February is Black History Month, a time to honour and acknowledge the contributions Black people have made to Canada. It is also an opportune time to listen and learn about the issues the Black community still faces, such as racism and inequality, and the steps toward meaningful change that can be taken both at Camosun and within our communities.
And it could be argued that some meaningful change is needed here on campus. We had people explain they feel like an outsider and heard stories of racism while conducting interviews for this piece. Perhaps if we all learn a bit more about history this month, it might change what the future looks like for the Black community on campus.
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“If there’s one thing that I would personally like to see more of, it would maybe [be] just trying to get to know people of colour more,” says Camosun College Student Society external executive Jessie Niikoi, an international student from Ghana.
Niikoi thinks the openness to new cultural experiences should go both ways. When people from other countries arrive they learn about Canadian culture, and, in return, Canadians could be more open to learning about theirs, she says.
“There’s a lot of things we can learn from each other and in the end we’re all here learning different things in a very diverse place,” says Niikoi.
While Niikoi says that she has not experienced any racism on campus, she says it has been a bit uncomfortable for her at times.
“Sitting in class and being the only person of colour or just being the one person that’s pretty much different from everyone and then it’s like, no one else sits close to you or no one wants to sit beside you,” she says. “That’s what it feels like… It feels a little isolating.”
The Black community on campus is small, and considering that most students don’t stay at Camosun for longer than one or two years, connecting the community has been challenging. “Camosun has had a lot of support but one of the major kind of challenges that there is at this point is that there is no space, Black space, at Camosun… So Camosun could do more,” says Camosun Sociology instructor Francis Adu-Febiri.
Camosun as an institution has been supportive but campus has its forms of racism. Students have complained to the Ombudsperson about Adu-Febiri’s teaching instead of trying to talk to him first, he says. He also says that students have shown up to class the first day, walked out, and never returned. His interpretation is it didn’t work for them that a Black teacher was teaching the course. The experiences didn’t shock Adu-Febiri, who hopes his dean and colleagues will make the right choice when the time comes to replace him.
“I’m hoping that when I retire there will be another Black Sociology professor at Camosun that [doesn’t] want my history to be erased totally here,” he says. “That’s my fear as I near retirement.”
Having a continued African-Canadian representation among Camosun faculty is very important to Adu-Febiri.
“When I retire,” he says, “who’s going to keep the mantle and teach Introduction to Africa and champion the cause, the African Awareness Committee? That is my question.” (Adu-Febiri created the Introduction to Africa course.)
Adu-Febiri—who says that he would like to see Social Sciences expanded to include a Black Studies course—is also the co-chair of the African Awareness Committee, an organization that tackles the hard issues facing the continent of Africa and raises awareness of the positive stories of how Africa has changed. Camosun has been supportive of the African Awareness Committee by providing a space for the group to meet.
“Over the years, [the] Camosun library has really supported me to bring in a lot of African literature into the library. I think that’s a good plus, a good support system. So people who want to read about Blacks, about Africa, can have some materials from the Lansdowne library,” says Adu-Febiri (the Camosun library puts out a LibGuide for Black History month; see sidebar for more information).
Niikoi says that she would like to see the college have some way of checking in on international students to help guide them through the cultural differences they face and to help make them feel welcome.
“If Camosun is priding itself being a very diverse community there should be ways of integrating their students and culture and this very different world,” says Niikoi.
Looking at the bigger picture, Adu-Febiri says that there are people out there thinking that there isn’t Black history (he uses the phrase “visible minorities with invisible histories”).
“What saddens me is that we don’t have a monument showing that Blacks have been here for centuries,” he says.
The next section of this story will look at the history of the Black pioneers of BC, something Adu-Febiri feels strongly about.
“So Black History Month we talk about, we petition the Canadian government to have a space for a whole month to celebrate our lives and our achievements,” he says, “but it has been quite abstract that sometimes we need to immortalize ourselves here for what it’s lacking sometimes. And one of my dreams is to have an African heritage cultural centre here in Victoria to immortalize and memorialize the Black pioneers.”
Adu-Febiri mentions an African proverb: Until the lion is given a space to tell its story, the hunter will always be a hero.
“So we need to tell our own stories,” he says, “so that we can actually, you know, highlight the big contributions that we’ve made to the creation and building of British Columbia and in Canada as a whole.”
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How many of us know the Black history of Victoria? There’s more than you may realize, and more than we have space to detail on these pages, but here’s a quick overview of just some of the Black history of our region that you may not know about.
In 1858, James Douglas, the first governor of Vancouver Island, decided to invite a Black community, the Pioneer Community from San Francisco, to live in Victoria, partly because he was aware of their struggles in California but also partly because he wanted to increase settlement to attempt to stop America from taking over Vancouver Island. Sent via Jeremiah Nagle, captain of the steamship Commodore, the invitation included an opportunity to own land, vote, sit on juries, equal protection under the law, and, eventually, citizenship. These were opportunities not afforded to them in the US.
Returning to Victoria with Nagle were 35 people from the Pioneer Community. The migration would continue as Blacks became landowners, farmers, workers, teachers, and businessmen in Victoria, Saanich, and Salt Spring Island. Over 800 black pioneers came to Victoria.
There’s a plaque in the Parade of Ships installation along the Inner Harbour wall that recognizes the ship the Black pioneers arrived on. In 1997, the migration of the first Black pioneers was recognized by the Government of Canada as an Event of National Historic Significance.
Away from the harbour at Central Saanich United Church, formerly Shady Creek Methodist Church, there’s a plaque about Black pioneers in British Columbia that says about the settlers, “Though still faced with intense discrimination, these pioneers enriched the political, religious and economic life of the colony. For example, Mifflin Gibbs became a prominent politician; Charles and Nancy Alexander initiated the Shady Creek Methodist Church; John Deas established a salmon cannery; and the group formed one of the earliest colonial militia units, the Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps.”
Mifflin Gibbs was the first Black Victoria city councilor and the first Black person elected to BC public office; he was elected to Victoria city council in 1866, representing the James Bay district. He represented Salt Spring Island in the 1868 Yale Convention to draw up the terms for BC’s entry into Confederation. His organization of Black voters and political activism ensured the enfranchisement of Black settlers by colonial administrators. Gibbs and his business partner Peter Lester were merchants; they were the first competitors the Hudson Bay Company had come up against. Miners that came through Victoria on their way to the Fraser River bought food and equipment from them.
In 1869, Gibbs left Victoria for Haida Gwaii (then called the Queen Charlotte Islands) to run a coal mining operation; in Haida Gwaii he built the first tramway in British Columbia delivering coal to tidewater.
November 19 was declared as Mifflin Wistar Gibbs Day by the City of Victoria in 2016, in honour of Gibbs becoming the first Black person elected to public office in BC. In May 2019, a plaque was installed in Irving Park, where Gibbs’ home and estate once stood, that reads, in part, “After helping lead the exodus of 800 Black residents from San Francisco in 1858, Gibbs became the recognized leader of their community on Vancouver Island.”
One of the most successful pioneering Black families is the Alexanders. Charles and Nancy were both free Blacks from Missouri. On December 25, 1849 in Springfield, Illinois the couple were married. Charles, a carpenter, built and ran a grist mill in St. Louis. They travelled out west in the spring of 1855 along the Oregon Trail to the gold fields of California. On July 1, 1858, Charles and Nancy set out to Fort Victoria on the ship Oregon.
After success at the Fraser River gold mines, the Alexanders moved to south Saanich to establish a home and farm. Charles helped build the first school in south Saanich and served as a trustee. The building of Shady Creek Church (now Central Saanich United Church) was initiated and assisted by Charles in 1862; he was also one of its first preachers. Charles also built a house on Bay Street near Douglas Street for the Finlayson family (who Finlayson Street is named after).
Nancy was one of the founding members of the Lake Hill Women’s Institute; there are now four chapters of the Women’s Institute in Victoria and several more across BC.
Over 400 descendants of Charles and Nancy Alexander have been documented; there are still over 100 descendants of the Alexander family in the Victoria area today. Karen Hoshal, a direct descendant of Charles and Nancy Alexander, will be speaking at Central Saanich United Church on February 12 (see details in sidebar).
In the late 1850s, after facing discrimination from the newly formed Victoria Fire Department, several Black men offered their services as a volunteer militia; in 1861, they became the Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps (VPRC). They consisted of one captain, three officers, and 44 privates; they were all Black.
The VPRC drilled twice a week under drill sergeants from the Royal Navy. Initially, their drill hall was on Yates Street; it was built with funds that volunteers raised. The drill hall eventually moved to View Street between Quadra and Blanshard.
Most of the funds were raised within the Black community, who used the drill house as a social centre; it became a popular meeting place.
In the beginning, the VPRC only had antique flintlocks, and while James Douglas was to procure better weapons, that never happened. Due to ongoing discrimination by fire brigades, the VPRC were refused entry to the swearing-in ceremonies when the new governor was sworn in in 1864; the VPRC disbanded the following year.
On February 24, 2017, 150 noteworthy British Columbians were named to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday. John Sullivan Deas was one of them.
Around 1862, Deas came to Canada. By 1866 he was a hardware dealer and manufacturing tinsmith in Yale, BC. In 1871, he started canning salmon on the lower Fraser River, eventually running the leading cannery there. The cannery produced 200,000 to 400,000 cans per year, depending on the salmon run. Through an agent, the salmon was sold and shipped primarily to England.
When men were rushing to local recruiting offices of the Department of Defence and Militia to enlist during World War I, Black men were told it was a white man’s war or their services were not needed; at least 200 Black men were rejected by 1915. Finding this unacceptable, Black leaders of the community wrote to Militia headquarters and the governor general questioning why these men were rejected. Militia leaders were also writing to headquarters; they were feeling the pressure from white men refusing to serve alongside Black soldiers and the Black leaders advocating for men in their community.
No. 2 Construction Battalion, the largest Black unit in Canadian history, was authorized on July 5, 1916 under the command of lieutenant-colonel Daniel Sutherland. Labour was in short supply, there weren’t enough Black soldiers for an infantry battalion, and the British War Office feared that Black men might use their training and experience against the British colonies.
In early April 1917, No. 2 Construction Battalion arrived in England. Having not reached full battalion numbers, it was renamed No. 2 Construction Company. Serving in the Jura region of France, the men supplied, often under enemy fire, lumber for the front and provided essential support services. For example, the water at a station that supplied 1,300 men for cooking, drinking, and washing was supervised by the battalion.
Throughout their service, Black soldiers faced harassment and discrimination. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, on July 9, 2022, apologized on behalf of the federal government to the descendants of No. 2 Construction Battalion for the racism the battalion members experienced. For Black History Month this year, Trudeau announced the Royal Canadian Mint would honour the battalion with a commemorative coin. The Royal BC Museum’s BC Black History and Heritage Day event (see sidebar) will have a section about the No. 2 Construction Battalion.
These are just a few of the stories that make up Victoria’s, and Canada’s, Black history. It’s important that they be told. It’s important that Black history is not forgotten.
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Here’s a list of some of the events happening around town for Black History Month. Visit the websites for all the details on each event.
Wednesday, February 1
Camosun College Black History Month guide available at
camosun.libguides.com/BlackHistoryMonth
1 to 4 pm Saturday, February 11
BC Black History and Heritage Day
Free, the Royal BC Museum
bcblackhistory.ca/black-history-and-heritage-day
10 am to 3 pm Saturday, February 11
Black-in-BC Symposium
RSVP required, second floor 753 View Street
issambacentre.ca/upcomingevents
10:15 am Sunday, February 12
Black History Month church service
Central Saanich United Church, 7180 East Saanich Road
bcblackhistory.ca/black-history-month-church-service
5 pm to 7 pm Thursday, February 16
Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling
$15 for students, Hermann’s Upstairs/livestream
bcblackhistory.ca/out-of-the-sun-on-race-and-storytelling
Friday, February 17
Saturday, February 18
Sunday, February 19
ISSAMBA Showcases
Various times, prices, and venues
issambacentre.ca
12 pm to 10 pm Monday, February 20
Family Day Black History Month Music Camp
$25 and up, Victoria Edelweiss Club
www.eventbrite.ca/e/478153789857
2 pm to 3 pm Sunday, February 26
Ross Bay Cemetery Tour
$5, Ross Bay Cemetery
bcblackhistory.ca/ross-bay-cemetery-guided-tour
7 pm to 9 pm Monday, February 27
$10 suggested donation, Noedy Hechavarria Duharte and Sadé Awele
The Belfry
bcblackhistory.ca/black-history-month-at-the-belfry