The Backstory

Our plan to honour selected resistance fighters from the fugitive slave ads of Barbados and Niagara would be a signature project for the new Canada-Caribbean Institute (CCI), recently established by Brock University and the University of the West Indies (UWI). The ads contain details of what enslaved people looked like, sounded like, what they wore, and details of their friends and families.

The ads also provide glimpses of their escape tactics. Our overarching goal is to promote Black resistance as something that speaks–with eloquent pain and integrity–to the drive towards equity and social justice. As the imposing colonial statues—of, for instance, enslaver Edward Colston in Bristol and Edward Cornwallis (he offered bounties for killing Mi’kmaw) in Halifax—come down, we will be working towards material memorials (though not traditional statues) designed to reclaim the presence of people who resisted oppression.  

The project will result in physical memorials and virtual exhibits. By featuring the strength and heroism of people who resisted impossible brutality through centuries of enforced enslavement, we would contribute, ideally, to the displacement of the trope of the “threatening” Black body. Replacing it with the construction of someone who is heroic, a resistance fighter who stands for freedom and social justice in the face of sustained White oppression.