Erased No More: This Project Is Documenting Canada's Black Indigenous History

“Africans have been exploring the oceans long before the Europeans. Indigenous and Black people interacted long before the Europeans started exploring. The Indigenous and Blacks exchanged in trade, they exchanged cultures and customs. We know this through archeological digs and lost records in Egypt, South America, and North America. We need to know and understand our history, from our perspective and not from a white person’s perspective,” says Ciann Wilson, assistant professor in Community Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University and principal investigator for the Proclaiming Our Roots project.

The project’s mission is to include Black Indigenous history into the larger dialogue of Indigenous history. The co-founders Ciann Wilson and Denise Baldwin had many conversations about the relationship and similarities between the Black and Indigenous communities before joining forces for this project. Denise Baldwin, who is a Black-Anishinaabe Kwe citizen from the Chippewa's of Nawash First Nation in Ontario, knew like Ciann that the conversation about Canadian Black Indigenous people deserved a public platform. Having both worked in support of Black and Indigenous communities for over twenty years combined, they detected a pattern of the silencing and lack of acknowledgment of Black Indigenous Canadian history....