: "The February session of the Nova Scotia Legislature is expected to amend and greatly improve a relatively weak Human Rights Act in the province". At that meeting and in the same report Dr. W.P. Oliver who had worked - and was at that time still working - in the Adult Education Division of the Department of Education since 1945 stated: "With one side of the mouth we're saying, 'come along', but with the other side we are saying 'only so far'"(6). Despite the best efforts of 'moderates' such as Oliver and left activists such as Jones and other members of the black community, Mi'kmaq people and other racial minority groups and their allies, human rights legislation failed to bring about substantive change in the lives of those affected by racial discrimination. While it may perhaps appear cynical to conclude that this legislation is merely optics it is difficult to conclude otherwise when as mentioned before the same underwhelming results of the legislation in Ontario exists and the continuation of the same adversity faced by groups protected by the legislation remained year after year. Nova Scotia in fact, demonstrated its lack of commitment to equality in its search for a Director for the very organization created purportedly to bring about change and equal rights. In the January 1969 edition of the Atlantic Advocate, we learn that James Harding the Minister of Housing and the person responsible for 108
Arendt's Between Past and Future: "human rights must be held sacred, regardless of how much sacrifice is required of the powers that be ... regardless of what might be the physical consequences ...".22S As mentioned in the preceding chapter, in 1968, the province participated in a Human Rights Conference sponsored by the Nova Scotia Human Rights Federation titled "The Black Man in
Nova Scotia". In the report to the Conference dated December 6, 1968, Chairman of the Commission, W. A. MacKay, lays out the tasks assigned to it. They were:
"to coordinate the programmes of government that relate to human rights matters, to do and to encourage research by others in human rights problems, to develop a programme of public information and education about human rights matters, and to work with private organizations concerned in the fields of human rights".
The Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission was not responsible for enforcing the Human Rights Act. Administration of the Act was the responsibility of the
Department of Labour as it had been when the Human Rights Committee coordinated these concerns within the province. The report goes on to say:
appointing the Director of the Human Rights Commission received fifty applications. During the December conference Harding was asked after he announced that Marvin Schiff of Toronto a former Globe and Mail writer, who also had some affiliation with the University of Toronto in Philosophy and English, was to be the first Director: "Was it not a fact Black people from Halifax had applied? And had not a Halifax lawyer applied for the job, and not even received a reply to his application? (14). Harding acknowledged that ten to fifteen percent of the applicants were black people, all from Halifax and that they "had been told 'no' verbally over the phone". Harding was described as looking extremely embarrassed and the audience as astonished. If the province was serious about its own legislation and ending racial discrimination it might have given a fair opportunity to people like W.P. Oliver who had done work with the province's community of interest since 1945. Minister Harding might have also sought out the expertise of one of the past Chairmen of Halifax Human Rights Advisory Committee, H. A. J. Wedderburn. Both were members of the black community and were eminently qualified for the position of Director. One can argue that they were far more knowledgeable about the situation of human rights in the province and held qualifications that were much more suitable than Schiff s. 228 Kant qtd. in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin) 228. 229 W.A. MacKay, Report of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission. Human Rights Minutes and Records. 1992-718/001 1968-1970. 109
We must recognize that many in our community, both black and white, have for far too long been handicapped in their opportunity for full personal development. We must recognize also that black people in Nova Scotia, as a group, have not had the same opportunities as have many among the white majority. Sometimes people refer to this as the problem of the Negro community and more recently we are told that this is really a problem for the white 230
community.
Human rights discourse, in the official circles in the province, was a
"Black/White" conversation, or rather a conversation concerned with what to do about the "Negro" problem. It was not about equality. The privileging of the needs of Black Nova Scotians can be understood in the context of the perceived threat of a black liberation movement that might borrow tactics from its counterpart in the United States. Given that local ties to the Panthers had been previously established, a sense of urgency to some preemptive action or containment of the problem on the part of the government was created. As previously mentioned the black population of Nova Scotia was estimated to be about eleven thousand at that time. It was the largest of all minority groups in the province. The Mi'kmaq population was one-third the size of the black population. The sense of urgency felt to deal with the black community did not exist with other groups given their size as well as the lack of pressure and influence from a radical movement just beyond the border.
A concern for and with true equality would at the very least be able to consider all instances of thwarted aspirations and inequality in outcomes for all citizens of the province. The call of Mi'kmaq activist Greg Johnson for inclusion of the Mi'kmaq peoples on the rights agenda in 1968 would not have been
230 ibid. 110 necessary. The complaints of the Mi'kmaq and Acadian peoples to the province about their exclusion from the rights agenda would also not have been necessary if equality of process, opportunity and outcome was the legitimate concern of those attending to and proclaiming human rights. Mi'kmaq elder and scholar
Patrick supports this assertion. He states: "if you were a true believer in human rights and you were Premier of this province at that point in time you would have looked at both communities and said something has to be done across the board.. .I'm going to invite them in and we are going to put together information that will include the Mi'kmaq".231
In 1973, the August 2nd edition of the newspaper, 4th Estate, reported that both the Mi'kmaq and Acadian communities in the province complained that not enough attention was given to the discrimination leveled against them.232 The article refers to comments made by a member of the Mi'kmaq community, former
Human Rights Commissioner and Coordinator of Communication for the Union of Nova Scotia Indians, Roy Gould, and Paul Gaudet, the Director of
Administration for the Federation Acadienne de la Nouvelle-Ecosse. It states:
"Both men indicated that they realized the great amount of work that is needed in the area of discrimination against Nova Scotia Blacks but they stressed that their minority groups need good communication with the Commission as well."233
Dorothy E. Moore supports the need for attention to the difficulties of these two
231 Patrick, Personal Interview, 13 June 2006. 232 Brenda Large, "Spokemen for Acadians Indians criticize Human Rights Commission," 4thEstate! Aug. 1973:3
233 Ibid. Ill other communities in her study of the Acadian, Black and Mi'kmaq communities where she speaks of the inequality experienced by these groups and of their historical disadvantage in relation to the "British" majority within the province.
She writes:
.. .historically Acadians, Blacks and Micmacs, have all occupied the most disadvantaged rural locations, and their communities are still to be found in the worst 'poverty pockets' in the province. ... ethnicity continues to be associated with different experiences .. .234
The circumstances of the Acadian and Mi'kmaq communities warranted no less an intervention than did similar circumstances in black communities.
The Premier's request to the Deputy Ministers in 1962 makes clear the concerns regarding human rights in the province. This commitment was reiterated in a 1966 Human Rights Committee meeting in which the members were asked by a consultant (Professor Brookbank of Dalhousie University) if the
"Negro" should be in a special category. The minutes of the November 9,1966 meeting state: "It was the opinion of those present that the Negro in Nova Scotia should have the same rights as the individual in any other minority group or any other citizen, but he should have special consideration and attention."236
Established out of the concern for the conditions of the "Negro", seven years later the Commission dealt with the issues of the black communities to the exclusion of other minority communities within the province.
Dorothy E. Moore, "The Economics of Micmac, Acadian and Black Community Underdevelopment in Nova Scotia," Public Archives of Nova Scotia MG15 19.7: 26. Date unknown. 235 Premier Robert Stanfield was among the members present at this meeting. 236 Minutes of Proceedings 9 November 1966. 1992-718/001 1964-1966. Public Archives of Nova Scotia. 112
The apparent contradiction between the declared (human rights principles and legislation) and the manifest (conditions of life for the protected) may lead us to conclude that these issues arise out of oversights that can be rectified through strengthening of human rights provisions, but this is not so. By design human rights legislation is not interested, per se, in changing the material reality of those protected. Rather it is about managing the differences that exist within a state's, or in the case of Nova Scotia, a province's jurisdiction. The evidence of this, in
Nova Scotia's expressed interest in human rights, is contained in several provincial documents including the March 14, 1963 records of legislative debates of that day. The terms of reference of the Human Rights Committee are stated as the following:
...(1) To give immediate attention to the problems ofthe negro (sic) in Nova Scotia. (2) To review existing provincial services and legal responsibilities in respect to all minority groups, including negroes, and make recommendations as to how such services may be more effectively rendered for the benefit of these minority groups and how existing legal responsibilities may better be discharged. (3) To make recommendations regarding programs which may be undertaken, (a) to improve race relations in the fVovmce(emphases mine) (b) by educational authorities, business .. .to promote freedom and equality of opportunity for all persons 237
Nowhere in the terms of reference does the province guarantee action to ensure equality; it intends only to "promote" it.
In the above record we see statements such as: "... in reaching towards the general principle that every person should be free and equal in dignity and
Human Rights Minutes and Records. Minutes of Proceedings 14 March 1963. 1992- 718-001 Public Archives of Nova Scotia Archives. 113 rights, without regard to race, colour, creed, ancestry or place of origin" and
"... hon. Members of this house would like to think that Nova Scotians are continually striving towards the basic general principle that everyone should be entitled to have equal opportunity to direct his life toward what he thinks will be the most rewarding objectives".239 Nova Scotia reaches and strives towards a principle but makes no guarantees or commitments to provide what is necessary to attain a "level playing field" for all citizens within the province. It does not even declare an intention to do so. In December, 1963 members of the black community under study stated to E.L. Homewood, Editor and Reporter with the
United Church Observer.
... Mr. Coleman, and some other Negro leaders, claim the Act isn't being enforced. 'And if the law isn't being enforced, it immobilizes the people ... It is worse than having no law at all. If there were no law, our people would be adamant in having something done about discrimination. As it is there is a law to cover it but it doesn't work.240
One might take this or these statements to mean enforcement would lead to effectiveness or improvement in circumstances of the protected, but the following statement from interviews conducted with members of the pre-Confederation black community and the Mi'kmaq community contradicts that conclusion. A member of the Mi'kmaq community was asked on June 12, 2006 by the interviewer whether things had improved for her community as a result of the passage of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Act andHuman Rights Commission
Act. Beatrice replies:
238 Ibid. 865. 239 Ibid. 869 240 E.L. Homewood, "The Maritimes' Race Problems," The United Church Observer 1 Dec. 1963: 14-16. 114
... if you are off reserve and you have something happen to you that falls under the act, it would apply. But I don't think that things have gotten better since the Human Rights Act. And the reason that I think that things have not gotten better is because ... racism is really hard to prove. ... I remember many different times that I have been discriminated against and that going to the Human Rights Commission is onerous, it's cumbersome, complicated ...241
Beatrice, who is a lawyer, felt in addition to the fact of the process being "onerous
...", that the evidence one can present is often not enough to demonstrate that discrimination actually occurred. Beatrice notes that acts of racial discrimination aren't often explicit. There is usually no clear and unequivocal statement denying you a service based on race. She states: "It is much more subtle than that... sometimes it's like I get a bad feeling about this person and they are treating me in a weird way. My husband is Mi'kmaq but he doesn't look like it, he's very light skinned, he has light hair. So he went into the bank and asked for a loan and we were trying to open our own business and he tells them "oh my wife is a
lawyer" and they said "oh good that's great, we have this program for professionals like lawyers", and I walk in and she says "no"".242 Beatrice also
feels that the situation of providing evidence that you have been discriminated
against and the grounds for that experience is even more complicated when there
are multiple possibilities. Beatrice states: "... like multi-levels of discrimination
the commission cannot deal with ... Nobody has just one thing. I am Mi'kmaq
and I am Beatrice".243
Rights legislation in Nova Scotia accomplished little more than fixing the
protected as "other". For those who object, this is not to say that the "visible edge
241 Beatrice, Personal Interview, 13 Jun. 2006. 242 Ibid. 243 Ibid 115 was not taken off racial discrimination but it is to caution against overstating the value of human rights legislation. There is a difference between human rights protection and equality. Goldberg writes:
.. .in British India or French Algeria law applied to its colonizing and indigenous inhabitants differently even as inherent equality of the rights of man was abstractly recognized. ... Law legitimates its own inapplicability.. .law itself the categorical differentiation in its racially driven applicability.244
While the guarantee of equality under the law might prove to be useful as a remedy or perhaps recourse in challenging discriminatory behaviour, its function seems more ideal than practical. Human rights legislation and inequality can co exist remarkably well within the same space. The page 3 headline of the
November 7,1975 edition of the Cape Breton Post reads, "History Making
Human Rights Seminar Held At High School". The article tell us that: "Cape
Breton is more cosmopolitan than any other area in Nova Scotia and the progress being made here by the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission is greater than that made by any other human rights commission in Canada".245 It goes on to say that this conference held at the Sydney Academy was the biggest human rights conference ever held in the country, with fifteen hundred participants. Yet among the human rights documents from the Nova Scotia Archives is one marked with the Human Rights Commission stamp "Received - March 17,1976". This document has as its title "Fashion Show Entertainment; Annual Nigger
Jamboree". It begins,
24-Goldberg 143-144. 245 "History Making Human Rights Seminar Held At High School," Cape Breton Post 7 Nov. 1975:3. 116
During the next tow (sic) hours there will be an open season on chimney sweeps. Between the hours of 8:00pm and 10:00pm on the 11th of March a new sport of Broom a Coon will be introduced during intermission of the fashion show. All Coons in the school at this time can and should be beaten to death or (at least crippled).246
This document was posted and originated at the same Sydney Academy, which hosted three months earlier, a historic human rights conference in the most progressive and cosmopolitan city in Nova Scotia and one credited with responsibility for Nova Scotia's lead over other provinces in the field of human rights. The March 25th edition of the Cape Breton Post reports that the offensive document was placed on the bulletin board of the school on March 10th. Articles in the same publication at the end of March and in early April suggest that there was significant public reaction to this incident all over the province. There were meetings between the "Black community", school board officials and the Human
Rights Commission that resulted in joint recommendations for dealing with the incident. While there was an investigation it appeared that the Commission was unable to determine who was responsible for the document.
Protection maintains inequality. Both are inextricably linked. I am asserting that to be protected is to be unequal. The one who protects has power over the protected. In speaking of difference Mackey makes a similar assertion, stating that: "The power and the choice whether to accept or not accept difference, tolerate it or not, still lies in the hands of the tolerators .. ,".247 It is by the goodwill and attention of the one that the other is not exploited and by the neglect
Human Rights Minutes and Records. Fashion Show Entertainment, Annual Nigger Jamboree. Public Archives of Nova Scotia 247 Mackey 19. 117 of the one that the other is ravaged. As Morrison asserts in Playing in the Dark, inequality and protection are yoked together: "The rights of man, for example, an organizing principle upon which the nation was founded was inevitably yoked to
Africanism. Its history, its origin is permanently allied with another concept: the hierarchy of race."248 While I do not mean to belie the specificity of place or locality by quoting Morrison's US example, it is entirely possible to extrapolate from one racial state to another. The hierarchy of race that can be found in US society is also demonstrated in the Canadian state through federal and provincial legislation such as the Indian Act and, as I have argued, through human rights legislation.
There is an intimate dance between human rights legislation, and inequality; one is assisted by the other. Inequality begets human rights legislation; human rights legislation begets inequality. If we were to take away human rights declarations and legislation what would be left? I propose that what would be left is unbounded action. As was noted in the Observer interview, the fact that there is a law ties the hands of those who it "protects". Law, the state's intervention, diffuses the power of their action. It might be argued that what is protected are the privileges and excess of the majority population and the deprivations of life for the protected. In other words, human rights protection, or more correctly human rights legislation, maintains inequality.
What underlies the state's/provinces insistent assertion of the universal equality of all in the face of evidence that demonstrates without effort the
Morrison 38. 118 falseness and unreality of such a claim? I argue, as Goldberg argued, that this assertion is a (re) commitment to the categorical "them" and "us". In asserting a commitment to universalism the state/province's steps into the league of enlightened nations. The harassment and persecution of Kirk Johnson who successfully sued the Halifax Police Services for race discrimination and Donald
Marshall Jr. who lost over a decade of his life in jail because Crown Prosecutors took his status as a young Mi'kmaq person to signify and demonstrate his guilt, was perpetrated by state institutions charged with upholding or rather enforcing the universal rights of all its citizens. Though this reality stands in stark contrast to the expression of equality under the law, it is this demonstration of violence, contempt and hostility towards difference that serves as the more common or universal expression of citizenship in the province.
If we go back and look at the incident at Sydney Academy, the site of the odious manifesto and the staging ground of the province's illusory struggle over the ills of racism, much can be learned. The document continued:
Don't be shy come out and beat your favorite jungle bunnies women included in the fad sport sweeping in [sic] high schools across the nation don't be shy come out and participate. The human rights association will supply the clubs [sic] Come on the nigger jamboree all your white friends will be there. All proceeds will go toward the Emmigration [sic] of Coons back to Africa or where ever they were dug up, if you want any souvenirs you will have to bring your own chain to transport to where you want them to serve you.249
There was of course immediate public objection to this explicitly racist and violent expression. In addition to highlighting the continued threat of racial violence to the province's racial minorities, including both the Black and
249 Human Rights Documents. "Fashion Show Entertainment, Annual Nigger Jamboree" 119
Mi'kmaq communities, it tarnished and challenged the government's assertion stated by George McCurdy at the conference three months earlier. When he was quoted in the Cape Breton Post, speaking of the "success" of the seminar: "It shows the people are determined they are going to build on the positive momentum that we find growing in Nova Scotia - to set human rights on the right track".250 A review of government documents and articles in the popular press make Mr. McCurdy's pronouncements about the people's determination and positive momentum puzzling, unless he is referring to the determination of the two communities to resist and push back against racial violence. What is well documented in the interviews, the newspaper articles and government records prior to and during the period of the conference is the unabated threat and manifestation of racial violence in all its forms.251
The response of the school which was said to be, by the April 7th Post: "... only to voice indignation at those who condemned it publicly", and "that the incident was blown out of all proportion", seemed entirely appropriate given the racial climate in the province at the time. An article in The Highlander, written the same day supports this view, stating that: "The Scarlet (sic) letter on the
Academy Bulletin Board was a crazy effort, and the response to it in some quarters was even crazier".252 In reaction to Dr. Carrie Best's letter to Post253
250 "History Making Human Rights Seminar Held At High School," Cape Breton Post 7 Nov. 1975: 3 251 There are very few documented cases of racial violence against Mi'kmaq communities in the popular press or in provincial records. This is of course not to say that this was an indication that the Mi'kmaq community fared better in this regard than the Black community. It can and should be read as the indifference and lack of attention paid to the province's indigenous population. 252 "The Word and the Deed/' Highlander 7 April 1976. 253 "Academy Document Recalls Klu Klux Klan" Cape Breton Post 2 April 1976: 3. 120
Editors in which she suggests that part of the notice is reminiscent of the KKK and indicative of the possibility of outside interference, the writer continues: "The fact is where bigotry in words is concerned, Cape Bretoners are as competent as anyone, anywhere, and don't need any help from the Ku Klux Klan."254 The writer minimizes the significance and indeed the incident itself by placing it in the context of an Island (Cape Breton) which, (s)he says,: "has its fair share of Archie
Bunkers, and jokes with racial overtones are as popular here as the equally insulting regional overtones of the Newfy jokes, which are in turn repeated in
Halifax as Cape Bretoner jokes, thus completing the happy circle of denigration."255 The article goes on to say that humour occasionally crosses the line into ugliness, and the Academy letter can be seen in this light, but that the note was mild when compared to publications like National Lampoon. The article condemns those who suggest that the Principal of the Academy, and member of the Human Rights Commission, is condoning racism, as sick (he describes the
Academy letter as "sick").
Proponents of human rights legislation held it as a tool to eradicate racial violence. This assertion was reiterated in the face of evidence to the contrary provided by studies that spoke to the conditions of minority groups, in particular
Black people, in the province, newspaper reports of daily violence and the
Commission's own experience in trying to investigate and enforce the law (when the task of enforcement and investigation became a part of its responsibilities through amendment of the Act in 1969). As discussed in the previous chapter, the
254 "The Word and the Deed" 121 town of Antigonish was one of the sites of intense racial strife and violence in the
1970s. In 1972, the beating of a young black man by three white men brought the ever present racial tension in the town to what could be considered an armed struggle given the fact that white and black residents alike armed themselves with knives, bats and guns.256 This incident brought the glare of the media to the community as well as the intervention of organizations such as the Black United
Front (BUF) and the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission. In an effort to support the "black" residents of the town the BUF organized a community meeting with members of both communities and the police committee. Jules
Oliver who was then Executive Director of the BUF was quoted in The Casket as expressing his satisfaction with the large number of people who attended the meeting: "Weleft the meeting satisfied that we had made the police committee members aware of the situation and race relations generally in the area."257 Leo
Chisholm, the Chair of the Police committee, is said to have summed up "his own reactions to the meeting as an educational experience and one which would do much to further the cause of race relations in the area." There was a quality of innocence and optimism on the part of Chisholm, Oliver and the Human Rights
Commission that seemed disingenuous. Given the fact that the citizens of this town had become well armed factions, how is it possible that the Chairman of the
Police Committee, Mayor of the town and member of that community needed to have a lesson or "educational" experience about the state of race relations in his community? Is it really possible that BUF and the Human Rights Commission
256 "Some Blacks and Whites Carry Knives and Guns for Protection," New Glasgow Evening News 10 April 1972: 1. 257 "Black-White Dialogue: Town police Criticized," The Casket 13 April 1972: 1 122 believed that the committee did not have an understanding of race relations in the area?
Human rights legislation, conversations and programs in Nova Scotia were spectacle with players from all walks of life contributing to producing and re producing Black and Mi'kmaq subjects and the terms of their subjectivity, with the Human Rights Commission playing its ineffectual role in the drama. Leo
Chisholm, the Mayor of Antigonish and a former cabinet minister in the government of Angus L. Macdonald, stated on May 18,1972: "You ask me if there is discrimination in Antigonish and I'd have to say absolutely not... There aren't any blacks here so there is no discrimination". He then corrects himself and recalls that there were about twenty families. In the same article we are told:
a prominent resident was discussing the current racial tensions. Quiet, gentle, sincere. He had been honestly surprised that such things were happening in his town and he was relieved that the committee [human rights committee] had been formed to deal with it. A hopeful sign for future harmony, he was convinced.259
The reporter then engages this prominent resident in a conversation on the difficulty that black people within the town had in finding work. The article continues:
why there's one nigger ... ah ... er ... black man working down there at...' He talked a little faster, nervously, his eyes riveted to the floor. It had been an unconscious slip of the tongue, borne out of years of unconscious casual racism .. ?
Angus L. MacDonald, "Antigonish Does Some Soul Searching after Beating and Charges of Racism," 4th Estate 18 May, 1972: 12-13.
Steve Kimber, "BUF, McCurdy Involved: Antigonish Does Some Soul Searching After Beating And Charges of Racism," 4th Estate 18 May 1972: 12. 123
In a report in the October 7 edition of Weekend Magazine this statement was attributed to a town leader: "The trouble is blacks are better fed now. It's harder to beat them up".261 In the same article after innocently proclaiming that he didn't realize how prejudiced he was, Mayor Leo Chisholm (the same who denied that racism existed in Antigonish) states:
Why my old dad tells me that in his day they use to go out and beat the niggers up just for the fun of it... " Near the end of the article Joe Chisholm says of the human rights committee of which he is a member: "We're making good progress ... it's been a great education.262
The great tragedy of the above situation is that this was not, in reality, a theatre of the absurd. Though it played out that way it was part of the real life experiences of Black Nova Scotians.
The failure of human rights programs and initiatives to bring about changes in the lives of black and Mi'kmaq people within the province was evident beginning with the earliest piece of legislation enacted in 1955. In every decade thereafter there was talk of commitment and re-commitment to human rights with very little to show for it. While governments and their officials talked about equality of rights many did not believe in the notion of the equality of all citizens and still more were unable even to support the mere optics of equality of rights.
At an earlier point in his speech to The Nova Scotia Association for the
Advancement of Coloured People, W. S. Jones, Chair of the Human Rights
Committee states: "Your Association which is dedicated to the Advancement of
261 Douglas How, "The Whites of the small Nova Scotia town of Antigonish knew about the fine humanitarian reputation their famed university had brought them. What they didn't know was that for two centuries they had been blinded by prejudice," Weekend Magazine 7 Oct. 1972: 4. 262 Ibid. 6 the Coloured People of our Province has, I believe, made a particular measure of progress in recent years. Granted that progress is a step at a time I think that there has lately been a quickening in your steps of advancement".263 After laying out what he saw as the successes and work of the committee thus far, he continued by making reference to the worldwide struggle of Black peoples for freedom and places Nova Scotia in the context of that as well as what he felt needed to be addressed by the committee:
In many parts of the world your race is in a straggle. This is often referred to as a struggle for freedom. It is not always easy to define what is meant by this word freedom but I think that we can say here in the Province it was not a violent struggle and a large measure of freedom was achieved some time ago ... you seek now opportunity to learn more, to live better, to secure better employment,... These things will take time but you are moving in the right direction ... To achieve these opportunities you must develop a greater measure of something that perhaps up until now you have not thought you could afford and this thing which you must develop more of is Ambition [sic]. You must be ambitious for yourselves, you must teach your children to be ambitious.264
There was also always an understanding of black culpability for the circumstances of their lives and always the notion that their redemption was possible to the degree that they applied themselves and challenged the ills within (i.e. the lack of ambition noted).265
263 Jones 1 264 Ibid. 6. 265 A report titled "Survey of the Negro population of Annapolis County Under The Terms and Reference Laid Down by Inter-Departmental Committee on Human Rights" dismisses the state's/province's and white citizens responsibility for the terrible living conditions of Black people in that County. Racism is categorically dismissed as a factor in the lack of employment opportunities, lack of basic services such as water, sewer systems etc. even when the report itself describes explicitly how white citizens organized to keep a black housing development spearheaded by St. Francis Xavier University from materializing. This development was one of three that were successfully blocked by white opposition. All were meant to provide better living conditions. The report states: "It would be too easy to say that discrimination and prejudice [sic] were deciding factors in a Town where coloured college students of all nationalities have been housed for years. Rather, the problem is economic. Some white families feel land values would 125
The steadfast assertion of human rights legislation and programs as a means of dealing with racial violence could only be believable if one entered into the realm of wishful thinking existing outside of the reality of life in the province. The province was deeply implicated in the racist attacks on black and Mi'kmaq peoples even as it claimed to be concerned with the equality of citizens within the province.
In the following and final chapter of this thesis, we review what we have already learned about the relationship between the pre-Confederation black community and Mi'kmaq community and add new information from the interviews with community members.
suffer. ... The fact remains that in trying to help 5 low income group Negro families to acquire better homes, the St. F. X. Extension Department found itself embroiled in all the pertinent Negro problems with the whole town alerted and no immediate solution in sight. It continues: "The fact that St. F. X. has started this movement and that the Christian Family Movement exists at all, would indicate that real reace [sic] prejudice is not a governing factor and that people who might be motivated by such prejudice are in a very small 'hard core' minority" 4. 126
Chapter 5
Black/Mi'kmaq Relations in Nova Scotia
".. .1 think there have been times when, at least in my experience ...
people have worked in both communities very closely together and one
thing I find though is that one of the things that is different that has to be
recognized is that Mi'kmaq people have a treaty relationship with the
Crown and some people don't get that".266
Beatrice Maple
".. .we could make a very powerful movement if we address the issues
properly and unite ourselves in a united force.. ."2 7
Tom Brand
This Chapter examines the relationship between the descendants of the pre-Confederation black community and the Mi'kmaq community in Nova Scotia relying primarily on information gathered from community members. Six members of both communities were interviewed in the summer of 2006. In locating participants for the interviews I contacted the following organizations within the black and Mi'kmaq communities, The Council of Mainland Mi'kmaq,
The Office of Aboriginal Affairs, Mi'kmaq Justice Institute, The Black Cultural
' Beatrice Maple (pseudonym), Personal Interview, 13 June 2006. ' Tom Brand (pseudonym), Personal Interview, 12 June 2006. 127
Centre and The Office of African Nova Scotian Affairs. I also contacted the Nova
Scotia Human Rights Commission. Having lived in Nova Scotia I also relied on my knowledge of elders and others within the community. I telephoned one of the elders and informed him of my project and he agreed to be interviewed. He directed me to two Mi'kmaq elders who he thought would be able to engage my questions. My telephone calls and e-mails generated a list of a possible eight to ten informants. Two people found out about the project from others and contacted me to express their interest in being interviewed. Of those two people I chose to interview one. Of the two other participants I was aware that one had been engaged in legally pursuing the issue of land rights and title for her African
Nova Scotian community and the other had significant information to share in regards to the relationships between the two communities. All but one of the possible participants I pre-screened and all of the Mi'kmaq organizations I spoke to recommended the two Mi'kmaq elders, so I included them in the interviews. I selected the participants based on their ability to speak about the time period under study as both observers and participants in the events shaping their lives.
Critically they needed to have first hand information of the late 1950s through the
1980s of life in and for their own community. The interviews lasted between one and one half hours. There were three members from each community; three were men and three women. All were in their mid forties and older, two were lawyers, two scholars, two held administrative positions in education, three were elders
(from both communities), four were comfortably middle class, two were working class and five of the participants could be described as activists given their 128 political engagement with issues affecting their communities. Several open-ended questions were asked of each participant. The answer to the following are taken up in this chapter: what is the relationship between the Black and Mi'kmaq communities, what is the meaning of "indigenous Black" Nova Scotian and what do you think of or how do you understand the term "indigenous Black" Nova
Scotian?
Generally Speaking
The 1992 conference on racism in the education system at Dalhousie
University was a collaboration between the Black Nova Scotian and Mi'kmaq communities. This project began with the expectation of finding and documenting many more such collaborations. Given the fact that both communities were victims of debilitating racial violence it would seem that collaboration and collective action might have improved the chances for success where the actions of one community might fail to convince the state to act. There were many times when one questioned whether joint struggle and resistance held the possibility of effecting a change in the circumstances of both groups. For example, during the period surrounding the 1968 Human Rights conference
student activist Burnely "Rocky" Jones and Greg Johnson were both articulating strongly and unequivocally the need for immediate change in the conditions of life for their communities. What might have been the outcome if black activists,
"community leaders" and human rights proponents at the time responded to Johnson's statement that the "Indian was also discriminated against" by demanding that the Mi'kmaq people be included on the rights agenda?
Mi'kmaq elder Patrick believes that the lack of collaboration between the two communities is rooted in the 1961 decision of the Stanfield government to exclude Mi'kmaq people from the Human Rights Committee and therefore from the human rights agenda in Nova Scotia. He answers the question what is the relationship between the Black and Mi'kmaq communities in this way:
.. .very little interaction at this point. You don't have to take long to answer. I think it related to that 1961 decision. If both people had been brought together by being included in the Human Rights Commission and you know working together probably would have built into a more productive relationship... .26
Patrick believes that the Nova Scotia government actively pursued a "divide and conquer" strategy in dealing with the two communities. He reasoned that the collective strength of both communities might have challenged the government to respond meaningfully to their issues. Tom Brand another Mi'kmaq elder held the same position he states: ".. .we could make a powerful movement if we address the issues properly and unite ourselves in a united force and get some social and legal action happening".
In the 1960s the Mi'kmaq population by government account stood at
3,908 people and the black population at 11,000.270 In late the 1950s and into the late 1960s and early 1970s it was the plight of Black Nova Scotians that captured the public imagination. Perhaps the size of the black population of Nova Scotia
268 Patrick Oak, Personal Interview, 13 June 2006. 269 Tom Brand ibid. 270 George Brand, "An Address Delivered by Mr. George Brand, Department of Public Affairs, Halifax to the Fourth Annual Conference of the Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada", Regina, 26 Oct. 1963. 130 made them more visible than the Mi'kmaq people. The news reports about the dire conditions of black communities and the razing of Africville shamed the government of Nova Scotia into action. The government did not have to respond to the conditions of the Mi'kmaq community because their issues did not garner as much public attention.
While Oak and Brand speak of a powerful coalition between the two groups as likely to elicit a response that would change the circumstances of both
t communities such a coalition seemed unlikely. Perhaps as Oak suggested the government might have employed a divide and conquer strategy but there appeared to be little evidence that this coalition was considered or even desired by members of the black community at large or by those attending to human rights matters. In fact what is clear from the evidence is that Black Nova Scotians concerned themselves largely with the plight of their community. In 1969 Gus
Wedderburn, who was a member of the Nova Scotia Association for the
Avancement of Coloured People (NSAACP), was also a member of the Human
Rights Commission. On April 14l of that year he attended a Commission meeting in which Rev. Mumford reported on what was referred to as "some major problems in the area of human rights". As the minutes of the meeting reveal: Rev. Mumford pointed out that in Truro there is a fairly substantial black population and there is also an Indian reservation there or just outside of town limits. The situation in the Indian community could in fact, be more serious than that of the black community.. ,271
Mumford's report continued outlining the situation for the black community and what is needed. At the end of his presentation a decision was made to take steps
271 Human Rights Minutes and Records. Minutes of Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission 14 Apr. 1969. 1992 -718/001 1968-1970 Public Archives of Nova Scotia. 131 to address the issues of the black community. The meeting adjourned with no decision or discussion of what might be done in regards to the reserve. In this instance Wedderburn's participation on the committee provided no special hope for an exploration of the issues in that Mi'kmaq community. In fact the only person who considered the situation was Mumford who, unlike Wedderburn and the others, did not have the power of a vote on the committee that might have influenced some kind of response to the issue.
In 1973, when the Mi'kmaq and Acadian peoples complained about the lack of attention to their issues George McCurdy from the Black Nova Scotian community was the Director of the Human Rights Commission and Wedderburn was still a member. At the time of the complaint there were a total of four commissioners (four men, two each from the Black and White [British] Nova
Scotian community) since the number of Commission members shrank to half of the 1971 size there was certainly room to represent other communities at least through membership. McCurdy demonstrated no interest in representing
Mi'kmaq and Acadian communities on the Commission (and it was under his leadership that Mi'kmaq commissioner Roy Gould resigned). In response to criticism of lack of access to and representation on the committee by the two communities, the 4th Estate attributes this quotation to McCurdy:
.. .it would not be sensible or practical for the Commission to attempt to have every minority group represented on the commission.. .the commission has been trying to employ skilled staff from various minority groups. 'Such people are difficult to find, but we are continuing to search for them'.272
Brenda Large, "Spokesmen for Acadians, Indians criticize Human Rights Commission,"/ Estate 2 Aug. 1973: 3. 132
While McCurdy says that it would not be practical to have representation from all groups, if the desire existed the number of seats would have made it possible for the Commission to have been completely inclusive even by today's standards.
McCurdy highlights the problems in finding qualified people to do the job while in his midst were Noel Knockwood, who had worked for five years as a provincial civil servant in Nova Scotia and two years in the same capacity in
Massachusetts273; Mi'kmaq Priest Maurice Lewis, who had done a survey of the housing condition on every reserve in the province; Greg Johnson, human rights activist; Chief Simon Nevin from Shubenacadie, and Daniel Paul who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs.274 I am sure that there were many other members of the Mi'kmaq community who were qualified to do human rights work as there was no effort required on my part to come up with this list of names and Mi'kmaq people were actively opposing racial violence and discrimination and articulating their rights.
In response to the criticism of McCurdy and the Commission the
NSAACP released the following statement:
The insinuation that Mr. McCurdy and the Commission have favored blacks over Acadians and Indians is dangerous and malicious. Such comments are favorite tactics of those whose intent is to incite racial strife between minority groups... We feel they should be commended rather than condemned for assisting black people in the province to go a long way towards their goal of equal access. 75
"An Articulate Micmac returns to help his people," The Truro Weekly News IS Jun. 1970: 17. 274 Paul was appointed to the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission sometime after McCurdy's tenure. 2 Large 3. Emphasis mine. 133
Perhaps the statements were dangerous and malicious but they were also true.
This is borne out not only in, as discussed, the terms of reference for the
Committee but also by the focus of most if not all of the programs such as the
Negro Education Fund276 and in Commission funded research that overwhelmingly and disproportionately dealt with the plight of Black Nova
Scotians. It is important to state again that this focus did not bring about significant or lasting positive changes for Black Nova Scotians. The statement sets up a false choice between commending and condemning the Commission. In fact Gould did both when he recognized its work in black communities and supported the Commission's direction in doing more to address the issues in those sites.
Attempts to Collaborate
Doris Lilac, a member of the black community, had this to say about the relationship between the two groups:
... we don't' have a political relationship... there was social and familial kinds of relationships, not very political and there was a short period of time both would form alliances... I think that people expect for there to 977 A A
be a natural relationship and it isn't.
Doris' insight as to the expectation that there would be a relationship between the two groups resonates within this project as it had its inception in this erroneous The Human Rights Commission established this fund in the late 1960s under the direction of its first Director Marvin Schiff. In 1969 an Awards Officer at Dalhousie University complained that this fund (and another) were discriminatory based on its emphasis on one racial minority group. Schiff responds: "... such special educational programs might be considered to be discriminatory in that there might be other minority groups that could use them as well, but limited financial resources and resources of other types had to be used to the greatest effect and where they would do the most good immediately". Wedderburn commented that it "was not special treatment but rather compensatory treatment". 277 Lilac ibid. belief. While there were collaborations between the groups as indicated by Dons, they were often forced by governments and institutions such as Dalhousie
University. For example, both the Transitional Year Program (TYP) and the
Indigenous Black and Mi'kmaq Program (IBM) were two such projects. Burnely
"Rocky" Jones is quoted in Daniel McNeil's article as saying:
I felt that perhaps we had to have a program for black lawyers, and when we first started to talk about a program for law school, we talked about developing a black program, what happened was in speaking with the administration, the law profs, and trying to put that together, they made it clear politically that the program would not fly, but an integrated program the same as IBM... then funding would be made available for it.278
Indeed funding for a program for black lawyers would have been difficult and likely impossible to obtain without the political will and leadership of Dalhousie
University and the provincial government in assuming financial responsibility.
Both TYP and the IBM program were funded by Indian Affairs based on the participation of Mi'kmaq students. This funding issue at the beginning of the program was a great source of resentment in the Mi'kmaq community, as one member states:
It was decided that we are going to start this program but we are going to fund it based on Indian Affairs money. Because Indians are going to get money, so we're going to have to start it with that and Dal will come up with some other money but we'll use this Indian Affairs or Indian 279 money...
There has been a great deal of tension between both communities about the administration and funding of these programs and, as Jones pointed out in
McNeil, Finding a Home notes. 79 Beatrice Ibid 135
McNeil, the Mi'kmaq community boycotted the program at one point. Beatrice understands and outlines some of the conflict in this way:
.. .one of the things that is different that has to be recognized is that Mi'kmaq people have a treaty relationship with the Crown and some people don't get that. Where I seen the most difficulty occur is the lack of access to funds whereas Mi'kmaq students have their education paid for... the indigenous black community did not have. So there was always the question, well why is that?
There was a lack of acknowledgement on the part of the Black Nova Scotians involved in the program that what seemed to be perhaps an unfair advantage for the Mi'kmaq students was a result of a particular kind of relationship with the state. Some members of the Mi'kmaq community find this lack of acknowledgement and understanding of their status as First Peoples and not as just another minority group to be vexing. Beatrice explains that there was an assumption that all Aboriginal students would be funded and that other program monies could be used for African Canadian students. Objection from the
Mi'kmaq community to this practice with the explanation that not all Aboriginal students are funded led to deep conflicts. Another point of tension in the program has been the Directorship. There have been at times one co-Director from each community and also at times a Black Nova Scotian or Mi'kmaq Director. In recent years a member of the Mi'kmaq community has headed the program while
McNeil, Finding a Home, notes. Jones relates this in his interview with McNeil, 'There was tension between the Aboriginal leadership and the black leadership of the Transitional Year Program. And the Aboriginal leadership really wanted to support their own... their own program- there's a program in Saskatchewan for Aboriginal students - so there was a boycott at one point by the Aboriginal community of the Transitional Year Program'. Jones statements here does not make clear the source of the conflict between the two communities. 281 Beatrice Ibid. 136
most of the students are black.282 This situation is regarded as problematic for
some of the descendants of the pre-Confederation black community.
There were other collaborations between the two communities that seemed
less fractious such as the workshops and classroom experiences between the
students in the TYP. Noel Knockwood and Burnley "Rocky" Jones were the first
two instructors and they are both described as "powerful" by two of the interview participants. Jones and Knockwood challenged the racist ideas that students from
each community had about each other. In some cases they forced them to work
out their problems by ensuring that some of the students requiring residence lived
together. So while there were conflicts between members of the communities vis
avis the program the students were expected to get along and to be respectful of
one another and indeed they did and were.
Kinship
Greg Johnson, who is describe as a firebrand by Black Nova Scotian elder
Ozzie Parker, in the language and logic of race and racial identification stood on
the outside of the 1968 Human Rights conference while his kin stood inside.
Greg Johnson is the descendant of an African slave and his Mi'kmaq wife. Tom
Johnson was born a slave in Lincolnville Nova Scotia. He met and married a
Mi'kmaq woman. "All the Johnsons are related to him, they can trace their
I say black here instead of Black Nova Scotian because many of the students in the program are now more recent immigrants from Sierra Leone, Kenya and other places in Africa. This has also been articulated as a problem for Black Nova Scotians (involved in the program or from the community of interest) who configure and reconfigure the definition of "indigenous black" to ensure access primarily to descendants of the pre-Confederation black community. 137 ancestry back to him on the Johnson side. Greg Johnson, same family". The
Mi'kmaq people and the descendants of Nova Scotia's pre-Confederation black community share in some cases a common ancestry. Members of both communities recognize and sometimes acknowledge their common ancestry.
Doris recalls this of her experience in the black community in which she grew up:
You know and people traced it through their ancestry all the time. It was just a natural thing that you would walk into someone's house seeing there was a Native person there and that was a relative and it just wasn't anything shocking or exciting, that's just the way it was.284
While Doris speaks of the naturalness of seeing Mi'kmaq relatives in black homes the kinship relationships as with other aspects of the interaction between the two groups has been marked by racism. Patrick recalls a conversation with a friend from the Black Nova Scotian community:
You know the biggest problem that the Mi'kmaq and the black community here have to overcome is that they have been so damaged by racism and I am a true believer in that because it's not something that is going to happen by snapping your fingers. People don't stop hating one day who you are and start loving the next. The best way to overcome this kind of thing is to in particular in the black community and Mi'kmaq community is for both sides to learn about one another. People in the Mi'kmaq community are very ashamed about having black blood in them and there is [sic] people in the black community who are ashamed of having Mi'kmaq blood in them. And as a matter of fact I got a call from a girl one time who was trying to establish her Mi'kmaq ancestry and so I asked her why she did not ask some of the elders. She said she did and was told to forget about that and leave it alone, don't talk about it.285
Just as generations of White Nova Scotians had internalized racial hatred and racism against the black and Mi'kmaq people so too did they internalize those same ideas about each other.
Beatrice Maple, Personal Interview, 13 June 2006. Doris Lilac (pseudonym), Personal Interview, 12 June 2006. Oak Ibid Ozzie has this to say about the relationship between the two communities:
Well I think it's schizophrenic too. Historically there has been a lot of cooperation between the Mi'kmaq community and black community and you know the Mi'kmaq have assisted black people to survive in the early years of development. So there was a lot cooperation and intermarriage and everything. As the Mi'kmaq were crowded and forced on to reservations, they then became products of the residential school system where their education and their language was controlled by the Catholic church. When this developed, I think Mi'kmaq people began to adopt some of the attitudes towards black people that existed in the larger white community because they were isolated from the black community and they didn't know so they adopted some of these racist attitudes.
While Ozzie agrees with Doris and Patrick he also states that the relationship is also different in different places within the province. For example, he cites the communities in Yarmouth and Truro as examples of the differences:
Chief Debbie Robertson, she is the chief in Yarmouth. .. .her son is black and her ex-husband is black... and in her band there is a lot of intermarriage... In Truro there is a lot of intermingling and you will find that Mi'kmaq and blacks are either inter-married or having children with each other.288
The relationship between the two groups has not been static as demonstrated in
Parker's statement nor has it been entirely dominated by unresolved conflict.
On Indigenous Black Nova Scotians
286 Ozzie Parker, Personal Interview, 12 June, 2006. 287 It is interesting to note that Parker describes Robertson's son as black and wonder how he might be described by the people of his Yarmouth community. I have had brief conversations with two sisters in the province who have two black grandparents and one Cree and one Mi'kmaq grandparent. When asked how they came to choose black as their identity they both cited the fact that they look black. When asked how their parents identified both parents identified as black though no one believed their mother was black because she looked Mi'kmaq. 288 Ibid. "Well Nova Scotia does not have an indigenous black community. ...
They have an indigenous red community". Patrick is clear that blacks are not indigenous to the Americas and he expresses an understanding of this claim by the descendents of the pre-Confederation black community as a way of them differentiating themselves from blacks from Africa and the Caribbean to ensure funding for their community is appropriately directed. He is not troubled by the use of this term and understands that Black Nova Scotians have no idea where
they came from because of slavery. Both Patrick and Tom are very aware (and
disturbed) by the fact of Black Nova Scotians' loss of connection to their African
homelands and ancestry; Tom, however, does not share Patrick's position on the
use of the term. He states:
First of all I think it is wrong of them to use the word indigenous because they should put a definition on it when they use it and say they might be the first black to come to this land but that does not make them indigenous. The only one that can carry the title indigenous are the Aboriginal occupants of this land. No other people can make that claim. Europeans cannot say that and others that came to this country cannot say they are indigenous. Only the Micmac people can say that, so it is culturally and it is racially incorrect to use that term.290
Ozzie has offered this definition of "indigenous black":
Well I think that there is an attempt to differentiate a claim to Canada in the sense that the descendants of the Loyalists have got a 200 year history. If you go back to 1604 with the first black here, and then if there are any descendants of those people, all of the descendants of those people want a special place in terms of ownership of what has happened in Canada and in terms of the ownership of any exploitation that has occurred. You know these people treated us this way for over 200 years as opposed to the more recent immigrant after the Second World War. So in order to differentiate them, this phrase, this term is the closest that comes, and indigenous meaning basically people who are part of a particular landscape and their genesis in essence is here. So the Nova Scotia black is
Patrick Oak, Personal Interview, 13 June, 2006. Brand Ibid. 140
saying this is our genesis. They are starting this history here. You know as opposed to starting their history in Savannah Georgia, or Jamaica or even Africa. By using the term indigenous and accepting that this says that my history begins here and so it is a certain ownership of this land and it differentiates of course between all other African descended people who may come here.291
This definition of "indigenous black" differentiates between those of African descent from elsewhere. It also asserts an "ownership of any exploitation"292 of
African descended people in Canada! It goes well beyond what is necessary to differentiate the geographies of Canadian blackness and asserts a black genesis in
Mikmaki. Doris' definition echoes that of Ozzie:
It fundamentally means that I have nowhere else to go. I am indigenous to this province, this is who I am, this is where I was born and raised, you cannot deport me anywhere else. So, for me it is very clearly, it is easy for me to say that and being confident about where I am from.293
Doris is well aware of the tension that this identification causes with some in the
Mi'kmaq community: ".. .you know you offended this community, well they should not be offended. That's how we choose to call ourselves".294 Doris does acknowledge that: "although our ancestors may be from other places we've been here for generations". In both Ozzie's and Doris' definition we see a slight acknowledgement of the possibility of ancestry elsewhere. For example, Ozzie talks about Black Nova Scotians starting their history here instead of in Jamaica or even Africa. In Doris' case she mentions their ancestors may be from other places. The emphasis is clearly on asserting a black indigeniety onto the
291 Parker Ibid. 292 Ibid. Emphasis mine. 293 Lilac Ibid. 294 Ibid. 141 landscape. In Doris' comments there is certainly an air of entitlement to that claim.
Summing It Up
Black/Mi'kmaq relations in Nova Scotia are complex, dynamic and are always being negotiated. Those negotiations take place in and between families, as the two groups are thrown together by governments and institutions which ignore Mi'kmaq people's special relationship with the Crown and use joint programs as a way of dealing with minority issues (and indeed a way of funding programs for others), and in the everyday act of inhabiting the same physical place. All of the participants unanimously and genuinely expressed a desire to bring members of both communities together. It is important to note that four of the six participants were connected to the TYP at Dalhousie and one person reflected on the possibility of the communities coming together:
But I would say that at this point there is more openness in both communities to develop interactive programming because those persons who in 1970 were coming into the transition program, they are now in leadership and so they are more open and it is the same within the black community".295
In addition to the improved opportunities for interactions between the groups as suggested there is also among this group a very strong desire to talk about and resolve points of tension and to explore the possibility of collective action or collaboration. All ask that this project be presented, at completion, at a conference to begin a conversation between the two communities.
Parker Ibid. 142
The communities will have much to grapple with if they decide to become more socially and politically involved with one another. What will the Mi'kmaq ' community make of the confident and steadfast assertion of black indigeniety in their territory? Do descendants of the pre-Confederation black community accept
Mi'kmaq people's claim to their territory and their belief that the lands were stolen? If they do accept this claim what does it do to the desire of some of their members to pursue legal recourse for the land denied their ancestors or land taken over by white settlers? In my interview with Doris she talks about the discriminatory practices of assigning land grants in the 1800s:
The process was totally different so it had legal implications now because when you trace, when you go back to the chain of ownership there is some real discrepancies and there were people's land taken and not recognized that that was taken and the change in ownership... it was taken over and the blacks would never know and there was no exchange of monies. So the land was gone, the land was gone! The Crown was okay with that.296
How do we reconcile the absolute injustice felt by Doris in the way that her community lost and in some ways were never given what they were promised with Mi'kmaq ownership of the land given and promised to her community? The irony of her assertion is completely lost on her. Doris is a community worker and activist who fought valiantly against oppression in the two provinces in which she has lived in this country. She is one of five of the participants who have done this in their communities. What is the answer to the inevitable clash that will result over land ownership between these two communities and the good, honest, hardworking, justice-seeking people in each? How do we reconcile Danny
Lilac Ibid. 143
Paul's297 and his community's certainty that no one owns any part of their territory with Doris' legal quest for land that she believes belongs to her community? How do we keep their grand and great grand children from colliding with each other?
Clarke states in his interview with Moynagh: "My argument is that society consists of interconnecting but also contesting groups".298 Perhaps Clarke's idea of contesting groups with winners and losers will be the unfortunate outcome of the tensions between the communities. There is a dilemma for the descendants of pre-Confederation blacks in acknowledging and accepting Mi'kmaq people's claim to the land and in recognizing them as the only indigenous group in the province. To do so would not only weaken the black community's claim to indigeniety but also contest their entitlement to lands promised by the Crown.
The dilemma of Black Nova Scotians is also that of White Nova Scotians. In this way their interest, whether of maintaining or obtaining land given to them by their ancestors, are tied together and recognition of Mi'kmaq claims threatens both.
The outcome of Clarke's competition in Nova Scotia will depend very much on whether the rhetoric and propaganda of Africadia is more compelling to Nova
Scotians and Canadians than the truth of Mi'kmaq claims to the territory.
The innocent notion of Africadia in Clarke's work has far reaching implications. It is a statement of claim against the land and territory of Mikmaki.
Ironically Clarke instructs us of another way out of the impasse:
I think you have to have cultural interchange and exchanges of ideas in order to grow, in order to adapt as well, but the crucial point here is that
297 See Paul's We Were not the Savages. 298 Moynagh, 89. 144
this transformation take place on your own terms and not someone else's. That's when it becomes imperialistic. If we're going to value diversity, we have to value preservation, which means that you adopt foreign 299
influences on your own terms.
If I follow Clarke then this is what I come to when I apply what he says to the
Nova Scotia situation. In order to avoid imperialistic behaviour it is important for members of his community to engage the Mi'kmaq people in an exchange of ideas in order that the continued transformation of Mi'kmaq territory happens on their own terms and not someone else's. If the descendants of the pre-
Confederation black community engage in this way then Mi'kmaq peoples will be
able to adapt foreign influences on their own terms. This reading of Clarke also
makes possible his idea of what Africadia is: "And I suppose it also reflects a
realization of the highest aspirations of the Canadian state in terms of notions of
equality and liberty, and so it would also encapsulate these notions". Though
one's ambition would have to be far beyond the aspiration of the Canadian state to
realize liberty and equality.
In my own words, the way forward, or justice, requires that in seeking to
answer the question of the "way out" of this dilemma, descendants of the pre-
Confederation black community must engage with Mi'kmaq people about the
terms of their continued occupation of Mi'kmaq territories. Indeed all those who
are not Mi'kmaq must do the same. Of course all are free to continue their
conversations with the state on behalf of their own group's interest but we cannot
call this justice and a just solution. Justice built on the land, backs, bodies, souls,
graves, spirits and aspirations of others is not justice but dismemberment, 299 Ibid 89. 300 Ibid 77 145 disembodiment and dispossession even when it is wrapped in the horrors of our own group's experience of the same. 146
Chapter 6
CONCLUSION
"Their blood is there, and they can't throw it
• out".301
Yvonne
Wilson
We have learnt that the relationship between black and Mi'kmaq people in
Nova Scotia is complex. While in some instances they shared a common ancestry, racism and racial violence perpetrated by the state and the majority white citizens had negative effects on their relationship. Each group internalized the stereotypes about the other that were prevalent in the dominant society. In struggling for place and belonging the descendants of African slaves, United
Empire Loyalist and Refugees of the War of 1812 asserted an indigenous belonging to and within Mikmaki. This assertion claims equal place with
European presence and belonging to the nation while also establishing a hierarchy of black belonging.
This project demonstrates that the claim to indigeniety and the renaming of places in Mikmaki accomplishes no less of an erasure when employed by Black
Nova Scotians. This is not to deny the absence of significant political or
301 Yvonne Wilson qtd. in Katherine McKittrick, "Their Blood Is There, and They Can't Throw It Out":Honouring Black Canadian Geographies" Topia Spring 2002: 7, 27. Wilson made this comment during a protest against renaming Negro Creek Road in Ontario. Please see McKittrick for details. economic power in Black Nova Scotia (and indeed Black Canada) or to imply that the process of erasure is the same. Rather, it is to make the point that both
Africville and Seaview Park have been equally effective in covering over
Mikmaki.302 What underlies Seaview Park and its monument is Black Nova
Scotian geography. The history of the lives of several generations of Carverys,
Byers, Carters, Flints, Browns, Dixons, Howes, Mantleys and a host of others.
Africville is indelible in the minds of Nova Scotians, indeed of many Canadians.
What underlies Africville and Seaview Park is Eskikewa'kik and the history and blood of Kluscap's people. While their blood is there, their names, histories and stories have been concealed and erased. Though the process of erasure is different, the outcome is the same. The outcome is still erasure.
This project argues and demonstrates that conversations about inclusion, place and belonging within the racial state must include First Nations people and recognize their prior claim to the land. The descendants of the pre-Confederation black community and others who seek redress for land from the Canadian state in unceeded territory are complicit in the oppression of the people who are indigenous to this territory. In not acknowledging First Nations ownership of the land they argue for the spoils of indigenous peoples' dispossession. While these groups do not have the power to return stolen and occupied lands, they do have the power to recognize prior occupancy and ownership and to honour it.
Seaview Park is first referenced on page 60. 303 Africville: A Spirit That Lives On (Halifax: The Art Gallery, Mount St Vincent University, The Black Cultural Centre For Nova Scotia, The Africville Genealogy Society, The National Film Board, Atlantic Centre, 1989) 5-7. 148
While I argued against notions of indigenous blackness, it is recognized that the dire conditions of life, the brutality of racial violence and the rendering of the tenure of black people in Nova Scotia as less significant than that of white citizens, gave rise to this troubling claim. Pre-Confederation Black Nova Scotians and their descendants consistently challenged their marginalization within the state in other ways and took action on their own behalf. This is demonstrated well in the petition for land at Brindley Town, the exodus to Sierra Leone after years of resistance to state and white settler brutality, and sustained protest and demands throughout the 1960s and early 1970s for justice and equality both in process and outcome.
Though the province gave them equality before the law it did little to improve their circumstances and the response did not match their efforts for change. Ozzie highlights this situation:
I don't think the Human Rights Commission has really had much of an impact on the day to day life of the community but what it has done, it's increased the expectations and has helped to make black people believe that they have a right to certain services and to be treated in a particular way and so in the back of their mind or in the background is this Human Rights Commission that is supposedly going to back up the community in its demands for true equality,.. So the benefit of the Human Rights Commission is more intellectual than practical.304
Ozzie also points to another barrier to equality resulting from the structure of the very organization created to address such issues. This structural barrier renders complainants who appear before the Commission vulnerable without representation while the respondent, usually a company or organization, and the
Commission have lawyers representing their interest. He concludes: ".. .the
Ozzie, Personal Interview. system is still a system that is designed and implemented that it benefits the powerful.. .".305 Ozzie also agrees that the appointment of Black Nova Scotians has not led to a more effective or useful Commission.
I don't think it's meeting the needs of the community and they have done different things like appoint black directors and appoint black staff but those people are individuals in the system and it is the system and the design that is bad and wrong.
Prior to human rights legislation and the Human Rights Commission Black Nova
Scotians were the victims of racist attacks perpetrated by white citizens, employers, landlords and the state. After human rights legislation was enacted and the Human Rights Commission was created Black Nova Scotians were victims of racist attacks perpetrated by white citizens, employers, landlords and the state through its institutions.
Mi'kmaq people were in the worst condition and had fewer opportunities throughout the entire period of black enslavement and settlement in Nova Scotia, including during the period taken up by this study. They too challenged their marginalization through protest and other acts of resistance. Mi'kmaq people resisted the dire conditions of their lives and their demands for justice were generally ignored. The state's insistence on pinning their fortunes to that of Black
Nova Scotians by forced collaborations such as the Transitional Year Program and the Indigenous Black and Mi'kmaq program did not serve them well in creating programs specific to the needs and desires of their community. It also created a situation in which Black Nova Scotians failed to appreciate the meaning
305 Ibid. 306 Ibid. of their relationship with the Crown thereby causing resentment and at times anger between the two communities.
Government intervention for both groups was inadequate and, as I have argued in the case of the Commission, fixed them in the eyes of the dominant group as other while it did little to change their material reality. 151
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