“You Don’t Have A History”: Passion as the Counter-Narrative of Heritage, History, and Archives

The author describes her lifelong journey as a historian, heritage activist and librarian-archivist focused on recovering and sharing the history of Quebec and Canada’s English-speaking Black communities. She contends yet again that this community faces silence and invisibility. The author shares personal and professional examples of how she became passionate about Black history and reveals the real-life consequences of its erasure. From this context, the author provides details on how this passion fueled decades of research, storytelling, and the building of collections and historical and archival materials. Over three decades ago, the author responded with ground-breaking books: Blacks in Montreal 1628-1986: An Urban Demography (1989), and The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal (1997). Since that time, the author has written extensively on the need to reshape Canada’s narrative so that it may embrace the diversity we boast about. She shares how her efforts to address our cultural ignorance led to the recent creation of the “ABC’s of Canadian Black History Kit.” The author concludes with an underscoring of how that very passion was rooted in her life’s mission to counter her own invisibility in Canada’s narrative.

Minorités linguistiques et société / Linguistic Minorities and Society

No. 21

1-14

2023

en