1In the late 1980s, spurred on by the results of a national poll showing that Canadians significantly lacked knowledge of—and pride in—their own history, Canadian businessman and philanthropist Charles Bronfman set out to create short dramatic film narratives focusing on significant people or landmark events in Canadian history. Starting in 1991, an initial series of sixty-second bilingual films (in English and French) entitled “Heritage Minutes” was broadcast on major Canadian TV networks as well as in movie theatres across the country. They were produced by Bronfman’s privately-funded CRB Foundation.1 In 1999, the CRB Foundation created the Historica Foundation of Canada, which merged with the Dominion Institute in 2009 and was renamed Historica Canada in 2013. Historica Canada’s mandate of “enhancing awareness of Canadian history and citizenship” has meant that the organization, which now receives funding from both private and public sources, has carried on producing the “Heritage Minutes.”2 A new series launched in 2012. The latest vignette—an animated Minute featuring Kensington Market, an ethnically diverse and vibrant neighborhood of Toronto—was released in October 2017. Today, the “Heritage Minutes” consist of a collection of eighty-seven episodes, with the more recent releases still broadcast on TV, older productions accessible online, and complements available through ninety-second “Radio Minutes” featuring other important aspects of Canadiana.3

2Undeniably, the “Heritage Minutes” have become an integral part of Canada’s popular culture. Viewers are frequently polled on social media to find out what their favorite episodes are, famous lines have become vernacular Canadian language, and many of the most popular vignettes have been parodied in TV comedy shows.4 Canadian historians, meanwhile, have had many an opportunity to frown at what they regard as an openly biased celebration of Canada’s national mythology. Indeed, the original criteria defined by the CRB Foundation for inclusion of a topic in the series included six primary concerns: “intrigue us with Canada’s heritage,” “be producible within resources,” “be truthful within the bounds of dramatic license,” “reflect and celebrate Canadian social and cultural values: tolerance, fairness, courage, tenacity, resourcefulness, inventiveness,” “reveal origins,” and “surprise, provoke reflection, re-examination, raise questions.”5 There are obvious tensions, if not contradictions, in these standards, especially between the combination of a celebratory objective with a need for sensational story-telling on the one hand, and the simultaneous call for a critical inquiry into the nation’s past on the other. Critics have thus highlighted the Minutes’ foundational predicament: they were conceived as cultural products mixing an “extensive use of the codes of commodity culture to sell Canadians on their past” with “an emphasis on simple, dramatic, formulaic and exemplary stories of reconciliation and overcoming.”6 Peter Hodgins finds that their underlying objective is to “reassert the primacy of the Canadian grand narrative, mobilize Canadian nationalism and inoculate their viewers against competing narratives of the past.”7

3It comes as no surprise that the first series of “Heritage Minutes” should include an episode entitled “The Underground Railroad.”8 To this day, Canadians have held fast to the romanticized and sanitized image of their country as a place of refuge for slaves who fled the American South in the mid-nineteenth century, hoping to enjoy British freedom and justice on Queen Victoria’s shores. The tale typically opposes Canada, where slavery was abolished in 1833 following the adoption of the Slavery Abolition Act by the British Parliament, and the United States, whose Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which facilitated the return of runaway slaves to their owners, compromised the freedom of African Americans in the North, and severely impeded antislavery activism.

4The movie vignette very obviously taps into this straightforward, binary, but revered tale of the Underground Railroad to Canada. At the beginning of the episode, which is set in an unspecified nineteenth-century small town, the camera zooms in on the back of a young black woman wearing a turban; we then see her face; she is looking out of a window, whimpering and shouting that “Pa should have been here by now. He’s three hours late already! Pa ain’t gonna make it! One of them slavecatchers got him! Something has happened, I just know it!” She is in a church, surrounded by a younger black man—her brother Josh, who confidently retorts “He’s our Pa and he’ll be here!”—and two white women, including a bonneted lady who tries to reassure her by reminding her that she and her brother “both made it past the border yesterday, we’ve all done this before.” The highly emotional black woman, Eliza, will not calm down, and instead dashes outside in a panic. As the white lady rushes to try and stop her, a wagon loaded with wooden church pews is seen in the distance. The white woman’s sudden halt and confident stare confirm to the viewer that the expected “delivery” is on its way, whereas Eliza’s confused look suggests disbelief at the miracle that is about to happen. A solemn voiceover announces: “Between 1840 and 1860, more than 30,000 American slaves came secretly to Canada and freedom. They called it the Underground Railroad.” Back in the church, the characters set down one of the pews before removing its bottom part. As all those present look on feverishly, “Pa” emerges from his hiding place with a triumphant grin and is greeted with cries and shouts of “We’re free!” and with Eliza’s joyful scream that “Yes, Pa! We is in Canada!”

5In this essay, I pay close attention to the way events are dramatized and characters are represented in the Underground Railroad “Heritage Minute” so as to try and deconstruct the myth-making process at play in the vignette. In particular, I consider the scope of national (ist) discourse and its reliance on the “master narrative” of Canada as a refuge for American slaves during the age of emancipation (1830-1860), while confronting it with “competing narratives” that emerge from taking into account recent Canadian—and American— historiography on the topic.9 Three major components of the myth featuring Canada as Canaan for fugitive slaves will be addressed. First, the vision of the Underground Railroad as mainly depending on white agency to operate and succeed needs reassessing. Second, closer attention will be devoted to the notion that fugitive slaves were the sole users of the Underground Railroad, a misrepresentation that obscures other important aspects of the African American migration to—and experience in—Canada. Third, the intricate links and potential tensions between history and memory will be examined, especially with regard to Canada’s relationship with its slave past.

Porous borders, white agency, and the historiography of the Underground Railroad

6It could be argued that the climactic moment in the Underground Railroad “Heritage Minute” is not so much Pa’s sudden release from his hiding place in the pew than an earlier scene foreshadowing this happy denouement: the slow, mundane ride into town of a horse-drawn wagon loaded with church pews and driven by workmen. When sighted by Eliza and the white lady who is running after her, the conveyance triggers a mixture of surprise, awe and relief. It also conveniently—though inadequately—defines the Underground Railroad as, first and foremost, a means of transportation for slaves on the run from the American South.10 According to the Reverend W. M. Mitchell, a former Toronto missionary and author of an 1860 collection mixing factual information and anecdotes on the Underground Railroad, the image of the railroad originated with a Kentucky slave owner who complained after one of his slaves’ successful escape that “The d—d abolitionists must have a railroad under the ground by which they run off niggers.”11 Soon enough, the story was repeated, expanded and altered,12 while the railroad terminology used as coded speech to describe fugitives as “freight,” antislavery helpers as “conductors” or “station-masters,” and safe houses as “stations,” obviously reinforced that perception.13

7By focusing on the wagon, the movie suggests that ground transportation was prominent, while incidentally confirming that the Underground Railroad was not an actual railroad with underground tracks covering the distance from South to North.14 Early historical evidence points to much more complexity in the means of ground transportation used by fugitive slaves. In the first-hand accounts gathered by William Troy in Hair-Breadth Escapes from Slavery to Freedom (1861) and William Still in The Underground Rail Road (1872) we see some of the vehicles that runaways used singly or in combination—wagons, stagecoaches, buggies, horses, mules, and trains. In Troy’s book, which focuses on fugitive slaves who made their way to the province of Canada West,15 many a story also highlights the need for slaves to use false pretexts or ingenious tricks to succeed in their attempts: John E. Sherman leaves the plantation on the pretext of delivering letters for his master, while David Johnson and his wife escape by hiding in a clothes’ basket.16 In his narrative published in Toronto in 1851, Thomas Smallwood, who helped slaves and free blacks in the Washington, DC area escape to Canada, also relates how ground transportation required careful preparation and often had to be paid for thanks to money provided by individuals and benevolent organizations.17 His underground work required the active cooperation of the Northern vigilance committees—organizations dedicated to helping slaves along the Underground Railroad.

8Waterways were also significant escape routes for fugitive slaves who used steamships, canal boats, barges, rafts, sloops, etc., to seek freedom. Fugitives crossed rivers that served as physical boundaries separating slave from free states, notably the Ohio River between Kentucky and Ohio, of which Henry Bibb provides one of the most poetic (and political) representations in his 1849 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave:

Sometimes standing on the Ohio River bluff, looking over on a free State, and as far north as my eyes could see, I have eagerly gazed upon the blue sky of the free North, which at times constrained me to cry out from the depths of my soul, Oh! Canada, sweet land of rest—Oh! when shall I get there? Oh, that I had the wings of a dove, that I might soar away to where there is no slavery; no clanking of chains, no captives, no lacerating of backs, no parting of husbands and wives; and where man ceases to be the property of his fellow man. These thoughts have revolved in my mind a thousand times. I have stood upon the lofty banks of the river Ohio, gazing upon the splendid steamboats, wafted with all their magnificence up and down the river, and I thought of the fishes of the water, the fowls of the air, the wild beasts of the forest, all appeared to be free, to go just where they pleased, and I was an unhappy slave !18

9Many fugitive slaves bound for Canada went back and forth the Great Lakes and connecting rivers in the Canadian and American borderland region. As Tiya Miles notes, the area’s rivers and lakes were “open and often transitory spaces” crisscrossed by mostly self-emancipated fugitives whose stories of “motion and multiplicities” challenge the emphasis laid by historians on the “static, enclosed domestic space” of the private homes of Underground Railroad station-masters.19 Miles’s notion of a “liquid border” finds an illustration in the life of former slave and abolitionist William Wells Brown, who worked on a Lake Erie steamboat and helped fugitives reach freedom in Canada.20 The visual interpretation of waterways as arteries towards freedom finds its best expression in an engraving printed in the 1839 issue of the American Anti-Slavery Almanac: a triumphant John Bull standing on a rowing boat has just helped a slave cross a lake to escape from the clutches of an evil-looking Brother Jonathan (fig. 2). In a similar vein, Thomas Jones’s 1862 edition of his slave narrative has a frontispiece depicting a fugitive paddling on a raft towards a three-mast ship flying a Union Jack and probably heading for the Canadian shore (fig. 3). Recent historical research has refined our understanding of this aspect of the Underground Railroad. The groundbreaking essay collection A Fluid Frontier includes three articles on the individual stories of fugitives or fugitive families entitled “Bridging Rivers: Caroline Quarll’s Remarkable Journey,” “One More River to Cross: The Crosswhites’ Escapes from Slavery,” and “The McCoys: Charting Freedom from Both Sides of the River.”21

10Whether by land or water, runaways who used means of transportation required, in most instances, either willing or unwitting assistance from whites— some were cheated into cooperation—because carriages, stagecoaches, ships and railroads were owned or operated by white people. White agency was thus crucial, though the “Heritage Minute”’s choice of making it a defining feature of the Underground Railroad calls for critical inquiry. Early professional historical writing on the Underground Railroad, which can be said to have started in 1898 with Wilbur Siebert’s The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, established a long-term tradition that tended to glorify white abolitionists by collecting their personal accounts of slave rescues (black involvement was not denied but it was not a primary concern). Accounts did not always steer clear of hagiography: a case in point is the sketch of abolitionist clergyman Charles T. Torrey, whose devotion to assisting runaways led to his imprisonment and death, making him a martyr of the antislavery cause.22 In 1961, Larry Gara’s The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad attempted to set the record straight by interpreting escape as a powerful means of resistance to slavery, thus foregrounding black agency. Gara’s work was soon supplemented by Benjamin Quarles’s Black Abolitionists (1969), which called attention to the “Black Underground.”23 In his 2001 Race and Reunion, David Blight went as far as describing the over-exposed involvement of Northern white abolitionists in the Underground Railroad as an opportunity for them to seek an “alternative veteranhood” to the Civil War, with their “homespun tales of helping slaves escape […] a kind of white alternative slave narrative.”24 With his 1996 edition of the as-told-to autobiography of John P. Parker, a black conductor who helped fugitive slaves cross the Ohio River from Kentucky and go north to freedom, Stuart Seely Sprague added a further corrective to the notion of an Underground Railroad entirely operated by whites.25 Another remarkable addition to the pantheon of black freedom-seekers is Harriet Tubman— “the Moses of her people”—whose commitment and legacy have been recently brought to the fore: historical and biographical research has combined with the development of historic sites as well as literary and movie dramatizations of her life and work.26 Manisha Sinha’s claim that “Black abolitionists established the permanent, organizational apparatus of the abolitionist underground, the vigilance committees of the 1830s” and her description of Parker and Tubman as “black foot soldiers of the abolitionist underground” can also be seen as significant amendments to a racialist perception of the respective roles of blacks and whites in the Underground Railroad.27

Figure 2. John Bull’s Monarchy a Refuge from Brother Jonathan’s Slavery, in American Anti-Slavery Almanac, for 1839 (1838), p. 9. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library.

Figure 3. Thomas H. Jones, The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years (1862), frontispiece. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University (Atlanta, GA).

11Focusing on the Underground Railroad as a means of transportation to freedom necessarily involving white participation creates other ambiguities. John Michael Vlach insists that the Underground Railroad be characterized as a “user-determined system,” which allows us to “focus on the choices a slave might make on his or her own behalf.”28 It is a fact that most fugitives fled on foot, on their own, relying on their (often scant) knowledge of geography to find their way. The reality of self-emancipation also explains why, early on, black abolitionist leaders emphasized black heroism, praising the superior talents of those who managed to escape successfully through self-reliance, ingenuity, and unflinching determination. Emphasis on the sensational fills Mitchell’s “recorded facts,” Troy’s collection of “hair-breadth escapes,” Still’s compilation of “the hardships, hair-breadth escapes and death struggles of the slaves in their efforts for freedom,”29 but also Homer Uri Johnson’s lesser-known From Dixie to Canada: Romances and Realities of the Underground Railroad (1894), presented by its author as “a little volume of unique but wonderful history.”30 In such epic chronicles, the slave’s passage from bondage to freedom is an act of bravery and a remarkable feat as much as an act of resistance and defiance. Samuel Ringgold Ward provides what is perhaps the most telling example of the fugitive’s heroism steeped in unsurpassed moral righteousness. In his 1855 Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, he describes black refugees in Canada as pilgrims on their way to Canaan, where they not only prove their capacity for self-help and uplift but also serve as exemplars of virtue for their white neighbors.31

12The transportation scene in the “Heritage Minute” also emphasizes the role played by white church members who embraced the antislavery cause. The drivers clearly intend to unload their “cargo” and entrust it to the two white ladies. The plainness of their dress and the simple architectural style of the church suggest that the women may be Quakers, which points to the early involvement of “Friends,” as Quakers were usually known, in the antislavery crusade. Autobiographical records by prominent figures such as Levi Coffin’s Reminiscences (1876) and Laura Haviland’s A Woman’s Life-Work (1882) remain key accounts of Quaker participation in the Underground Railroad. Recent scholarly discussions of Haviland, however, have focused on her sisterly relationship with black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Mary Ann Shadd and their collective activism in the Michigan/Canada West borderlands.32

13Much new scholarship has also emerged that probes the relationship between abolitionist activism and American, African American and African Canadian churches, with special focus on the role of African Canadian churches as “worship way stations” in the Michigan/Canada West borderlands.33 The Second Baptist Church in Detroit provided many services to the black community in the city and beyond. One of the church’s ministers, William Troy, also happened to be the minister of the First Baptist Church in Windsor, Canada West. The two churches were only two miles apart on both sides of the United States/Canada border. It is now clear that black churches were committed to providing not just comfort for the souls of fugitives but also social and educational services, and that “international borders such as the Detroit River were indeed highly porous spaces.”34

14Church support in the Underground Railroad was real but far from systematic. Not only did many individuals get involved in the Underground Railroad without the support of their churches, but many risked excommunication by joining the struggle in spite of what church authorities recommended. Laura Haviland herself withdrew from the Society of Friends because she was too radical. She became a Wesleyan Methodist.35 The Wesleyan Methodist Connection was created in the early 1840s by Methodist abolitionists—Orange Scott, Luther Lee and Lucius Matlack among others—who decided to secede from the Methodist Episcopal Church because it refused to repudiate slavery.36

The black experience in Canada beyond the Underground Railroad

15Another important element in the “Heritage Minute” is the focus on “American slaves” as the primary users of the Underground Railroad. Undeniably, African American slaves came to Canada because slavery no longer existed there after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Yet the traditional representation of Canada not just as a free country but as a Promised Land devoid of racism and devoted to egalitarianism is problematic in many ways.

16First, it seems that characters in the Minute are represented in such a way that racial features become prominent in explaining behaviors. Eliza’s emotional reaction to her father’s late arrival, though understandable in such circumstances, contrasts sharply with the self-control of the white lady and therefore appears excessive, if not reckless: it almost imperils the family’s reunion. Furthermore, while presenting Canada as a haven for fugitive slaves—a land supposedly distinct from its American neighbor—the Minute plainly reveals that helping slaves entailed risks. To put it simply, not all white Canadians were abolitionists. Many first-hand testimonies have, early on, pointed to what was then called “Negrophobia” in Canada. Three examples are Samuel Ringgold Ward’s Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, which explains that racism was both imported to Canada from the United States but also native to the land; Narrative of Thomas Smallwood, (Coloured Man), which lamented home-grown prejudice but also exposed how African Canadians were restrained in their efforts to rise socially and integrate; and Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave, which depicts Mason’s experience of freedom in Canada as one of hard work with little financial return.37 All three insist on the detrimental effects of racism on black people’s attempts to reach economic self-sufficiency in Canada. Benjamin Drew’s The Refugee (1856), a collection of interviews of fugitive slaves, further emphasizes that Canada was not the Promised Land, although one of the interviewees described it as “the best poor man’s country” for black people. Just like whites, in fact, African Canadians could experience both successes and failures depending on where they settled in Canada West and what professional work they engaged in.38 Secondary sources examining the unwelcoming attitude of white Canadians have not been overly abundant; Jason Silverman’s Unwelcome Guests: Canada West’s Response to American Fugitive Slaves, 1800- 1865 (1985) remains the most thorough analysis on the topic.39 Recent scholarship has tended to address specific aspects of African Canadian lives, especially the issue of school segregation40 and the many intricacies of the situation of African Canadians regarding law and justice on both sides of the border.41

17Another problem with representing the Underground Railroad in the service of “American slaves” is that it is reductive. First, it tends to homogenize the experiences of slaves, obscuring for instance the variety of backgrounds they came from and the variety of choices they made when it came to selecting a place to settle in (either in a rural or urban environment), finding a job, gaining an education, etc. Class distinctions and issues related to integration also divided African Canadians, as the antagonism between Henry Bibb (founder of the first African Canadian newspaper, the Voice of the Fugitive) and Mary Ann Shadd (founder of the Provincial Freeman) reveals. Bibb recommended separate communities and institutions, while Shadd favored integration into Canadian society.42

18While the Underground Railroad concerned mostly fugitive slaves, it should be noted that important numbers of free African Americans went to Canada during the age of emancipation. Many crossed the border from Northern states into the provinces of Canada West, Canada East, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to escape potential abduction after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which made their freedom extremely precarious. Recent historical research has sketched the lives and legacy of those free blacks who decided that it would be safer to settle on Canadian territory. Drawing on the methods used by Karolyn Smardz Frost in I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land (2007), a study of the lives of fugitive slaves Thornton and Lucie Blackburn in Detroit and Toronto, this kind of research often combines historical archival work with archaeology and “land-based research,” i.e. using land records, landscape surveying and mapping.43 Such a dual approach was used for the Promised Land Project, a multidisciplinary research project investigating the history of early black settlements in the Chatham-Kent area, which culminated in 2014 with the publication of an essay collection titled The Promised Land. The book features several contributions following the trajectories of free African Americans who settled in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Marie Carter’s essay focuses on black abolitionist William Whipper, whose wealth and influence—derived from land ownership in the vicinity of Dresden, Canada West—seriously challenged the leadership and prominence of former slave Josiah Henson in the Dresden-based Dawn Settlement.44

19Recent scholarship has also emphasized the need to recover the historical complexity of black settlement in Canada. Not all black people came at the same time. There were several waves of black migration prior to the Underground Railroad’s peak of activity. American slaves and free African Americans of the emancipation era, therefore, lived among other black pioneers who made up several generations of black experience in Canada. Carter’s second contribution to the Promised Land volume closely examines the different African Canadian generations present in Canada West in the mid-nineteenth century and the legacy of black Loyalists in particular.45

20As far as figures are concerned, the voiceover in the “Heritage Minute” reminds viewers that “more than 30,000 American slaves came secretly to Canada and freedom” between 1840 and 1860. In 1991, when the Minute was produced, statistics on the number of African Americans who settled in Canada varied tremendously from one source to another, ranging from 15,000 to 75,000. In his seminal The Blacks in Canada: A History (first published in 1971), Yale historian Robin Winks argued that 40,000 was nearer the mark, though he devoted several pages to the difficulty of computing exact figures.46 More recently, Michael Wayne, in an effort to correct misconceptions about the black population in Canada West, used manuscript census data to prove that historians had systematically overestimated not only the black population in Canada West—it was probably close to 17,000 people, a figure not far from the one reached by white abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe in a report of 1864—but also the proportion of fugitive slaves among them.47

21Furthermore, the perception of Canada as the “final stop” on the Underground Railroad for African Americans in search of a better life must be challenged. First-hand accounts such as those collected by Benjamin Drew in The Refugee reveal that many expatriates wished to go back home, if only because they felt homesick. Other life narratives such as that of Henry Bibb remind us that family ties made settlement in Canada highly unstable: fugitive slaves would sometimes return South to help their loved ones escape, as Bibb did with his wife Malinda and daughter Mary Frances. As Nina Reid-Maroney shows in her study of Parker Smith, an established Philadelphia carpenter who moved to Dresden in the summer of 1861 only to return to Philadelphia one year later, some free African Americans were disappointed at the intellectual barrenness of Canadian small towns and felt that they too had ideas to share, even though they were not part of an intellectual elite or in a position of leadership.48 Abolitionist activism and more generally the maintenance of political ties was another major reason why African Americans and African Canadians would repeatedly cross the border between Canada and the United States. Samuel Ringgold Ward emphasizes the transborder cooperation of antislavery agents in the Underground Railroad in Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro:

It is not to be forgotten […] that in the States bordering upon us are some of the most thorough out-spoken abolitionists in the American Union. Having had the honour of being one of their humblest coadjutors, I could bear testimony to their zeal and trueness; and I felt, in living so near them, I was not entirely separated from them, though in another country, so far as political relations were concerned. […] Our fugitives passed through their hands. They conducted the underground railway. The goods were consigned to us. When they reached us they ceased to be goods, and became men instanter. For that purpose they sent them; for that purpose we received them.49

22Thus increased attention has been paid to transnational connections in recent scholarship by both Canadian and American historians, while the inter-relatedness of the lives of African American expatriates—their “rhizomatic” nature—has also been at the core of the Promised Land Project.50 In the light of these new historiographical trends, what the “Heritage Minute” offers is an oversimplified view of the black experience in Canada which does not reflect the complexity of generational diversity, geographical disparity (rural vs. urban, integrated city life vs. segregated communities), religious variety, class inequality and economic opportunity. Focusing on the period “between 1840 and 1860,” as the voiceover has it, obscures earlier waves of migration. Simultaneously, any Canadian even vaguely knowledgeable about their country’s history knows that Canada as a nation did not exist in those decades. Confederation, that is the union of Canada West, Canada East, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to form the Dominion of Canada, took place on July 1, 1867. Until then, the four provinces were British colonies with governments whose legislation regulated the lives of their constituents. Policies regarding entry of fugitive slaves, extradition, integration or segregation, were up to the provinces. Studies of the Underground Railroad have often taken Canada West, where the majority of fugitive slaves went, as standing for the whole of Canada. Other geographies of the black experience should be taken into account.51

Selective memory: Canada’s erasure of its slave past

23According to African Canadian historian Afua Cooper, a condensed time frame has also tended to favor a perception of the Underground Railroad’s history as “an object frozen in time,” whose history is likely to stand in for “all four hundred years of Black Canadian history” (from colonial times to the present day).52 In the process, Canada’s own slave past has been erased from history books and collective memory. The first historical work produced on the subject was Thomas Watson Smith’s The Slave in Canada, published in Halifax in 1899; in a series of essays published in the Journal of Negro History in the 1920s, William Renwick Riddell further documented aspects of Canadian slavery in various parts of British North America;53 Marcel Trudel’s work on slavery in New France, when it came out in 1960, provided important knowledge on French colonial slavery;54 finally, Robin Winks dealt at length with slavery in the first four chapters of his monumental The Blacks in Canada. Historical reexamination of the topic remained virtually non-existent in the last three decades of the twentieth century. In the 2000s, however, two works on the slave Marie-Joseph Angélique came out in quick succession—one in French by Québécois historian Denyse Beaugrand-Champagne, the other in English by Afua Cooper.55 Both studies chronicle the trial of a slave woman who was condemned to death for allegedly setting fire to her owners’ home in 1734; the fire destroyed a large part of Montreal. Though they reach opposite conclusions regarding Angélique’s motives and guilt—contrary to her predecessor, Cooper argues that Angélique did set fire to her owners’ house as an act of rebellion—the two authors manage to recreate the life of an eighteenth-century slave and the many implications of bondage in New France and colonial Canada, based on their examination of the case’s court proceedings. Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique, in particular, was hailed as a welcome addition to historical scholarship on Canadian slavery because it challenged the paucity of sources often invoked as African Canadian history’s main predicament.56 Cooper’s work also serves as a reminder that historians investigating Canadian slavery should consider all forms of bondage—aboriginal people were also enslaved—and think about their global connections, for instance through participation in the slave trade and Canadian experimentation with African colonization.

24A last aspect of the “Heritage Minute” that needs to be commented on is the names given to the two protagonists: Eliza and Josh. The name Eliza inevitably reminds Canadian viewers of the fugitive slave of the same name in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most famous of American antislavery novels, first published in book form in 1852, and discussed by Claire Parfait in her contribution to this volume. “Josh” might also be understood as a thinly veiled reference to Josiah Henson, a fugitive slave whose autobiographical narrative (The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, 1849) served as one of Stowe’s sources when composing the novel. Henson was later identified as the “real” Uncle Tom. That both characters can be linked to Stowe, an American antislavery figure, although one that was aware of Canada’s role in offering the possibility of freedom to fugitive slaves, might suggest to Canadian viewers that abolitionist activism was the sole realm of Americans. Such a suggestion not only downplays the scope and influence of Canadian abolitionism (and its connections with British and Scottish abolitionism) but can also lead to the conclusion that there was no need for such activism on the Canadian side of the border.57

25The combination of brevity and myth thus appears a dangerous one. By making the perilous but hopeful flight of slaves across the border a genuine epic that received full support from Canadians, the “Heritage Minute” constructs a simplistic opposition between a virtuous, slave-free Canada and the corrupt, slave-ridden United States.58 In the context of the early 1990s, when Canada was being perceived as a “fragmented nation” because of Quebec’s separatist movement and the turmoil caused by the recent adoption of a multicultural policy, the Minute offered tolerance and courage and resourcefulness (in the words of the CRB Foundation) as the cement holding the nation together. Similarly to other national myths examined by Daniel Francis in National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian History, the Underground Railroad story dramatized in the “Heritage Minute” relies on selection (of events and people), marginalization, and idealization, while its historical inaccuracies and exaggerations are part and parcel of a mythical discourse that reveals important truths about how Canadians like to see themselves and what values they consider their own.59 George Elliott Clarke sums it all up in his foreword to Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique:

The avoidance of Canada’s sorry history of slavery and racism is natural. It is how Canadians prefer to understand themselves: we are a nation of good, Nordic, “pure,” mainly White folks, as opposed to the lawless, hot-tempered, impure, mongrel Americans, with their messy history of slavery, civil war, segregation, assassinations, lynchings, riots, and constant social turmoil.60

26Counter-narratives written by contemporaries of the Underground Railroad era as well as recent historical research, especially that produced by a new generation of scholars charting new avenues of inquiry with innovative research strategies, have successfully challenged the master narrative, going beyond a binary, formulaic and simplistic representation of this complex episode in Canadian/American history.