Toyin Kayo-Ajayi’s favourite meal is pounded yam, with cassava and egusi — protein-rich African melon seeds, roasted in oil with spices and blended into a paste (pumpkin seeds will do if that’s all you can find). You can add turkey, chicken, fish, shrimp, kpomo (cow-skin) — any meat you want, with some broth and African spinach or amaranth — to turn it into a stew. 

Cassava and yam are central foods in his Nigerian culture and other Black cuisines across Africa, South America and India. He’s growing the tropical produce in greenhouses in Miracle Valley just outside Mission, B.C., about a 90-minute drive east from Vancouver. 

Kayo-Ajayi was told again and again that farming in Canada would be out of reach — it would be too expensive, the climate too unforgiving for the tropical crops he dreamed of growing. It wouldn’t last.

But he says enthusiasm for his five-acre farm has only grown since he got started in 2020. For five months of the year, he can grow tropical produce in greenhouses. His soil, which he makes himself, consists of clean silt, sand and goat manure. It’s working so well, he says, he is now selling it online and trying to get it stocked in stores. He’s still experimenting at a small scale, but the food he grows, like cassava and yam, he mostly supplies to the African Foods Food Bank, an organization he launched to provide healthy food to Black families.

Donating to the food bank helps more people access African produce that may be out of reach in Canada. Imported cultural food, like cassava, can face extreme mark-ups by the time they get to the grocery store. On top of rising grocery prices and systemic income inequality, those mark-ups can put these foods out of reach. “If it’s somebody that is still low-income, now, he’s struggling to afford the cultural food,” Kayo-Ajayi explains.

This summer, he plans to host people on his farm at the Kara-Kata Africa Village, where they can camp, learn about farming, share good food and enjoy music together, he says. In its fifth year, the initiative is part of his wider vision to break down barriers for Black, African and Caribbean people to get into agriculture in Canada. In 2022, he founded the Canadian Black Farmers Association, which now has over 200 members.

The farm produces an average of 4,500 pounds of produce for the food bank and 250 dozen eggs per year. To date, Kayo-Ajayi has provided agricultural mentoring to more than 500 people.

Breaking down barriers for Black farmers across Canada

Primary agriculture — meaning the work done on a farm or in greenhouses — contributes $31.7 billion to Canada’s economy annually. It employs about 223,000 people, but 40 per cent of that workforce could retire by 2033. 

Just under five per cent of those farmers are Black, and Kayo-Ajayi sees huge opportunity to increase that number in order to grow local economies, improve food security for Black homes, make communities more “self-reliant” food-wise and increase access to cultural foods.

Food growers are the roots of the entire agricultural sector, which generates $149.2 billion annually, or seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product.

While Kayo-Ajayi’s priority is getting cultural foods into Black homes at reasonable prices, he says supporting food growers stands to benefit all Canadians as the United States imposes tariffs and threatens annexation. 

“It’s something that is beneficial for our community and for Canada,” he says. “Everybody wins.”

Soil ‘the key to most of my success’

When he was about five years old in Ekiti State, Nigeria, Kayo-Ajayi’s mother would send him to visit his grandparents’ farm. “I didn’t like it,” he says. 

But that was where he learned “the most important thing in life is food.”

“I remember, we walked in the farm, they would smell the soil … They could tell you what could easily grow in that area,” he says.

He discovered planting seeds made him feel grounded. “It’s energy. It’s spiritual. It’s actually good for us,” he says.

He’s stayed in farming his whole life, and has been farming in Canada for more than 20 years, beginning shortly after he arrived in 2001 at 23 years old. Today he still owns a 500-acre sister farm in Nigeria from which he imports food into Canada as well, including about 7,000 pounds on average each year to the food bank. He’s able to grow more throughout the year, and stocks some produce in the food bank, and sells some to support his operations.

In 2011, he began what would officially become the Kara-Kata Afrobeat Society, which brings music and food to community events in order to build connections and share information about food-growing.

“When there’s music and food, you find more people in our community. And I know how to make good food,” he says.

At his B.C. farm he creates a loam soil, which supports the tropical plants that yield traditional African foods, like cassava and yam. He says it’s made all his produce grow better and easier. It’s a simple mixture — but it’s “the key to most of my success,” he says. 

“The soil is the root of everything I was able to do.”

He hopes to make it widely available for purchase across Canada, and even beyond.

But he says he’s had trouble getting it into stores. He’s reached out to retailers but it hasn’t gone anywhere.

 It can be difficult for small producers to meet retailers’ requirements and make goods at scale, and often little guidance is available.

Kayo-Ajayi wants to use proceeds from soil sales to support programming for Black farmers. In turn, he hopes those farmers will someday contribute to the food bank and build capacity in the community.

“It’s like a cycle, reinvesting back,” he says.

Cultural food can ‘create a sustainable economy in our community’

Kayo-Ajayi’s operations are all-organic, and the plants he grows work together to benefit each other. Herbs repel pests. Cassava leaves provide protein for cows. He grows sorghum, a nutritious grain that grows like grass. You can cut it three times a year, but it just grows back, rather than needing to be replanted like other crops, he says.

He’s met a fair amount of nay-sayers who doubt how successful he can be. “People think I’m crazy, but, you know, it’s good to be crazy in a good way,” he says.

He met aspiring Black farmers who found there was little support in navigating the agriculture system, and wound up giving up on farming. That’s why he created the Canadian Black Farmers Association, which provides advice but also helps members purchase land, create business plans, find funding and secure infrastructure.

Kayo-Ajayi thinks there can also still be lingering stigma around Black farmers. When he first moved to Canada, he was working on a farm close to the road, and someone walked by and asked, “Are you picking some cotton over there?” and laughed.

Those associations can be internalized among Black farmers too, he says. “It’s kind of stuck in the mind, seeing a Black person on the field … That kind of pushed most Black people away,” he says. “ ‘My ancestors were brought here, so I don’t want to bring myself here now, and now give myself up as a slave again.’ ”

Kayo-Ajayi’s vision is to highlight the empowerment that comes from growing healthy and cultural foods for one’s own community. 

“The most important thing in this life is food,” he says again. “We can use that food to create a sustainable economy in our community.”

Beyond financial and informational barriers, there are still more challenges for new food growers. Farmers rated upfront costs and climate change as their top two concerns, according to a 2024 poll commissioned by Farmers for Climate Solutions. 

Flooding and drought have caused billions in damages to farmland across Canada, and climate change also is leading to a rise in pests. 

Kayo-Ajayi says his vegetables are mostly grown in greenhouses and are drought-tolerant, and he believes they can be very adaptable to a hotter, drier climate. 

Kayo-Ajayi says he invested a lot of money personally before he started getting funding. “You have to prove that you can do something before you can get support,” he says. 

Since then, the Canadian Black Farmers Association has received funding from organizations like Agriculture Canada, the Vancouver Foundation and the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative. But he says he needs a lot more funding to get the farm going at a bigger scale and get to the point of selling soil.

“This is my passion,” Kayo-Ajayi says. “To me, somebody has to do it. It costs a lot, but guess what? The reason why you have a little is to be able to use the resources you have to make a difference in somebody’s life. To me, investing in another human being is my best investment, and I’m doing it this way.”

Updated on Feb. 18, at 1:50 p.m PT: A previous version of this story stated the farm produces an average of 250 eggs per year. The story has been corrected to state the farm produces an average of 250 dozen eggs per year.

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Ken Johnston walks north on a gravel road through southern Ontario farmland on a July morning. It’s cool just after sunrise, but in a few hours everything will be enveloped in thick midsummer humidity.

“By 10 or 11 o’clock, the land was just on fire, like walking in an oven,” Johnston says. He wasn’t expecting this heat in Canada, he says, nor the bugs. He dabs his face with a bandana.

“Look how dense it is in there,” he points to a thick stand of trees in Wellington County, about an hour west of Toronto, as mosquitos buzz around him. “Freedom seekers would have had to fight their way through that.”

Gravel crunches under Johnston’s brisk footsteps. On his pack swings a placard that reads “Northern Underground Railroad — Niagara Falls, NY to Owen Sound, ON” and a leather strap of jangling bells.

“These are not bear bells,” he says. “They’re bells I wear to signal to the ancestors and spirits that I’m here, if they want to reach out and communicate.”

Since 2018, Johnston has been retracing freedom routes used by African Americans escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad, through his project Walk to Freedom.

He followed the footsteps of abolitionist and conductor Harriet Tubman from her home in Maryland to Niagara Falls, N.Y., and is, on this hot July day in 2025, closing out the final 265 kilometres from the U.S. border to Owen Sound, Ont., a major terminus for the Railroad. When he finishes, he will have walked more than 1,360 kilometres on this route.

Johnston has commemorated other freedom struggles on walks through the Deep South, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico, Texas and Northern Ireland — in total, he’s trekked some 3,540 kilometres. When he’s not walking, the 65-year-old works in visitor services at the Penn Museum, an archeology- and anthropology-focused museum in Philadelphia.

The ancestors “willed me to do this walk,” he says. Months earlier, he had been waffling on whether to commit to this particular trip when he saw a U-Haul truck parked in front of his home. On its side was an illustration of a freedom-seeking woman, carrying a lantern and peering warily into the unknown. Behind her was a map of eastern Canada and the U.S. marked with arrows pointing north. “Venture across Canada,” the slogan cheerily invited, with a write-up of the Underground Railroad.

“The woman is literally staring right at my front door,” he laughs. “I remember looking up to the sky and going, ‘I hear you! I hear you!’ ”

Not all freedom seekers ventured all the way to British North America, which had abolished slavery in 1834. Movement accelerated after 1850, when U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Escaped slaves and free folk in the northern free states could be kidnapped by slavecatchers and sent back to the South, which meant northern states were no longer a safe haven.

An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 freedom seekers pushed to Canada. They came overland on foot, but when possible also used trains, horses, wagons and carriages. Ships carried them across the Detroit, Niagara or St. Lawrence rivers and through the Great Lakes to port towns like Owen Sound.

“The American narrative is they made it to Canada and then they were free. Well, the story continues on the other side, and that’s what I discovered when I reached St. Catharines,” Johnston says. “They had extraordinary lives.”

Ontario towns such as St. Catharines, Windsor, Hamilton, Guelph and Chatham became cultural and economic hubs for these refugees, full of settlements, churches, businesses, newspapers, schools and abolitionist organizations. As one example, Chatham’s population was one-third Black and regarded as a “Black Paris” in the 1850s, according to Kristin Moriah, an associate professor of African-American literary studies at Queen’s University.

“This idea of being able to start your own businesses, to support the Black community, to really celebrate the kind of freedom you specifically had in Canada, makes that area very special,” she says.

These are the Railroad stops on Johnston’s walk: Tubman’s church in St. Catharines, monuments, early settlements that fostered economic independence and the museums dedicated to preserving these local Black histories.

Connecting the stories and places of the Underground Railroad is an intentional part of his walks, Johnston says, amid efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to round up undocumented immigrants, crack down on Black Lives Matter protests, scrub government websites of Black histories and end diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“Democracy in the United States is backsliding, and here in 2025, in the second Trump administration, protecting and preserving civil rights is more important than ever,” he says. “That’s sort of the idea behind these walks: to encourage people, to meet them one-on-one in their communities, in the streets, to engage in conversations with them about some of the erosion of civil rights we’re seeing.”

In an era when so much political activism happens online and furiously, he finds intention in the slow act of walking — as people did during the Montgomery bus boycotts or on civil rights marches in the 1950s.

“It generated a lot of activity and forced people to engage. … The energy of that movement I feel is what’s been lost,” Johnston says. “We saw a little bit of it after George Floyd’s death, there was a spontaneous movement of Black Lives Matter, but then that dissipated and there was no leadership to really keep it moving forward. So this is my way of encouragement to get that movement back, to find that energy.”

On the road, he channels the same struggles, suffering and emotions as his freedom-seeking ancestors, but also meditates on his own life.

“I’ve enjoyed the ebb and flow of marriage, the delight in raising a child, the profound grief of losing a child and finally divorce,” Johnston writes on his website. His daughter, who passed in 2008, had severe disabilities. He wrestled with the way the world engaged with her, and in return what autonomy and access she had. 

“After all these experiences, I’ve learned one has to keep going in life because another horizon awaits you over the next mountain.”

Escaping enslavement required expert outdoor survival skills

Walking up the shoulder of Highway 6, Johnston follows the rough trajectory of Garafraxa Road, which first connected Guelph to Owen Sound. Garafraxa was one of many colonization roads criss-crossing southern Ontario, which cleared the first paths for British expansion and opened up new areas for settlement. 

It provided access to a region called Queen’s Bush, stretching from Waterloo, Ont., to Lake Huron. Though it’s now a paved two-lane highway, when Garafraxa was first surveyed in 1837 it would have been a boggy, densely wooded and miserable stretch.

“It required a huge amount of backcountry skills to be comfortable walking the trails, navigating as you made your way north,” Jacqueline L. Scott, a Toronto-based scholar on race and nature and contributor to The Narwhal, says. “You are working out your route as you go along, not knowing what’s around the bend or corner. You mostly hiked in the evenings because when you run into white people, you don’t know if they are friend or slavecatcher.”

It was a rough journey up this corduroy road, made of timber laid down in the mud. On one stretch dubbed “The Long Swamp,” wagons and oxen would sometimes slip off these bumpy, jolting roads and sink to their doom in the water and mud. In total, the 113-kilometre trip from Fergus to Owen Sound would have been a four- or five-day journey.

One person who escaped enslavement only to find themselves on this mucky route to freedom was John Little, who fled Tennessee in 1841. Little’s testimony is included in the 1856 collection The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. He recounted how he and his wife Eliza were on the run for three months before finally arriving in Windsor, Ont.

Six months later, “​​We heard of the Queen’s Bush, where any people might go and settle, colored or poor, and might have a reasonable chance to pay for the land,” he recalled.

With $18, two axes, a few kitchen tools, flour, pork, a blanket and bedquilt, he and Eliza “marched right into the wilderness, where there were thousands of acres of woods which the chain had never run round since Adam. At night we made a fire and cut down a tree, and put up some slats like a wigwam. This was in February, when the snow was two feet deep.”

Wolves, bears and lynx roamed the bush, thick with old-growth maple, beech, elm, birch and ash trees. The land was so thick that often only three or four acres could be cleared and cultivated in a year.

Little was proud of their grit, producing thousands of bushels of produce and livestock out of nothing: “The man who was ‘a bad n—r’ in the South, is here a respected, independent farmer.”

Freedom seekers were indeed expert survivalists. Whatever food they could not carry, purchase, beg or steal they supplemented with foraged plants, fish and small game.

Tubman’s early life prepared her for the 13 missions she took back to Maryland to lead about 70 friends and family out of slavery. Her enslavers tasked her to harvest timber, trap muskrats and work the fields. Like a modern wilderness guide, Tubman navigated water and land, read stars, foraged for food and plant medicine — and did so all while keeping her fellow freedom seekers alive.

The idyll of a summer hike doesn’t capture the terror of fleeing for one’s life in midwinter, without the luxury of waterproof boots or Gore-Tex, Scott says. “When I look at what they had to do on that trek, it loses a lot of its romance. It’s not an outdoor adventure … to prove I can walk 500 kilometres in however many days, right? That’s an adventure quest.”

These traumas shape how Black folks relate to the outdoors today, Scott says. Off-leash dogs on a hiking trail can evoke the slavecatchers’ hounds. Police are still a common threat for Black people in nature, like birdwatcher Christian Cooper, who was falsely accused of threatening a white woman in New York’s Central Park, or Ottawa cyclist Ntwali Bashizi, who had 911 called on him by a white woman that accused him of blocking her path in a park.

Canada can’t achieve its land conservation goals without nurturing future generations of racialized outdoors enthusiasts, especially when a quarter of Canadians identify as what Statistics Canada calls visible minorities, Scott says. “Why should we care when we’ve never felt like we belonged there or were invited to be there?”

Canada’s complicated history of enslavement, Black Loyalists and Indigenous displacement

Canada was the Promised Land, in both the aspirations of freedom seekers and our present-day mythologies. While that narrative should rightly be celebrated, slavery is, as Scott puts it, “as Canadian as our snow or maple syrup.”

Olivier Le Jeune was the first documented person of African descent to be enslaved in what is now Canada. Sold as a child, Le Jeune was brought to Quebec City during English occupation around 1629 to 1632.

Over the next 200 years, some 7,000 people, including Indigenous individuals, were enslaved in British and French colonies. It’s just a fraction of the 12 million African lives stolen in the transatlantic slave trade, but chattel slavery is very much part of Canada’s foundation.

Ships built in Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland carried captured Africans from as early as 1725 until the early 1800s. The worst, cheapest grades of cod fished from the North Atlantic were shipped south to the Caribbean to feed the enslaved on British plantations. 

Even after Britain abolished slavery, racist sentiments remained. The Ontario-based newspaper Provincial Freeman, published by abolitionist, educator and lawyer Mary Ann Shadd Cary, put it plainly in 1853: “Prejudice against negroes, so prevalent in various parts of the Province, as maintained by many persons of all nations … is one of the strongest pro-slavery influences that disgraces and degrades our fair country.”

Still, leaders like Shadd Cary were committed to the idea of Black settlement in Canada. “She really supported the British colonial project, and I think that she thought of it as a project that was directly in opposition to the evils of U.S. chattel slavery,” Moriah, of Queen’s University, says.

Viewed today, with an understanding of how colonization harmed Indigenous nations, this is an uncomfortable position. But Scott lays out the scant choices for a Black Loyalist, the name given to Black people who supported the Crown in the war against the United States. “You’ve fought for Canada because the fear was that if the U.S. won, the U.S. would reimpose slavery in Canada. … You know that freedom is hanging by a thin thread. Your reward is to be given land grants. … But it’s Indigenous land grants that you’re given.”

“And so the intertwining of that complex history — freedom for one group, the promise of freedom, of economic prosperity — it’s based on taking away the land from a different group,” Scott says. 

Canada’s promises to Black Loyalists were hollow. Most weren’t awarded the land they were owed, while others received “the worst land grants, smaller size, in the middle of nowhere, so far from the roads and later far from the railways, so it was economically unfeasible,” to earn a living there, Scott says.

Many lost their homes after white labourers, resentful of perceived wage undercutting, instigated the first recorded race riot in North America in Shelburne, N.S., in 1784. Disillusioned, more than 1,000 people, representing a third of Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalists, left for Sierra Leone just eight years later.

Some who lived along Johnston’s route were left disappointed, too. On Highway 6, near Williamsford, Ont., Johnston stops at an intersecting dirt road. Here, where a stream meets old Garafraxa Road, some 50 families of Loyalists and freedom seekers settled in what became the Negro Creek Settlement.

Black settlers were among the first non-Indigenous residents of the Queen’s Bush, as early as the 1820s. Their presence predated county surveys in 1851 that carved up plots of land. Though they had done the hard work to clear their land, many of these families could not afford to buy it. Without titles, land agents regarded them as squatters. Other families could not afford the land payments.

What followed were threats, evictions, harassment and coercion to sell or simply walk away. By the early 1850s, families migrated out of the area. Only a handful were established enough to hold onto their plots. By the 1960s, the community cemetery had been desecrated. All that remained were the signs for Negro Creek Road.

In 1995, perceiving the name to be politically incorrect, Holland Township announced the street would be renamed Moggie Road after an early white settler. Descendants of early Black settlers marched in protest, calling it an erasure of their families’ presence, and filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Nearly two years later, the town backed down.

This spring, community members intend to break ground on a memorial park on two acres of land donated by Jim Douglas, a descendant who still owns his family’s 300-acre parcel. Descendants continue to gather their histories in an online archive.

Johnston’s route doesn’t quite reach the town of Priceville, Ont., just 34 kilometres away, where Black residents were also pushed out violently. Eventually all that was left was a cemetery, which was razed in the 1960s for a potato field. Some tombstones were hidden in a stone pile near the local school, while others lined the floor of a barn and the basement of a farmhouse, as revealed in the 2000 documentary Speakers for the Dead.

Local white kids played baseball using a piece of a broken headstone for home plate. “I think it said Margaret,” one resident tells the camera with a laugh. “Pitch it to Maggie!”

In Dresden, Ont., an emotional meeting with descendants of early Black settlers

As 2025 drew to a close, Johnston was called again by the ancestors to walk. He set off from Detroit on Boxing Day, bound for the Black settlements of southwestern Ontario.

His trip landed during a cold snap. Some freedom seekers chose — or seized the opportunity — to leave in winter, when the long dark nights provided more cover. In freezing temperatures, they would have been able to walk over the frozen Detroit and St. Clair rivers.

“One of the things I did not fully understand was the psychological journey for these people coming across,” Johnston says. “They were happy to be free, but the psychological weight of the cold as I experienced in the last week dampened my spirit a little.”

On his route were sites with rich Black history: Chatham, Amherstburg, North Buxton and Dresden.

The Dawn settlement in Dresden was founded in 1841 by the abolitionist, preacher and Underground Railroad conductor Josiah Henson. Enslaved in Maryland and Kentucky, he had been permanently disabled by beatings that left him unable to lift his arms above his head. After discovering his enslaver had cheated him out of an agreement to buy his freedom, he escaped at the age of 41 with his wife and four children.

Henson, who advocated for economic independence and self-reliance, built a co-operative farm, church and vocational school to teach residents the skills to work at nearby sawmills and gristmills. His life was the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s often-misunderstood anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and his home sits on what is now Freedom Road.

On those 200 acres, Dawn’s early residents began the task “of settling upon wild lands which we could call our own; and where every tree which we felled, and every bushel of corn we raised, would be for ourselves; in other words, where we could secure all the profits of our own labor,” Henson wrote in his 1849 autobiography.

A century later, the area became a part of Black history as the site of Canada’s first racial discrimination trial. Many businesses in Dresden refused to serve Black customers, most notoriously Kay’s Café and Emerson’s Soda Bar Restaurant.

Hugh Burnett, a Dawn descendant, and his neighbours formed the National Unity Association in 1948 and lobbied town council and then the provincial government to pass anti-discrimination legislation. They succeeded in 1954, but some local businesses refused to comply. Two years later, after sit-ins and two drawn-out provincial trials, the owner of Kay’s Café finally served his first Black customers in 1956.

“It has been stated you can’t make a law to make one man love another — I think they knew very well the law would not do that — but it would eliminate the act of discrimination,” Burnett said in a 1954 National Film Board documentary.

On the final day of his walk, Johnston was greeted at the foot of Freedom Road by several dozen Black residents, many of them descendants of Dawn settlers. They walked arm-in-arm toward the museum, singing a gospel hymn.

Retracing Ontario’s Black history ‘touched me to my core’: Johnston

For those who made it to the end of the Underground Railroad, life was bittersweet. Though many freedom seekers found a piece of their Promised Land, the pains of dispossession, prejudice and slavery were ever-present.

“I reached Canada about a year ago. Liberty I find to be sweet indeed,” Henry Atkinson recalled in 1856, after escaping enslavement in Virginia. “I found an opportunity to escape, after studying upon it a long time.”

“But it went hard to leave my wife; it was like taking my heart’s blood: but I could not help it — I expected to be taken away where I should never see her again, and so I concluded that it would be right to leave her. I never expect to see her again in this world — nor our child.”

After the American Civil War and emancipation in 1865, this yearning drew many freedom seekers back to the U.S. in the hopes of being reunited with their families, Moriah says. Having achieved economic success in Ontario settlements like Elgin (in what is now North Buxton) which grew to 1,000 Black residents at its peak, families chased opportunities in bigger cities like Detroit or Toronto. Today these clans are transnational, slipping between countries with family, friends, school and work on both sides.

The magnitude of these many journeys hit Johnston when he first arrived at the border divide in Niagara Falls.

“I’ve been tracing the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, from the banks of the Choptank River in Maryland on the eastern shore all the way to St. Catharines,” he says. “Harriet Tubman rescued her brothers in Christmas of 1854. They made that journey to St. Catharines in one month. It has taken me five years.”

“Just looking back and seeing how extraordinary that journey was that they made, and the sacrifice that many people made — many people left their families and they weren’t going back,” he says, pausing as he tears up.

“I had the privilege of knowing I was going back home to my family and friends. It touched me to the core of my bones just what that walk meant to them.”

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Maurice Ruddick waited for nearly nine days near the bottom of a 4,300-metre-deep coal mine before he was rescued. An underground earthquake brought down ceilings and pillars and shifted debris into tunnels, trapping Ruddick and several other miners. Stuck in the darkness, with limited food and water Ruddick lifted his fellow miners’ spirits by leading them in prayers and song. 

In 1958, Nova Scotia’s Springhill mine disaster killed 75 men and trapped dozens in the tunnels. The world kept vigil for survivors as they were slowly rescued. Ruddick, a descendant of enslaved Black people, was among the last miners to be brought back to the surface. A media circus followed and the survivors’ stories were broadcast around the world.

“Maurice’s story is often celebrated for his heroism during the Springhill disaster but less attention is paid to the broader context of racial discrimination he faced,” Aderinola Olamiju told The Narwhal. Olamiju, a graduate student at Memorial University in Newfoundland, is researching the history of Black miners in Nova Scotia.  

“As an example, after the rescue, when he and other survivors were meant to travel to Georgia for vacation, there was still segregation in the United States at that time and he had to be housed separately from the white miners.”  

Ruddick’s story is one of the most well known of a Black miner in Canada. It was made into a Heritage Minute, covered in books and is now a musical play. Olamiju, originally from Nigeria, is looking to explore lesser-known stories. 

As he digs through archives, libraries, union pamphlets and historical newspapers, he hopes to uncover “the hidden stories of Black miners in Nova Scotia’s industrial past, particularly how racial dynamics influenced their experiences with workplace safety and health risks.” 

The Narwhal spoke with Olamiju about his research into what life was like for some of the first Black miners in Canada and the challenges of trying to piece together this history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What questions do you hope to answer through your research?

As part of the Mining Danger project, which investigates the history of accidents, occupational disease and pollution in Canada’s mines and mining communities, the main focus of my research is looking at the racial dynamics of mining labour, particularly how it connects to health and risk. 

My research will examine several key questions, but the main ones are: how did coal mining companies, labour recruiters and government institutions together create and reinforce racial hierarchies within the industry? And how did Black workers engage with unions and workplace advocacy to improve their working conditions and address workplace accidents and issues relating to occupational health?

What role did Black miners play in Canada’s first mining booms?

Historically, the coal industry in Nova Scotia was intricately linked to the steel industry, as coal was used to burn the furnaces in the steel-making process. So you had two industries heavily dependent on each other. During the industrial expansion of the 1880s and 1890s, there increasingly became labour shortages in the coal industry. Companies like Dominion Coal (Domco, later Disco) and Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company (Scotia) emerged as major players in the 1890s, and they turned Cape Breton into this industrial hub where you had rival companies running both steel and coal-mining operations. 

To address these labour shortages, some of these companies began to recruit labour from outside the country. Disco was actually a major facilitator of Black migration to Nova Scotia through agreements with the provincial government. The recruitment process sometimes used established networks within the North American steel industry, with company managers recruiting workers from industrial centres in Alabama, Buffalo, Maryland and Pittsburgh. 

Other times, you had labour recruiters going directly to Caribbean countries, and workers who returned home would also recruit their friends or families. As many Caribbean countries were colonized by the British at the time, it was easier to recruit labour from the Caribbean, particularly from Barbados and Jamaica. Nova Scotia’s location and shipping networks made this connection and recruitment easier and labour migration wasn’t only limited to the coal and steel industries. Domestic workers, particularly women, were also recruited from the Caribbean to work in Nova Scotia.

What do we know, so far, about what life was like as a Black miner in the early days of Canada?

We know these new labour recruits faced multiple layers of racial discrimination. Just like in our contemporary society, back then Black labour was devalued as Black workers were often paid much less compared to their white counterparts. Despite having skills, Black workers faced this constant discrimination that kept them in subordinate positions, doing the most physically demanding and lowest-paid jobs. During boom and bust cycles, these workers were often the last to be rehired and the first to be fired. 

Their housing situation was also subpar. For example, for some Disco workers, many lived in company shacks in the Cokeville section of Whitney Pier that lacked basic things like proper heating and running water. There’s this letter from 1908 where a blast furnace superintendent, J. McInnis, wrote to the general manager about how bad the houses were in the “Negro quarter” — they were unboarded and exposed to the harsh realities of winter weather. 

The work itself was extremely dangerous, especially at Disco’s blast furnaces and coke ovens. Black workers were concentrated at these positions because of racial stereotypes about their ability to withstand heat better than white workers. But despite all these negatives associated with labour and immigration, Black workers managed to build strong communities. They set up churches, schools and businesses to help each other cope with the challenges of industrial work and discrimination. 

What has surprised you most in your research so far?

Seeing how racial dynamics developed in Nova Scotia and what forces and factors shaped them. You had these companies actively recruiting Black workers from the Caribbean and the United States to address labor shortages, while at the same time Canada’s immigration policies were trying to restrict Black migration.

Where are you looking for information and what do you hope to find?

Over the summer months, I will be conducting research at various archives and libraries in Nova Scotia, including the Nova Scotia Archives and the university archives at Dalhousie and Cape Breton. Some of the most important sources will be company records, print newspapers and magazines and union documents. Canada’s immigration records are also useful in understanding the policy of immigration discrimination based on race and looking at the scale of migration and countries of origin.

How challenging has it been to find information on the history of Black miners in Nova Scotia? 

Generally, the historical record of such stories is often fragmented. Racial discrimination affected what stories were told and kept in archives. Sometimes the most valuable information can be found in places like immigration paperwork or company letters, rather than the usual mining narratives. Archives also may only keep what society at that time deemed important.

Another factor is scale. Compared to white workers, there weren’t that many Black workers in Nova Scotia’s mining industry. The Afro-Canadian population in Nova Scotia is significant and has a rich history, yes, but when it comes to mining specifically, their numbers were smaller. This was partly because of Canada’s immigration policies — immigration agents were actually given secret instructions to keep Caribbean Black people out, even when they met all the official requirements. They would even work with U.S. officials to restrict African-American migration by getting American railway companies to increase ticket prices for Black passengers from $20 to $200, for example.

Updated on Feb. 28, 2024, at 10:45 a.m. ET: The subtitle on this story was updated to clarify the researcher interviewed for this story is based in the Altantic region, not the Maritimes. He is based in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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There’s something unmistakably legendary about Billy Beal to those living in the forestry and agricultural communities of Manitoba’s Swan River Valley.

He was something of a renaissance man: an engineer by trade, but in the everyday struggle of homesteading in Manitoba’s northwest, he moonlighted as a doctor’s assistant, mechanic, astronomer, carpenter, librarian and school district representative.

Just about everyone in Swan River remembers a story about Beal — or knows someone who does.

“His sense of community was just so strong,” Robert Barrow, photographer and co-author of the biography, Billy: The Life and Photographs of William S.A. Beal, says in a phone call from Swan River, about 500 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg. “Almost everything of purpose he did was for his community.”

Beal was among the first documented Black settlers in the province — and the first to settle the Swan River Valley.

As an avid reader and amateur photographer, Beal documented life in his Manitoba town at the turn of the 20th century.

With photographs and a handwritten memoir, Beal captured an intimate portrait of life on the rapidly changing Prairies, documenting the early influences of industry, immigration and western expansion.

Canadian immigration policy welcomes, and then bans, Black immigrants

William S. A. Beal, son of a bookseller, was born in Chelsea, Mass., in 1874 and educated in Minneapolis.

But not much is known about his life until he arrived in Manitoba.

At the turn of the 20th century, Canada launched an aggressive campaign to draw American and European farmers (deemed “desirable” immigrants) to the Canadian West. Farmers were offered a promising deal: the government would grant 160-acre homesteads for a nominal $10 fee, so long as farmers cleared and cultivated 15 acres within three years.

As a result, the Prairie population grew by over a million people between 1896 and 1905.

The Swan River Valley had been home to Cree and Anishnaabe for generations, and already had a storied history as a contentious fur trading hub when the immigration policy brought waves of Icelandic, American and European farmers to its dense woods.

Beal was by no means the only Black person to settle the Prairies — Black communities emerged in Amber Valley, Alta., and Eldon, Sask. — but he was the first to make a home in Swan River.

It would become clear Black immigrants didn’t fit the government’s “desirable” settler definition and it instituted several unofficial policies of deterrence before attempting to formally ban Black immigration to Canada in 1911.

Documenting early clearing of old-growth forests in Manitoba

Beal built a career at the Minnesota sawmills — many of which provided lumber to Manitoba settlements. By the early 1900s, however, the northern states had nearly exhausted their supply of good spruce, and had begun turning to the Canadian forests for their harvests.

The Duck Mountain region was home to much of Manitoba’s old-growth forest. Though the old-growth trees have long been depleted, it remains one of few regions in the province where commercial logging still occurs.

In those days, forestry was mostly a winter job. The bare trees and snow-packed ground meant fewer obstacles. In the spring, as the snow melted and the waterways began to run, lumber teams would drive logs into the river to float back to lakeside sawmills.

Trained as a steam engineer, Beal tended equipment that kept the sawmill running — an industry that continues to this day.

“Lumber and farming are still kind of the mainstays here,” Barrow says. “The old hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

Early homesteaders got cheap land in Manitoba’s Swan River Valley — if they could clear it

Over those long winters in the logging camps, Beal wrote, “there was nothing but homestead talk every evening.”

Eventually, that talk seemed to have an effect on Beal, in spite of his city-dwelling sensibilities. He applied for a homestead in fall 1908. Because he was late to cash in on the government promise, the only land available was a scrubby plot 16 kilometres north of the townsite on the banks of Big Woody River.

There were no roads out to Big Woody, or bridges across the river. Beal remembers cutting his own roads to build a “shack” to live in.

In those days, he wrote, no one grew grain or sprawling crop farms. Working the land to meet the 15-acre quota was a slow, grueling, “herculean task,” Beal wrote.

“My father put it this way: he said the government bet you $10 that you’d starve to death,” Barrow quips.

Indeed, Beal wrote not everyone could withstand the work. Most people grew small gardens and tended a few cattle. There was no guarantee crops would grow. The cold climate meant frosts would come even in the summer. Beal’s first garden grew nothing but potatoes.

‘The real treasure’ — Billy Beal’s dedication to Swan River

It was around this time, Barrow says, that Beal picked up a camera and some photography skills from another settler. The collection of about 70 plates that still exist were passed on to the Barrow family after Beal’s death in 1968.

There are scenes likely captured at house parties and local dances. There are portraits of neighbours surrounded by their livestock and crops. There are scenes of life on the logging roads, of tugboats pulling cookhouses up river to the work camps.

It’s the affinity for people in Beal’s work that’s always stood out to Barrow.

​​Through the intimate portraits — mostly of his neighbours — and the landscape images from his logging work, “you see the makeup of the community, and the kinds of occupations, trades and recreation that people were involved in,” he says.

According to Beal’s memoir, “everybody was friendly,” and eager to welcome him.

In return, he served the community in every way he could, Barrow says.

He built a telescope out of stovepipe and tin cans and taught his neighbours about astronomy. He built the town’s first radio and hosted the local children — including Barrow’s uncle — to listen to its signal.

When diphtheria threatened the town in 1915, and the influenza pandemic arrived a few years later, he helped the town doctor with vaccinations.

Barrow says Beal was instrumental in setting up a local debate society that gathered for all manner of philosophical and political discourse at the community hall. Unlike in most other homesteading communities, the Big Woody district school (another one of Beal’s contributions) is still used as a town hall today.

“The farms have gotten bigger, there’s fewer people and I suppose eventually it won’t be a viable option anymore, but to this point the community has stayed together,” Barrow says.

He attributes that connectivity, in no small part, to that of the community in Beal’s day.

“It’s one thing to build yourself up but it’s quite another thing to build other people up. That’s the real treasure,” Barrow says.

To this day, the Swan River Valley treasures Billy Beal. When Beal died a penniless, lifelong bachelor in 1968, the community built a headstone to honour him. They inscribed his story on a plaque outside the library and named the local ice-fishing derby in his honour.

“He was a wonderful man,” Don Brown, a Swan Valley resident who remembers meeting Beal as a young and shy child, says over a phone call. “Weren’t we lucky to have him come to this area.”

Beal, too, took pride in Swan River.

“Someone said back in 1906 … ‘We are just clearing this country for the second generation,’ ” he wrote at the closing of his memoir.

“The second generation is here and some are doing well. Very few of the original settlers are left. We have seen the district pass from the days of ‘oxen,’ to horses, to tractors and now combines. What will be next?”

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Last fall, the world of birdwatching was rocked by news a long time in the making: birds in North America will no longer be named after people. 

The American Ornithological Society — which maintains a list of official English-language names for birds — said the change is aimed at righting historical wrongs, and dissociating some feathered species from the racist and colonial legacies of the people whose names they bear. 

That includes the Townsend’s warbler found in coniferous forests on the West Coast, named after early 1800s naturalist John Kirk Townsend, who stole skulls from the graves of Indigenous people and whose work contributed to scientific racism used to justify slavery. The ornithological society is starting with a list of 70 to 80 birds, but will eventually change the English names of hundreds of species in the Americas, in consultation with the public. 

“Exclusionary naming conventions developed in the 1800s, clouded by racism and misogyny, don’t work for us today,” the organization’s executive director and CEO, Judith Scarl, said in a statement calling out “historic bias” in the way birds have been named until now.

“The time has come for us to transform this process and redirect the focus to the birds, where it belongs.”

Some of the avian species set to receive new titles might be familiar sights in backyards and around bird feeders in Canada. They include those with relatively-benign — if confusing — names, like the Steller’s jay, named after a German naturalist, the Anna’s hummingbird, named after a European royal and the Cooper’s hawk, named for an American who mainly studied mollusks. 

Others carry darker legacies. Scott’s oriole was named after a Civil War general who oversaw the forced relocation of Indigenous people along the Trail of Tears. Audubon’s shearwater was named after enslaver John James Audubon, also the namesake of the National Audubon Society, a bird conservation group that describes him as a fabulist and fraudster who stole human remains and “did despicable things even by the standards of his day.” Many species were named after the first European or American man to kill and collect a specimen, a colonial practice that erased the contributions and knowledge of Black and Indigenous experts. 

Concerns about the history of racism in birding have existed for a long time. Likewise, renaming birds to fix historical wrongs is also nothing new. The long-tailed duck, a common sight on Canadian coastlines, received a new moniker in 2000, erasing an old one containing a racial slur. But for a long time, ornithologists took requests for renaming one at a time without looking at larger systemic change. 

The turning point came on May 25, 2020. The same day a white police officer murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, a white woman named Amy Cooper, who once attended the University of Waterloo in Ontario, called 911 from New York’s Central Park to lodge a false allegation against a Black birder named Christian Cooper. Both incidents prompted massive reckonings with racism in North America. The impacts reverberated in birding too, drawing attention to the ways Black birders often face unwarranted scrutiny and violence, and sparking calls for birdwatching to be made more inclusive. 

A grassroots group called Bird Names for Birds pressed the American Ornithological Society to change all eponyms, or names derived from people, to demonstrate the organization’s commitment to reform. By the end of the year, the society renamed what is now the thick-billed longspur, which got its former moniker from a Confederate general. It also decided to explore what a wider renaming process could look like — an effort to make birdwatching more diverse and welcoming.

Renaming is just the beginning of the changes that need to happen to make birdwatching inclusive and safe, Shontal Cargill, a birder based in the Greater Toronto Area, says. Spotting common woodpeckers and rare geese through her binoculars is joyful, but the practice has had hurtful moments too — times when she feared for her safety, or realized white birders on the trail were saying hello to each other but not her. 

“It’s almost like people don’t really take you seriously because you’re just a Black, young girl … and when you think of birding, you generally think of an older white male. Sometimes it’s very lonely,” she says. 

“It’s very tiring to constantly have to say, ‘Hey, my life matters. I’m worthy to be here in the field the same way that you are. I know what I’m talking about.’ ”

In their call for action, Bird Names for Birds noted the history of ornithology is “in many ways, a microcosm of the history and harms of western science.” That history can also show how birding can be a force for good. American abolitionist Harriet Tubman was an avid naturalist who learned to perfectly mimic the call of a barred owl, a signal she used along the Underground Railroad to covertly tell freedom seekers when it was safe to come out. Another agent of the Underground Railroad, Alexander Milton Ross of Belleville, Ont., posed as an ornithologist as he travelled through Confederate states to spread information to enslaved people about escape routes and safe houses.

So, how can the world of birding truly become safer and more inclusive? The Narwhal spoke to six Black birders about their experiences in the field, the renaming process and how else the community needs to change as it looks towards its future.

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. 

Zoë-Blue Coates

Compost Education Centre office manager and member of Special Bird Service | Victoria 

Introduction to birding: I think that birds have always been a thing in my life. I have a memory of my grandma giving me this bright, sky blue poster with birds on it and it had the names of them underneath. The first bird I learned how to ID was the American robin when I was a kid. In 2019, my grandparents and I went to Newfoundland and I got to see the puffins. We went to Cape St. Mary’s and it was the first time I ever saw a bird colony. I remember the smell of bird poop as I walked across this beautiful meadow, to this giant rock that’s just full of birds. And it was the most awe inspiring thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

I think the thing that got me really into backyard birds, which are my main focus now, was during COVID. A lot of people started running, and I live in an apartment where I can see the main thoroughfare in my neighborhood and watch crows dive bomb runners down the street. So to prevent myself from being dive bombed, I started feeding the crows and learning more about corvids.

Then COVID went into the heat dome, and I found myself having a lot of anxiety about the state of the world. Eventually I took a bird language interpretation course that actually is offered at my work, and it opened up my mind to how you can interact with birds and bees and plants. And I started walking to work and listening for the birds that I was hearing … It’s the most grounding thing ever. No matter where you are, you can usually hear a bird.

Thoughts on renaming eponymous birds: I had heard about it sort of being a thing in the birder gossip-sphere in 2021. It was like ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’ Why are we naming things after people who are claiming to have seen them first or to have studied them first? The people who they’re named after … it’s not because they actually had a relationship to the bird, or to the land that the bird was on. I think that’s the thing that actually needs to be called into question if we’re really starting to untangle these systems and these things that are the root causes of things like climate change.

The thing that’s sort of disappointing about names is that oftentimes they are disconnected from the lands that they’re on. They’re disconnected from the relationships they have to people, to plants, to other beings. For example, Swainson’s thrush. The translation from SENĆOŦEN is salmonberry bird, because it calls out the colour of the salmonberry. So I think that there are actually ways that we could have a deeper relationship with the birds that we’re hearing. I think that maybe we’re just stopping at the midpoint with just saying we’re going to rename them. And then what does that consultation look like? Who are the communities renaming them? Is it just continuing to be higher learning institutions? And if so, is it actually undoing the harm that the names of these birds caused?

How birding still needs to change: I would really love to see birding be about more than just birds … I really wish that people saw the intricacy between the land and the birds, because that’s what’s really going to help when it comes to conservation.

Julian Victor

Wildlife filmmaker, host of On the Wild Side on Breakfast Television | Toronto

Introduction to birding: About 10 years ago, I wanted to do wildlife filmmaking. I always had a passion for wildlife and animals, so then I wanted to go to school to be a zoologist. But that didn’t work because my grades weren’t the greatest, so then I went to school for film. I ended up working in a production house and my boss at the time was like, ‘There’s this weird place you should go check out,’ which was actually Tommy Thompson Park. 

I took my camera and on my weekends, I would go and check out the place. I fell in love with filming the birds around Tommy Thompson. Over the years, you start to learn about more species.

Birding gets you to be aware of your surroundings. You’re kind of looking for signs, like [bird] sounds. I could be walking with my friends and hear a red-tailed hawk, and I go ‘Oh, there’s a red-tailed hawk somewhere.’ I can tell the difference between a crow’s call and a raven. So many types of birds migrate into the city from the Caribbean and it’s great to see a lot of these really cool birds in such an urban setting. I love that feeling of knowing wildlife is all around and these birds are just all around us, even in the city. 

A very misunderstood bird that I actually like is the double-crested cormorant. Just like Black people, very misunderstood. People always act like cormorants are such dirty birds. They were persecuted and they actually used to be called n-word birds. They were seen as a nuisance. I find them to be very fascinating. In the sun, they’re black but they have an emerald colour and green eyes. They dive below the water and they can come up with fish and swallow three or four fish at a time.

Thoughts on renaming eponymous birds: When you look back at the time period when some of these birds were named, these were done during times of slavery or times when naturalists who were Black people or people of colour were excluded. Some of the people who named these birds could be linked to colonization and the genocide of Indigenous Peoples. So I think that can be very triggering to people and also very unwelcoming. I think it’s good that they’re naming them after the characteristics of the bird and their regional locations, I think that would be more inviting.

How birding still needs to change: How can you want to have everybody on board to save the diversity of species in the world when a diversity of people is not properly represented? I think in 2020 people were like, ‘We’re all about inclusivity.’ I guess at the time it was the thing to do, but you have to keep it going. Don’t get a token to say ‘Hey, we have this one.’ You have to continue to do the work, and continue to go to different neighborhoods with people of different backgrounds and talk to them about birding and about wildlife. 

Shontal Cargill

Birder and wildlife photographer | Brampton, Ont.

Introduction to birding: I had to take a science for non-science major class in my undergrad. There was actually an ornithology class that fell under that criteria. I took it just because I needed to cross off the requirement, but it was so fascinating to learn about birds.

I started going on hikes during the pandemic, like really long ones, and observing what was around. I think that was kind of my moment where I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna consider myself a birder now’ because I have some advanced knowledge … I’m observing birds, I’m recording what I’m seeing on various apps, I feel like I’m edging into birding territory here. 

I think the most special encounter I had in my early days of birding was at the Riverwood Conservancy. It was my first time seeing a downy woodpecker up close … I was just observing it and thinking, ‘Wow, this is so incredible.’ We have these birds right here in our backyard, and we’re just walking right by them every single day with no clue that they’re just out here doing their thing.

Thoughts on renaming eponymous birds: When Christian Cooper had that situation in New York, people started to really amplify that a lot of prominent birders were deeply problematic people. That’s when I became really aware of the fact that a lot of birds are named after people who were slave owners or people who held really racist views. To me it was shocking, first of all … but I also was just thinking to myself, ‘Wow, imagine that something like a bird that just flies freely in the sky has this legacy through no fault of its own.’ We impose the name on it because someone ‘discovered’ it.

When I heard that the names were going to be changed, I thought it was a welcome choice. I do think it’s important. I don’t think it’s like the silver bullet that’s going to make birding more inclusive, because there are a lot of other issues within the birding community that I’ve personally experienced and witnessed. 

How birding still needs to change: I don’t think a lot of people understand that when you’re a Black person it comes with — I don’t know how to phrase this in a way that doesn’t sound horrible — but it just comes with a lot of extra things that maybe people who aren’t Black don’t realize. [Recently] there was a very rare goose in North Caledon. So I went there. It was in a rural area and there were just a few houses here and there, spread out. Immediately when I pulled up I felt unsafe, just because I know it’s very easy for me as a Black person with binoculars and a very large camera to look suspicious.

[And then I learned that] a few days earlier, the police had been called on two white men who were birdwatching with their binoculars and their camera. So I’m thinking ‘Wow, if someone would call the police on them, imagine what could have happened if someone saw me and thought, “Hey, I don’t think this person belongs here.” ’ It could have ended pretty badly.

When I tell my friends and family that I’m a birder, they’re like, ‘Isn’t that like a white people thing?’ The ultimate goal would be to dispel the myth that going outside, observing birds …  is exclusive to a certain group of people.

Melissa Hafting

eBird reviewer, B.C. Young Birders Program founder and B.C. Rare Bird Alert blogger | Vancouver

Introduction to birding: I got into birding when I was about five years old. My dad would take me to a place called Reifel Bird Sanctuary … he really started the love of birds and wildlife and nature in me, and then it just grew from there. 

I love being outside in nature, camping, just looking at wildlife. It just brought me a sense of peace looking at the birds from a young age. Especially as I grew up and had a lot of problems, like losing my father and then my mother … they’ve really been a saviour to me. I have a book coming out in spring 2024, called Dare to Bird, exploring the joy and healing power of birds. This book is about how birds have helped me through grief and loss … It also talks about the joy that birds have brought me and how they can help people. 

Thoughts on renaming eponymous birds: In general I think [renaming eponymous birds] is a good move … It will help birders kind of learn what the bird is by the description, which will be a lot more helpful for us. [The name] Cooper’s hawk doesn’t tell you what the bird looks like. But if you named it something like dark capped-hawk, that would help. 

There’s a lot of opposition already to it … because nobody really likes change. I do understand why some people find these changes to be hard, especially because they don’t feel that you should be judging historical figures. 

How birding still needs to change: I’ve talked to other birders of colour who feel like this isn’t going to make any difference for them regarding some of the racist things they’ve had [happen]. I can understand that, too, because I don’t believe it’s going to make a huge difference regarding [whether we] will feel safer in the wild. Will people make us feel more included? Will we not have some of the racist things that have happened to us? No, I don’t believe that’s going to happen from just the name-change alone. But if you can do anything to make people feel more welcome, you should. 

I think you need to do a lot more. Like having people of colour on boards and bird record committees, having diversity and inclusion statements, doing more [walks for Black, Indigenous and other people of colour] and having [people of colour] in more leadership positions, acknowledging that there is a problem in birding — and that there are barriers to people of colour, and that they don’t always feel welcome. 

Cynthia Roulston

Middle school teacher and birder | Scarborough, Ont. 

Introduction to birding: When I became a teacher … [and] it was time to pick where you wanted to do your practicum, I saw the Natural Science School [on the Toronto Islands] and in my head I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, everyone is going to jump up and run for that location’ … And then in the end I was one of maybe three people who wanted to go.

I would take the 6 a.m. ferry over … I would go off with another teacher who was my mentor and we would go birding. Even after my practicum finished, we would meet up to go birding in different parts of the city. 

I had a bit of a hiatus … and then during the pandemic it was a great thing to start up again. Just as a very random online science project that I would show to my students, I started setting up some feeders in my backyard … Once we came back from the pandemic, I had that eye of looking for things, so I noticed how many species of birds were on our school property that I’d never really paid attention to. 

Thoughts on renaming eponymous birds: I think it’s a positive thing. I’m really happy with it. As a Black woman who grew up in rural Ontario, I was not represented at all in the outdoor and environmental world … I think that language matters. Names [can carry] a colonial perspective — that ownership. I see it in education circles as well, there’s a real wanting to covet knowledge and take credit for knowledge.

Going back to a renaming that focuses more on their unique characteristics and features more descriptive names — fantastic, who wouldn’t want that? Where there’s a chance to do less harm, why not do less harm? What makes me sad is the people who mock that. You can just tell the level of privilege because they don’t understand, or even are unwilling to understand how that might work for someone else. 

There’s still a lot of decolonizing and anti-racist work that needs to be done. I feel like this is a start … Hopefully, this is going to spark those conversations and then maybe, slowly, start moving some people into recognizing there are other voices out there that need to be heard in the environmental world, the birding world and in education. 

Charles Plaisir

Science communicator and nature photographer | Sherbrooke, Que.

Introduction to birding: Birding was something I was always interested in from a young age. Not in a very scientific way, but more [that] I love looking at the different colors of flying things. As a child, I was really interested in birds of prey … [like the] bald eagle, of course. Which I had never seen, I just saw a picture of it. And then I started looking in my backyard and started seeing all of the colourful birds that we have, even here in eastern Canada. Blue jays, cardinals, different birds with amazing feather patterns that I had never really thought of.

I got my first camera [as a teenager] and I started realizing that you can get some really nice pictures of these birds in your backyard or in different places. 

My best experience overall must have been Oceania, so New Zealand and Australia. I was able to work in an eco-sanctuary where birds that are typically endangered or threatened were able to flourish and to be protected. Australia was amazing for a whole bunch of other reasons: bigger birds and these flocks of cockatoos, like hundreds of them, flying over your head while you’re doing your fieldwork … it makes me appreciate the diversity we have here as well.

Thoughts on renaming eponymous birds: I didn’t have any opinion at first. And then I realized, wait a second, this is more than just renaming birds. It’s not only about increased inclusion for humans and our perspective towards each other — of course that action will not affect the bird in any way.  I think it’s an important action to take to show that our rapport with animals should not be us dominating them or us being in a position of power towards them by giving our name to them. It just has a colonial aspect to it. We should be distinguishing animals by biology, its physical features, its behaviour. 

Showing respect for the living world starts with how you describe it, how you define it. I think leaving our ego and ourselves out of it is important to the process. In sum, I think it’s really a positive thing. It doesn’t mean much for the animal itself, but it might mean a lot in the long run in terms of how we interact with living species.

Updated Feb. 12, 2024, at 11:30 a.m. ET: This story was updated to correct the credit on the photo of Melissa Hafting.

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“I want to help people in ways that I haven’t necessarily been helped. It’s important to me to prevent some of the harm that I went through,” Julius Lindsay says. The director of sustainable communities for the David Suzuki Foundation says that in his nearly two-decade long career in the environmental sector, he has never worked with another Black person. 

And, he says, that’s not uncommon. Black environmentalists share a love of nature and, often, a familial history of farmers and gardeners. But, unfortunately, another unifying experience is isolation in their field of work.

It can be hard for Black people to become environmental professionals when that requires expensive post-secondary education in fields they’ve been discouraged from pursuing. And even though environmental racism increases Black communities’ health risks and their exposure to climate change, it’s not always easy for them to focus on the issue when they’re just trying to stay afloat, considering all of the other ways systemic racism impacts their lives.

What that means, Lindsay says, is that “I’ve never had a mentor.” It also means constant work: on one hand, pushing non-Black environmentalists to give attention, time and money to issues affecting Black communities most; on the other, convincing people dealing with more immediate crises that climate action matters to their daily lives. 

Though the community of Black environmentalists in Canada is small, it is definitely mighty. And it’s grown enough that those who never had a Black mentor are now able to fill that role for someone else.  

That includes Lindsay, who is always connecting people: in 2020, he co-founded the Black Environmental Alliance, a group of environmental professionals aiming to address environmental justice issues and the lack of Black representation in the field. 

“This is not a coincidence. It’s a pathway that I’ve been on, and I can’t be anybody but myself,” he says. “It’s really important that these things are part of my work.” Lindsay credits his Grenadian parents, whose revolutionary spirit taught him phrases like “each one, teach one,” for making him community- and family-focused. 

Others whose achievements young Black scientists and environmentalists look up to include Ingrid Waldron, and her groundbreaking work on environmental racism, and Maydianne Andrade, the founder of the Canadian Black Scientists Network.  

All across the country, Black environmentalists are leading initiatives to get their communities into nature, make sure they have clean water and help them understand the impacts of climate change and environmental racism on their lives. 

Though the scope of their work varies, their stories are similar in many ways — including the inspiration they draw from others and a commitment to building connections that strengthen their communities. Here are some people doing just that. 

Chúk Odenigbo, Ingrid Waldron and Louise Delisle

In 2013, Chúk Odenigbo was an undergrad student in Kingston, Ont., taking a sustainability course where the final exam was to “do something to change the world,” he says. He put together a photo series called My Green Dream, highlighting the idea that humanity can re-integrate with nature without sacrificing modernity — since just going back to how things “used to be” in Canada wouldn’t be beneficial for most Black, Indigenous and other people of colour, Odenigbo says. 

The series resonated with audiences and was eventually published by the United Nations, bringing Odenigbo, a PhD candidate in medical geography at the University of Ottawa, to the attention of the world. Now it’s his life’s work: teaching Black people to center nature for the collective wellbeing of people and the planet by helping them overcome barriers such as not knowing how to swim, or fearing being perceived as dirty or unkempt. 

His mentor is researcher, professor and author Ingrid Waldon, who popularized the concept of environmental racism in Canada. Waldron centres Black people in her work, including in her groundbreaking 2018 book There’s Something in the Water, about environmental racism in Nova Scotia and the country at large. “In a country like Canada that for the longest time pretended that racism didn’t exist — that’s massive,” Odenigbo says. “She’s out here trailblazing.” 

Waldron encourages disenfranchised residents advocating for their communities and supports young Black environmentalists, too. “She looks after her people,” he says. “There’s the inspirational side where she’s not just talking the talk, she’s walking the walk. But then there’s also the approachability side where if you need advice, if you want to share something, you get to touch base and that’s really exciting too.” 

“I just found him to be an extremely bright, intelligent, young man,” Waldron says about Odenigbo in return. “I like the way he thinks.”

“Nobody has ever asked us before, ‘How do you think climate change is going to affect you?’ ’’

— Nova Scotia activist Louise Delisle, on researcher Ingrid Waldron

Now a professor and the HOPE Chair in Peace and Health at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., Waldron began researching the concept of environmental racism nearly a decade ago. She was studying gentrification in the north end of Halifax, where many of the former residents and descendents of one of Canada’s oldest Black communities, Africville, now live. 

Africville was historically neglected: the City of Halifax built a biohazardous waste dump, an infectious disease hospital, a slaughterhouse and a prison nearby, then ran a railroad extension right through the middle of the community. Then, in the 1960s, the city forced residents out of the area and bulldozed their homes. 

Waldron made the ongoing environmental racism in Nova Scotia the core of her book, which garnered wide attention. In 2019, it became the basis of a documentary she co-produced, bringing There’s Something in the Water to a wider audience. Now she’s working to pass Bill C-226, the national strategy respecting environmental racism and environmental justice act, which she co-wrote with former Nova Scotia MLA Lenore Zann. If the bill passes, Canada will commit to studying the relationship between race, socioeconomic status and environmental risk, and financially compensating those who have been adversely impacted. 

Waldron credits activist Louise Delisle as a mentor. The two met in 2016, when Waldron was recruiting a community facilitator for a project on how African Nova Scotians perceived environmental racism and its health effects. Delisle grew up in another historic Black community in Nova Scotia, Shelburne, which made a good case study because like Africville, it too was near an operating dump.

“I really loved Louise, I just loved her manner, her personality,” Waldron says. “She had never heard of environmental racism, but she did know that something was going on in her community with that dump nearby.” 

Delisle has vivid memories of the flames, smoke and ash that came from the Shelburne dump, and worrying as a little girl that the fires there would spread and burn down her home. As an adult, she moved back to Shelburne to take care of her ill mother. Seeing the dump was still in operation led her to start digging. Later on, community members discovered discarded oil at the dump was leaking into the ground, which Delisle believes has impacted drinking water.  

Just months after she met Waldron, Delisle and other community members founded the South End Environmental Injustice Society, or SEED, setting out to fight the dump in earnest. “What they’ve done since then is just stunning,” says Waldron. The group worked to get the dump closed and get homeowners new wells.  

“A lot of this was Louise. I’m just amazed by her energy, her persistence, her strength,” Waldron says. “I’m amazed that she’s my mentor.”

Delisle calls Shelburne, “a community in mourning all the time.” She knows of many people who have died from lung diseases, strokes and multiple myeloma, a rare type of cancer of the white blood cells, illnesses she believes are linked to environmental contamination and racism. 

“There are still people who do not and will not admit that there was an issue. But the group that we started, we’re on fire about this,” Delisle says. “That’s why I love Ingrid so much because [she] picked up the ball and decided, ‘okay, let’s do some research about this. Let’s work and try to find out what’s happening.’ ” 

Waldron works extremely hard for the Black community, Delisle says. “This is something that’s never happened. Nobody has ever asked us before, ‘how do you think climate change is going to affect you?’ “

Zamani Ra and Violet Morrison 

Zamani Ra is a mother, an environmental studies student and a tenant representative in her Toronto Community Housing building. In 2017, after noticing her neighbourhood was being impacted by erosion and flooding, she began organizing sessions to inform residents about climate change and what they could do to try to address it. 

That’s also when she founded Circular Environmental Education (CEED) Canada, which aims to make climate action “simple, convenient and culturally relevant,” through workshops and consulting services. In 2022, she won a grant from the City of Toronto aimed at helping women fund local climate initiatives. 

Ra calls her mother, Violet Morrison, her mentor. It’s a term she also thinks applies to other relatives, including grandparents, aunts and uncles who were farmers or “land people,” as she calls them. “I just feel like it’s the most honorable thing to do,” she says. 

“[Elders] have some really valuable lessons for us to pick up and continue with,” Ra says. “The practices of farming and planting can help people better conceptualize the importance of only taking what you need, and of generosity and reciprocity.”

“The spirit of that, the energy of that is very important to me, and it’s created who I am,” she says. “This is not new for us, the language might be new, but this is not a new practice for us at all.”

“It makes you feel good when you see people doing what Zamani would tell them … listening and taking it at face value.”

— Violet Morrison, mother, on Zamani Ra

Morrison, who moved to Canada from Jamaica in 1978, says she learns from her daughter in turn. Before Ra started CEED Canada, Morrison didn’t know much about climate change or what it meant to be “environmentally friendly.” Soon realizing that “we do so much to pollute the environment,” she’s now vigilant about things like separating recyclables and compostables from the rest of her waste and trying to educate others about doing the same. 

“There’s so much to learn from her,” Morrison says about her daughter. “It makes you feel good when you see people doing what Zamani would tell them [in her workshops]. At least they’re listening and taking it at face value.”

“We have to do the work and make the world a better place for younger people that are coming up, and teach them what to do and how to do it.”

Kiana Bonnick and Laurian Farrell

Kiana Bonnick describes her work at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and Womxn of Colour Durham Collective as bridging gaps between climate change adaptation and community development. The goals of the programs she’s developed for the collective are to build a sense of community for Black and racialized women in southern Ontario’s Durham Region, and to better understand the relationship between racialized people, Indigenous people and the land. 

There’s a direct link between the strength of a community and their resilience to the impacts of climate change, she explained. “The stronger a community is, the more networks they have, and particularly, the more aware of the services in the community they are,” the more adaptable and resilient they’ll be.

Bonnick discovered her mentor, Laurian Farrell, during her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. At the time, Farrell was the North American regional director of the Resilient Cities Network, which helps cities prepare for the impacts of climate change, and make sure their resilience plans are equitable. “I thought, ‘Oh, wow, she’s doing what I want to do,’ ” says Bonnick, who began following Farrell’s work.

“One could go crazy doing this work. Knowing that I can get on a call with them every once in a while — I look forward to it.”

— Laurian Farrell, deputy commissioner, bureau of coastal resilience, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, on Kiana Bonnick and Julius Lindsay

Their paths finally crossed when Julius Lindsay called the first meeting of the Black Environmentalist Alliance. 

Farrell is currently the deputy commissioner in the bureau of coastal resilience at New York City’s department of environmental protection. “It’s just amazing to see someone … who has done this work with municipalities, who has worked with conservation authorities, who is now living in New York and also brings her identity in the work that she does,” Bonnick says. She officially asked Farrell to be her mentor in 2023. 

As a Black female engineer, Farrell says she also never had a mentor or professor who looked like her, which is why she agreed to be Bonnick’s mentor. “I’m really impressed with Kiana for her being able to go out and seek support,” says Farrell. “It’s something that I was missing that I didn’t even know I was missing until later.” 

Farrell has learned that mentoring is a two-way street, “you get as much out of mentoring as you give,” she says. And getting to know Bonnick has given her hope that young Black environmentalists will build upon and better the work that her generation has started.

“One could go crazy doing this work,” says Farrell. “Knowing that I can get on a call with Julius and Kiana every once in a while — I look forward to it.”

Peter Soroye and Maydianne Andrade

Peter Soroye spent much of his childhood outdoors, which helped develop his passion for conservation. Eventually, it led him to a PhD researching the effects of climate change on bumblebees and butterflies. He’s now a conservation biologist in Ottawa with Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, identifying key areas for preserving biodiversity. 

His mentor is biologist and professor Maydianne Andrade, who is also the first Black environmental researcher he ever remembers meeting. Having grown up in one of the few Black families in North Bay, Ont., Soroye says he didn’t know of many Black scientists at all until Andrade got in touch with him. 

“I remember out of nowhere getting an email from Maydianne, and it was just so supportive,” he says. “Regardless of all the things she’s doing, she’s paying attention to everybody and seeing what’s going on.”

That email came when Andrade was reaching out to Black scientists to join the Canadian Black Scientists Network, which she co-founded after the police murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd in 2020. Now a professor in the biological sciences department at the University of Toronto, Andrade’s openness about the challenges she’s faced and how she navigated them has been “essential” for Soroye. 

“There should not be another generation of people like him who have to fight the battle alone.”

— Maydianne Andrade, biological sciences professor, University of Toronto, on Peter Soroye

“I’m really happy with where I am, and I definitely count her among the people that have helped to make that happen,” he says. Andrade’s many accomplishments include making science accessible, including as a host of The Nature of Things. “There are rare people like Maydianne who have a larger legacy as a scientist and as a person,” Soroye says.

For Andrade’s part, she says she was initially impressed by the quality of Soroye’s research and ability to defend it when it was inevitably debated. “His interviews with the media show that he clearly cared about outreach to the public and speaking in the language that was going to be compelling to the public,” she says. “Just everything about him was impressive.”

Andrade also didn’t have many Black role models. As a university student in Vancouver, she wasn’t surprised not to see many Black professors. But when she moved to Toronto — the city with the largest Black population in Canada — and still didn’t see Black professors, she was shocked. 

Andrade’s main focus of study has been on how and why black widow spiders have evolved to have their extreme mating habits. Along with the Black scientists network, she co-founded the Toronto Initiative for Diversity & Excellence, a group of University of Toronto faculty working to advance equity, diversity and inclusion efforts. 

Starting the organization has taken a lot of volunteer work, Andrade says, but is worth it so people have a space to discuss their experiences, including systemic and casual racism at work. 

“It was people like Peter that made me realize it was worthwhile,” she says. “There should not be another generation of people like him who have to fight the battle alone.”

Updated on Feb. 8, 2024, at 1:39 p.m. ET: This story was updated to add that Kiana Bonnick develops programs for the Womxn of Colour Durham Collective as well as working with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. Updated on Feb. 12, 2024, at 4:39 p.m. ET: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Laurian Farrell’s name.

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Chloe Cooley is on Canada Post’s 2023 Black History Month stamp, but she’s not in a guide to the country’s national historic sites put out by National Geographic and Parks Canada in 2016. I came across the guide while working as a summer student at Rouge National Urban Park, in east Toronto: there are no Black stories in the federal guide at all — no mention of Cooley, who was enslaved in Niagara-on-the-Lake and resisted being sold across the Niagara River to the U.S. in March 1793.

Though she was forced to cross the river, and to remain enslaved, Cooley’s resistance led to the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada a few months later. It was a significant step on the long road to the Abolition of Slavery in Canada and the rest of the British Empire, which was finally achieved on August 1, 1834. It was our Emancipation Day. 

I also didn’t find any Black people in the 250 photographs in another National Geographic/Parks Canada guide, to all of the country’s national parks, that I first saw that same summer. The guide was published to mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation, and Parks Canada said there has been no new edition since. When The Narwhal asked why there were no Black stories in the guide, a Parks Canada spokesperson said the book was a National Geographic publication the federal agency had simply advised on. But the Parks Canada logo is on both covers, with the phrase “official guidebook” underneath. Its CEO, Daniel Watson, wrote a two-page introduction in the historic sites book, celebrating Canada’s birthday. That answer isn’t good enough.

As a student just starting my PhD in social justice education that year, I didn’t have the words to describe how annoyed I was, so I put the guide out of my mind. I completely forgot about its erasure until 2022, when I began writing a story about crossing rivers for my blog, Black Outdoors, which focuses on the Black relationship to nature. Now, I do have the words: after some 400 years of sharing space on this land now known as Canada, there is nothing in these official guides to show that Black history — and Black presence — is a foundational part of the modern country. We are disappeared from history and memory in Canada. 

And just as Black history is still often erased from Canadian history, the environmental and outdoor recreation sectors, too, are full of erasure as Black voices are noticeable by their absence. 

The silencing of Black voices is not accidental — it never is — and reflects how power and privilege function to include some and exclude others. In 2020, Vanessa Nakate, a Black woman from Uganda, was cropped out of a group photograph of leading young climate activists at the World Economic Forum in Davos, leaving the image of four white saviours trying to save the world. 

The white wall that surrounds environmentalism is strong too in Canada. In the land of the Great White North, Black nature lovers turned to social media to find, organize and support each other. Groups such as Brown Girl Outdoor World, Colour the Trails, Black Canadian Hikers and Let’s Hike TO are doing the heavy lifting of diversifying nature spaces. 

A love of nature and the search for Black history is what drives me to explore hamlets and small towns in Ontario, such as Niagara-on-the-Lake. These trips counter the common assumption that Black people are mainly recent immigrants living in cities. Visiting these small places brings alive the long Black presence in rural Canada. When combined with a hiking, camping or snowshoeing trip, it is my bliss. 

This love was my pathway into conservation and caring about the environment. The places where I love to relax and rejuvenate are under threat. The Great Outdoors is only great if nature is there. 

Here are 10 Ontario rivers that have a connection to Black history. I have canoed, hiked, or cycled along them on numerous outdoor recreation trips. Sometimes I knew the Black history upfront when I planned the adventures, but most often I stumbled upon the connection from browsing down some proverbial rabbit hole. 

Chloe Cooley crossed the Niagara River. Waters are a barrier, border and bridge between places and people, ideas and spirits. Black people have known rivers, and had many rivers to cross in Canada. The environmental sector is another one where we must now wade in the water. Deep in the water.

Detroit River

A trip to Windsor included lollygagging by the Detroit River. Lucie and Thornton Blackburn did not have time to see the lights and the sights in 1833 as they were rowed across the river, focused on escaping a lynch mob in the U.S. In Toronto, they started the first taxi company in the city, aided other fugitives and made a fortune from real estate investments. Both are buried in Toronto’s Necropolis Cemetery, where their grave is marked by a large pink granite obelisk.

French River

Canoeing along this river just south of Sudbury, Ont., was to follow in the paddle strokes of  Black fur traders such as the 19th century Bonga family. They were enslaved in Canada but eventually freed, and made a living from trading furs for manufactured goods with Indigenous nations. For decades, in their quest for furs, members of the Bonga family paddled across the Great Lakes region and rivers in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta. George Bonga married an Ojibwe woman and translated and mediated between the Ojibwe and the U.S. government, and his signature is on a treaty from 1867. Bungo Township and Bungo Creek in Minnesota are named after this Afro-Indigenous family.

Ganaraska River

In 2021, I paused by this river on a 300-kilometre bike ride from Toronto to Kingston, Ont., in search of adventure and Black history. The ride followed the old stagecoach route of James Mink, a successful Black businessman in the 1850s, who delivered mail and passengers on the route. Other Black people, many nameless, also stopped by this river. Some were enslaved to the United Empire Loyalist refugees fleeing the outcome of the American Revolution who were allowed to bring their property to Canada — that included enslaved people, like Mink’s father. Pedalling along the route, I saw many heritage plaques about the Loyalists, but none that mentioned Black people or history.

Grand River

Cycling along the Grand River was my introduction to bike-camping, part of a long trip that started in  Brantford, Ont., and went around Lake Erie. Sophia Pooley canoed up and down this river many times. In the 19th century, this Black woman was enslaved to Thayendanegea, or Joseph Brant, the Mohawk chief. Her story is a complex one about the fallout of the American Revolution and of Black-Indigenous relations in the Americas. Pooley was later sold to a merchant in Hamilton, Ont. He has a street named after him; she has nothing to memorialize her.

Humber River

This is one of my local rivers in Toronto and it is an oasis of nature in the city. Daddy John Hall canoed, hiked and snowshoed along this river. This Afro-Indigenous man fought for his country in the War of 1812, and was captured by the invading U.S. army. At the end of the conflict, instead of being released as a prisoner of war, Hall was enslaved and sold down the river. He escaped over a decade later and made his way home. Hall was a soldier, trader and translator, and lived along the Humber River for a few years, before moving to Owen Sound, Ont., where he became a local legend.

Niagara River

This river became a border between slavery and freedom and between the U.S. and Canada. Harriet Tubman crossed it many times, bringing scores of fugitives with her to the snowy land of Canada. Chloe Cooley crossed the river too, tied up with rope in the bottom of a boat, as her Canadian slave-owner sold her to continued slavery in the U.S. Unlike in so many other locations, many heritage plaques along the Niagara Recreation Trail do share the Black history of the river. That’s because of local initiatives to recognize “the complexities of the Black presence in Niagara,” Natasha Henry-Dixon, an assistant professor of African Canadian History at York University, told The Narwhal. She credits the Central Ontario Black History Network as one group that has spent “years to build that collaboration, that collective knowledge base. That’s what you’re seeing today, a better effort to recognize the history.” 

Rideau River

What would Solomon Northup think of the river today? He walked along its Ottawa banks in the 1820s looking for construction work from the building of the new canal. Northup wrote about this in his memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, which was turned into a film of the same name.

St. Mary’s River

I walked along the riverfront promenade thinking of the history of the French-speaking Black people in the Americas, such as Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Born in Haiti, the successful entrepreneur was the first non-Indigenous founder of modern Chicago. Before settling in that city, he canoed up and down St. Mary’s River around Sault Ste. Marie in the 18th century, trading with Indigenous nations.

St. Lawrence River

Three Black men snowshoed along the banks of this river some 200 years ago. They were part of the 104th New Brunswick Regiment of Foot and travelled over 1,000 kilometres by snowshoes along many frozen river banks. It took them about two months to travel from Fredericton, N.B., to Kingston, Ont. The Black men did so because they wanted to be free — the U.S. had invaded the colony of Canada in the War of 1812 and a victory for the southern nation might mean a return to living under the whip.

Welland River

Cycling along the Welland River and the more famous canal, I thought about the Black men who helped to build the canal in the 19th century. Many were fugitives who were guided to Canada by Harriet Tubman. Black men were also hired to patrol the river, keeping the peace between squabbling factions of Irish immigrants who also worked on the canal.

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