When we think of Canada’s connection to slavery we often think of The Underground Railroad, the network of abolitionists that led escaped American slaves north to freedom. However, too little attention is paid to Canada’s own 200-year history of slavery. The nation’s early political culture was strongly pro-slavery and many early Canadian politicians were slaveowners. Slaves of both indigenous and African origin were held in bondage under conditions not unlike those in the U.S. or elsewhere in the Americas. Their stories are mostly unknown to the general public, in part because Canada’s education system has neglected this crucial chapter of the nation’s past. Natasha Henry is part of a group of scholars seeking to correct the record and tell a fuller picture of Canada’s history. Their work is important because only by understanding how systems of racial discrimination were first erected can we fully contextualize today’s struggle to dismantle them. 

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Natasha Henry is a 2018 Vanier Scholar completing a PhD in History at York University on the enslavement of Africans in early Ontario. She is the president of the Ontario Black History Society. 

You can visit her website here: https://teachingafricancanadianhistory.weebly.com/about.html

Her book is available on Amazon: www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Day-Celebrating-Freedom-Canada-ebook/dp/B004DNWM1U

#003-Natasha Henry: The History and Legacy of Slavery in Canada

A comedy interview podcast that explores the worlds of science, politics, environmentalism history and the arts from a rational, skeptical point-of-view.

#003-Natasha Henry: The History and Legacy of Slavery in Canada

The Daniel Barkeley Show