To Go North: Stories of Black Settlement and Imaginaries of Black Sovereignty on the Canadian Frontier

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The “West” as a space of radical autonomy and economic opportunity has played a central role in shaping the logic of settler colonialism in North America during the nineteenth century. While some Black arrivants moved to Canada’s western frontier, many others moved north in search of freedom from racial discrimination and financial independence. In this talk, we play with the concept of the West, suggesting that for many Black settlers the “North” was a more appealing frontier space for the expression of sovereignty. Through a discussion of historical accounts and geospatial patterns in Black settlement practices in Ontario West, we expand current theorizations of the relationship between frontier landscapes and settler imaginaries. In drawing attention to the role of formerly enslaved people in the broader project of colonization in Canada we work to complicate popular mythologies of the settler nation-state and challenge conceptual divisions between liberation and emancipation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow