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Michele Johnson, an associate professor of history and director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University, recently delivered a lecture and film screening as part of the Queen’s University Visiting Scholar Program.

As Dr. Johnson explains, her lecture, entitled “Black Bodies in White Spaces,” was aimed at “troubling” the notion that Canada is a welcoming and accommodating place for people of African descent, whatever their origins.

Despite hundreds of years of shared history major issues remain in the relationship.

“It’s still not good,” Dr. Johnson says. “On one hand there is still an assumption that people of African descent are not really Canadian. No matter how long they have been here they don’t seem to be able to belong to the nation.”

Dr. Johnson gave an example of a group of students she spoke with in Toronto. When she asked how they self-identify all said Caribbean despite the fact they were born in Canada.

That experience, of not belonging, is not new.

“It’s just so hard to penetrate what might be called mainstream Canada,” Dr. Johnson says. “There are people who have been here 12 generations and they’re still not part of (Canadian) society. Every day they are asked ‘Where are you from?’ because there is no expectation that the black body can be Canadian.”

Canadian history is filled with examples of where those of African descent have been excluded from the national narrative. The first known person of African descent to arrive in what is now known as Canada, Mathieu Da Costa, accompanied Samuel de Champlain in 1606 as an interpreter. That he spoke the language of the Micmac means he had been here even earlier. However, he remains practically unmentioned in Canadian history.

“So the question is why? If you are going to tell the story of the national narrative why is one of the earliest persons who is on this land, along with the expeditions, why is he not part of the narrative,” Dr. Johnson asks.

More well-known are the efforts of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad which saved the lives of hundreds of freed slaves. Yet, at the same time, there is little mention that slavery existed in Canada for more than 200 years.

“Canadians like to point to the United States as this source of evil slavery, yet slavery was here from 1628 to 1834,” she says. “So, 200-plus years of slavery, why is that missing from the national narrative?”

The key, she says, is that the “erasure” of such historical points, including the Ontario Separate Schools Act which created the basis for separate schools for black children from 1850 to 1965, help to construct a narrative of Canada as a “haven” as an accommodating and welcoming nation when compared to its southern neighbor.

While this may be convenient for the narrative of Canada as a tolerant, multicultural society it ignores the reality of its history and the current situation. And that can lead to bigger problems that will only become more ingrained.

“By pretending that these real, structural problems are not there we may be sowing the seeds of real problems," she says. "Saying that you are tolerant is not embracing, saying that you are accommodating is not being welcoming and having multicultural moments where you have a multicultural week and you have some ‘symbolic’ food and a festival is not to address the structural inequities in a society.”