Slavery’s Long Afterlife in the North

At an event for her book at Montreal’s Grande Bibliothèque late last year, Robyn Maynard asked the audience of about five hundred to raise their hands if they had been taught in school about the two hundred years of Black enslavement in Canada. One man raised his hand. One out of five hundred. This in a city, that, along with Quebec City and Halifax, was one of the transatlantic network ports, that frequently received ships containing enslaved Black men and women arriving from the Caribbean. A city where, as Maynard recounts in her methodically researched book Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Present, enslaved Black women were “particularly fashionable and noteworthy possessions.” (She is quoting from Charmaine A. Nelson’s Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica.) In 1734, one such enslaved Black woman, Marie-Joseph Angélique, was arrested...