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our blackness is buried
Jan. 14th, 2009 09:03 pmThe first thing that confused me when we moved to Vancouver, after six years of childhood in a country brown and black before anything else, was the absence of black people. There were brown people -- they weren't like me, and lots of the time didn't consider me a real Indian -- but they were there, at least.
I've been here for twenty years now.
Three years ago I learned for the first time about Hogan's Alley, the black community in Vancouver. Chicken houses run by women as their husbands worked as porters on the Canadian Pacific Railway, the city's only black church, the lesbian presence unacknowledged by the white hipster queer girls I talk to in class every week.
Hogan's Alley, destroyed in order to make way for the Georgia Viaduct (the Georgia what? A project that never happened) and with its erasure the disappearance of black people from my city. Before I came here or was even born, but the absence is still disorienting.
Three hours ago I learned for the first time about Priceville, a black community in Ontario. There were black people there since the 1800s, cultivating land and building houses that they were never allowed to legally own; it didn't take long for white residents to drive them all out of the town. And then in the 1930s Bill Reid, a white farmer, ploughed over the black cemetery and planted potatoes there.
His stepdaughter blandly recalls that they were good potatoes. An old man talks about using a piece of a tombstone found near "the darkie schoolhouse" as a home plate for baseball games. More tombstones, they think, are in Bill Reid's basement, used as flagstones on the dirt floor and poured over with concrete since then.
The corner of the Reid field that's since been rededicated and fenced off isn't even the whole cemetery. The rest of the bodies aren't there. They and their tombstones are under the road.
They are under the road.
I drove home on the long dark UBC road (unceded Musqueam territory, all of it) and all I could think about was the erasure of black communities in Canada, and our silence about it. The people out East who narrow their eyes at dark West Indians and the people here in the West who snarl at newly-arrived Somalians. I don't only mean white people.
We don't know anything about our own damn history.
- speakers for the dead: NFB documentary on Priceville -
..the remyth project..
I've been here for twenty years now.
Three years ago I learned for the first time about Hogan's Alley, the black community in Vancouver. Chicken houses run by women as their husbands worked as porters on the Canadian Pacific Railway, the city's only black church, the lesbian presence unacknowledged by the white hipster queer girls I talk to in class every week.
Hogan's Alley, destroyed in order to make way for the Georgia Viaduct (the Georgia what? A project that never happened) and with its erasure the disappearance of black people from my city. Before I came here or was even born, but the absence is still disorienting.
Three hours ago I learned for the first time about Priceville, a black community in Ontario. There were black people there since the 1800s, cultivating land and building houses that they were never allowed to legally own; it didn't take long for white residents to drive them all out of the town. And then in the 1930s Bill Reid, a white farmer, ploughed over the black cemetery and planted potatoes there.
His stepdaughter blandly recalls that they were good potatoes. An old man talks about using a piece of a tombstone found near "the darkie schoolhouse" as a home plate for baseball games. More tombstones, they think, are in Bill Reid's basement, used as flagstones on the dirt floor and poured over with concrete since then.
The corner of the Reid field that's since been rededicated and fenced off isn't even the whole cemetery. The rest of the bodies aren't there. They and their tombstones are under the road.
They are under the road.
I drove home on the long dark UBC road (unceded Musqueam territory, all of it) and all I could think about was the erasure of black communities in Canada, and our silence about it. The people out East who narrow their eyes at dark West Indians and the people here in the West who snarl at newly-arrived Somalians. I don't only mean white people.
We don't know anything about our own damn history.
- speakers for the dead: NFB documentary on Priceville -
..the remyth project..
