Sometimes Redundancy Is Necessary

 Thursday, May 6th, 2021

                                      Chairman Joe sent me an email on April 30th, 2021 which contained this advice from Annie Dillard, an American writer best known for her meditative essays on the natural world.

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

So herein begins the end of my hoarding.

 

Sometimes Redundancy Is Unfortunately Necessary

   When I was growing up, what we saw on the evening news and in our schools wasn't too far removed from what we see on our computers, phones and TV today as civil unrest, protests and rioting, police brutality. Some of you may be too young to remember it and may possibly think that it's all new stuff; some people think it's all gotten out of hand, but sadly, it's all been done before. 

   I still envision police dogs attacking protestors, police using fire hoses to disperse crowds, buildings burning, bodies in the streets, tens of thousands Americans gathered together across our nation's city streets demonstrating for civil rights and against war; the walk across the Pettus Bridge in Selma; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination . . .

  I entered junior high (middle school) 1963-1966, and senior high 1966-1969 during the increasing intensity of the Civil Rights movement and Viet Nam War protest marches. I’ve written much about this time period over the years, and have had many conversations with people of color about race. In the contemporary theme of BLM, I hear many of my white counterparts groan about the continuing lamentation they hear on the radio or see on TV, but I feel differently about it, owing largely of my early angst of the ‘why’ of it; “Why can’t we all just get along?”

  In the presence of years-long friends becoming teenage enemies all because of their skin color; the confusion of racial rioting all around me; of my high school classrooms imploding; students spilling into the hallways and out of the building; the employment of riot police as hall monitors, I became conscious (‘woke’) that ‘all this violence’ may have been avoided had we been taught the truth about America, about the United States, about cultures different from our own, from the very first day, underlining the reality that ignorance breeds fear, and fear breeds racism.

  This 21st century conversation; the great uncoiling impetus generated by the 9-minutes 24-second killing of George Floyd, seen the world over and over for months, has been a long time in coming. It makes me rush through my lifelong memories and recognize the many Black faces of my past, where anguish lived for generations unknown to me. I saw ‘something’ there during my days. I just didn’t know enough about ‘our’ history then, to put it into words, and there was no one around me to teach me different.

   How would I, as a White man, feel about my existence if generations of my relatives had been denied a reasonable standard of living and education, afforded so many others, because of the color of my skin? How would my life be different if I knew my ancestors came to North America by force, in chains, or torn from their ancestral homelands here; their identities, humanness, culture; their very life and death determined by another of a different race thought to be superior, a not-so-subtle theme of which continued unabated through society for over 500 years and has affected Black and Indigenous people throughout the history of the United States.

   And recently, I saw my feelings in print on an on-line page, in Indian Country Today, written by Black Canadian journalist, Karina Vernon, who grew up in Alberta. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/bop-pov-whitewashing-prairies-1.5880367

   “The whitewashing of Prairie history: If we don't know our past, we can't understand our present.”

   In this, she’s specifically talking about Canada’s purposeful omission of the presence and history of Black Canadians on its Prairie provinces.

   Although her mother was an English teacher and high school administrator in Olds, Alberta she never heard of the largest Black community ever to have existed west of Ontario, only an afternoon's drive away from where she lived, named Amber Valley. She wrote that the knowledge of significant Black history would have utterly transformed her being a Black girl of growing up on the Prairies.

   She never heard or read about any of the self-sustaining all-Black communities founded by the nearly 2000 African-Americans who moved on to the Canadian Prairies at the turn of the twentieth century: Wildwood, east of Edson; Breton, southwest of Edmonton; Campsie, northwest of Edmonton; Maidstone in Saskatchewan.   

   How does history like this go missing?

   She’s since learned its omission throughout her education was intentional. For example, the 1911 Federal Order-in-Council prohibition cited: "Any immigrant belonging to the Negro race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada," designed to keep the Prairies as a non-Black space.

   It dawned on her in October 2020, when Alberta's United Conservative Party planned to scrub the K-4 curriculum of residential schools, and all references to "equity," made national news. Although the party backtracked, such changes being suggested demonstrated to her how the Prairies' historical record has been vulnerable to alteration.

   While students on the Prairies will continue to learn — at least for now — about the history of residential schools, many will not learn that the rich Black history on the Canadian Prairies goes back three centuries, nor that enslaved, indentured, and free Black fur traders, voyageurs, and Indigenous language interpreters were active in the fur trade since at least 1790. Black cowboys, ranchers, cooks and people like Alfred Shadd — a doctor, politician and newspaper editor in Carrot River, Sask. — helped to forge early Prairie communities.

   Also absent from high school history books is the large migration of Black Americans from Oklahoma and surrounding states between 1905 and 1912.

   Last month, Alberta unveiled new draft elementary school curriculum about Black settlements and the contributions of early Black pioneers in some classrooms this fall focusing on a common cache of knowledge the province says every child should know, beginning in Grade 4.

   The lack of Black Prairie history serves at once to produce the fantasy of a dominant Prairie homogeneous population. It perpetuates the mistaken belief that Blackness is a post-1960s phenomenon on the Prairies, maintaining the fantasy that anti-Black racism happens elsewhere, rather than revealing it as a constituent structure of the Prairies.

   Restoring this Black history will help us understand the ways the Prairies have long been a site of struggle for Black freedom. For three centuries Black folks have come here in search of safety and a place where they might not only imagine but also realize a future for themselves and their families.

   The erasure of Black history from collective public memory is all the more grievous considering excellent educational resources have existed for decades.

   “The Black Canadians: Their History and Contributions,” published in 1993 by , Velma and LeVero Carter, two of the descendants of the Oklahoma migration, is an accessible primer of Black Canadian history.

   “We Remember Amber Valley,” Selwyn Jacob's 1994 documentary video 
   “Pourin' Down Rain,” by Cheryl Foggo celebrates the Black experience on the Prairies.
   “Alberta's Black Pioneer Heritage,” is an online treasure trove of stories and histories.

   "It is not only Black students who are robbed when Black history is excised from the history books. All of us are deprived when the full complexity of our collective history is denied. It fails us a full understanding of our own present moment."  

   As it did mine.