Black Nova Scotians
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Black Nova Scotians are the descendants of Afro-Canadian slaves and freemen who came to Nova Scotia during the 18th and 19th century. Many of the slaves that were transferred to Nova Scotia and lived there were of mixed African and European ancestry.
The first recorded instance of a black presence in Canada was that of Mathieu de Costa. Da Costa arrived in Nova Scotia sometime between 1603 and 1608 as a translator for the French explorer Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Monts. The first known black person to live in Canada was a slave from Madagascar named Olivier Le Jeune (who may also of been of partial Malay ancestry).
An increasing number of immigrants from Africa have been coming to Canada, as is also the case in the United States and Europe. This includes large numbers of refugees, but also many skilled workers pursuing better economic conditions. Today's black Canadians are largely of Caribbean origin, with some of recent African origin and smaller numbers from Latin American countries. However, a sizable number of black Canadians who descended from freed American slaves can still be found in Nova Scotia and parts of Southwestern Ontario. Some descendants of the freed American black slaves have mixed into the white Canadian community and have mostly lost their ethnic identity. Many have returned to the United States either to their original communities or to states such as Michigan, New York and Massachusetts. American cities such as; Boston, Detroit and Buffalo received a sizeable portion of returnees.
[edit] History
Black people arrived in Canada in several waves. The first of these came with the French as free persons serving in the French army and navy, and some were enslaved. The British colonial authorities promised land grants to those who had stayed loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution, though more promises were broken than kept. White American Loyalists fled north, bringing their African slaves with them, while free black Americans (Black Loyalists) also made their way to the remaining colonies of British North America, settling predominantly in Nova Scotia. This latter group was largely made up of tradespeople and labourers, and many set up home in Birchtown near Shelburne.
In 1782, the first race riot in North America took place there, with white soldiers attacking the black settlers who were getting work that the soldiers thought they should have. Due to the unkept promises of the British government and the discrimination from the white colonists, 1,192 men, women and children left Nova Scotia on January 15, 1792 and settled in Freetown Sierra Leone.
In 1796, the Maroons of Jamaica were re-settled in Nova Scotia, following their long battle against colonization. While in Nova Scotia the Maroons from Jamaica deterred an attack by Napoleon, and were very important to the construction efforts of the Nova Scotia government, constructing the parts of the Halifax Citadel and all of Government House. The Jamaican Maroons were sent to Sierra Leone in 1800 by the British Government in order to avoid the cost of maintaining them in Nova Scotia. Upon their arrival in Sierra Leone, the Maroons were used to quell an uprising among the Black settlers unhappy with their treatment by the Sierra Leone Company.
The next major migration of blacks into Nova Scotia occurred between 1813 and 1815. Black war refugees from the United States settled in Hammonds Plains, Beechville, Lucasville and Africville.
Canada was not suited to the large-scale plantation agriculture practised in the southern United States, and slavery became increasingly rare. In 1793, in one of the first acts of the new Upper Canada colonial parliament, slavery was abolished. It was all but abolished throughout the other British North American colonies by 1800, and was illegal throughout the British Empire after 1834. This made Canada an attractive destination for those fleeing slavery in the United States, such as minister Boston King.
From the late 1820s until the American Civil War began in 1861, the Underground Railroad brought tens of thousands of fleeing slaves to Canada. While many of these returned to the United States after emancipation, a significant population remained, largely in Southern Ontario, widely scattered in both rural and urban locations, including Chatham, Windsor, London, Hamilton, Collingwood and Toronto.
In 1858, the governor of the colony of Vancouver Island, James Douglas, replied to an inquiry from a group of blacks in San Francisco about the possibilities of settling on the island. Governor Douglas, whose mother had been at least part black, replied favourably, and several dozen travelled to Victoria at the outbreak of the Cariboo gold rush. Two of these people, Peter Lester and Mifflin Gibbs, became successful Victoria merchants, and Gibbs was elected to the Council of the City of Victoria in the 1860s.
In the late nineteenth century, there was an unofficial policy of restricting blacks from immigrating to Canada, and in the 1920s, formal racially-based immigration standards excluding blacks were developed. The huge influx of immigrants from Europe and the United States in the period before World War I included only very small numbers of black arrivals.
Another wave of immigration to Nova Scotia occurred in the 1920s, with blacks from the Caribbean coming to work in the steel mills of Cape Breton Island. The restrictions on immigration remained until 1962, when racial rules were eliminated from the immigration laws. This coincided with the dissolution of the British Empire in the Caribbean, and over the next decades several hundred thousand blacks came from that region to Canada.
[edit] Black Nova Scotians in Sierra Leone
Many members of the the Krio ethnic group in Sierra Leone can trace their ancestry back to Nova Scotia either as Jamaican Maroons that were deported there or as original Nova Scotian slaves (some of whom were of mixed black and white ancestry). Because many of the Krios cannot accurately trace their ancestry to an original African nation, many consider their ancestors as Black Nova Scotian slaves or as Nova Scotian Maroons. Because of this most Krios only know their ancestors' homeland as Nova Scotia or as Jamaica, and not a West African nation.
