ESI EDUGYAN: So the story of Priceville is the story of a Black township
in the 1830s in Ontario that has been forgotten.
Priceville was a small town in Ontario
that was established in the 1830s by African-American settlers
who had.... some of whom had fought alongside the British in the War of 1812
and they were granted the rich arable lands
in the northern part of Upper Canada, for having done that.
Some years after the African-Americans had arrived
and started tilling the land, and, you know, establishing a homestead
settlers from, I guess, the British Isles arrived as well
and were wanting to establish homesteads in the same area
and so there was a kind of
conflict that broke out
over who was able to make claims on the land.
Essentially, it was deemed that the Black settlers...
their land had been neither... it was not legally chartered
or legally assigned.
And so it was in the end
deemed that they had no claim to the land.
And so they were forced off of their homesteads
on which they had tilled the earth —
they had sort of done all of this very difficult work of establishing lives.
and they were being forced out.
They ended up leaving the area, and everything that they had
built ended up being sort of taken over by the new settlers.
Having had to leave behind all that they had built for themselves
this unfortunately included having had to leave behind their dead.
So, having had to leave behind their graveyard
which was kind of central in their township and because the land
on which their graveyard lay
had not been designated for internment
there was nothing that they could do when the new settlers
started kind of dismantling the gravestones and essentially building
a whole new life over that same land.
There's a wonderful documentary called ‘Speakers for the Dead,’ done by
you know, brilliant filmmaker called Jennifer Holness.
and she interviews
a man who was quite young at the time.
And he talks about how, as a boy
when they would play baseball in the local diamond
they used to call the home plate ‘Maggie’
because it was marked with the name Margaret.
We played ball over at the schoolyard and we used one for home plate.
Yeah, name was on, too.
Oh, yeah ‘Pitcher to Maggie’, yeah, we used to say that.
I think it was Margaret.
ED: And he concludes that
that was likely one of the headstones from the Black cemetery
which is quite shocking.
There was a real
schism in terms of
some of the townspeople wanting to form a committee
to essentially find out where the graves were exactly
how many there were, and reconsecrate the land.
And then you had a segment of townspeople who were quite against this.
And so there was it sounds like there was quite a bit of conflict over
what should be done.
They did eventually find some headstones, within this pile of rocks
and ground probing radar discovered that
there were about 100 graves on this land.
And I think the story isn't
so well-known, probably for various reasons.
I think that there can be a kind of suppression
of marginalized histories, especially ones that are so
you know, dark and contentious, that we kind of don't want to confront.
And, you know, I suppose I can understand that intellectually
but that's, you know, that's a shame
because this is ultimately a Canadian history that we all share.
And that's the reason why I think we should
be speaking more openly about this.
or speaking more directly about it.
By suppressing it, we're sort of, I guess
burying a part of our collective story that we need to confront.