Dominion Coal was a key player in Nova Scotia’s coal-mining industry, which surged from the turn of the century into the 1950s. Graduate student Aderinola Olamiju is researching the racial dynamics of mining labour, occupational hazards and health risks in historic mining industries.
Photo: E.A. Bollinger / Nova Scotia Archives
‘Doesn’t happen by accident’The history of Black miners in Nova Scotia is buried, and a researcher we spoke with is on a mission to unearth them.
Look at your Google calendar, and it might no longer tell you it’s Black History Month. At a time when some of the most powerful world leaders, backed by tech broligarchs, are rewriting histories — and brazenly attacking diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — telling some of those erased stories feels even more pressing.
It’s why our former mining reporter Francesca Fionda (who now supports our team’s well-being as director of newsroom development) interviewed Aderinola Olamiju, a Maritimes graduate researcher, about his work to uncover the buried history of Black miners in Nova Scotia.
Olamiju is digging through immigration paperwork, company letters and union pamphlets to find lesser-known stories as part of the Mining Danger project.
“Traditional archives have excluded so many crucial stories,” Francesca told me. “This doesn’t happen by accident. Those in power decide what is important and have historically excluded or misrepresented the stories of marginalized groups. That’s why Olamiju’s work is so important right now.”
Mining, by nature, was full of potential on-the-job hazards — even more so for Black workers, who were thought to endure heat better than white workers (just one of many racial stereotypes that came with their status as immigrant labourers).
Olamiju pointed out that even a well-lauded figure like Maurice Ruddick, who survived the 1958 Springhill, N.S., mine disaster, faced segregation policies — at a U.S. celebration he was housed separately from his white miner counterparts. Despite it all, Black miners formed strong communities to help counter the relentless othering they faced.
The echoes of the anti-Black racism at play back then haven’t disappeared. “What’s particularly striking is how similar these dynamics are to what we see today,” Olamiju told Francesca. “There’s still this tension between the economic need for immigrant labour and anti-immigrant rhetoric.”
In Ontario, the Greenbelt may stand as Doug Ford’s biggest and most scandalous attack on protected land, but it’s far from the only one. Over a year ago, the government told municipalities to assemble shovel-ready land for industry if they want to attract jobs. Wilmot, a township home to about 21,000 people in southwestern Ontario, gathered hundreds of acres of farmland, and some landowners say they were threatened with expropriation if they didn’t sell. The process has been mired in controversy and secrecy.
Since last March, I’d been hearing trickles of rumours about what’s going on in Wilmot. I started chatting with Terry Pender, a longtime reporter with Waterloo Region Record, the area’s award-winning local paper. We broke the news together this week: the land assembly is meant for a future Toyota site — an attempt by the government to keep the automaker in Ontario amid Donald Trump’s tariff threats.
This late-breaking news is unlikely to sway today’s election results; a historic Doug Ford three-peat is all but inevitable. Stay tuned for my story later tonight about what the election’s outcome means for the environment — and catch up on what’s up in Wilmot here. We’ll be watching what a third Ford government means for the land specifically. So if something similar is happening in your area, drop us a note.
— Fatima Syed, Ontario reporter
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Dominion Coal was a key player in Nova Scotia’s coal-mining industry, which surged from the turn of the century into the 1950s. Graduate student Aderinola Olamiju is researching the racial dynamics of mining labour, occupational hazards and health risks in historic mining industries.
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