We are the roots: Black Settlers and their Experiences of Discrimination on the Canadian Prairies by Dr. Jenna Bailey and Dr. David Este (review)

Until recently, there was a perception that the northern United States was a safe haven throughout history for African Americans who fled enslavement and, later, Jim Crow in the US South. Many people have similarly conceptualized Canada as the idyllic escape from racial discrimination in the United States. In the 1990s, historians began recognizing and exposing the racism and racial discrimination outside the South. Recent events have also publicly brought to light the long history of discrimination and inequality across the United States. We Are the Roots: Black Settlers and Their Experiences of Discrimination on the Canadian Prairies builds on this effort to dismantle the misconceptions about African Americans reaching utopian societies as they moved farther north. In sixty-seven minutes, the film confronts this myth about Canada with the lived experiences of blacks who settled there from the early 1900s to the present.

Historian Jenna Bailey, working with the Centre for Oral History and Tradition at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, wrote, directed, and produced the film. She collaborated with David Este, a professor of social work at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Bailey and Este used film production companies based in Canada and have made the documentary freely available for streaming at www.baileyandsoda.com and on the Bailey and Soda Films Vimeo channel. We Are the Roots was nominated for seven awards and won six of them, including the Oral History Association's 2018 Elizabeth B. Mason Award and 2018 Oral History in Nonprint Format Award, and the National Council on Public History's 2019 Outstanding Public History Award.

The documentary weaves together oral histories from nineteen narrators, both women and men—some of whom passed away during the film's production—all of whom were descendants of some of the first families to settle in Alberta and Saskatchewan by 1912. The oral histories are the driving force behind the documentary's narrative, while filmmakers also used archival documents and some text slides to frame and contextualize the oral history excerpts (rather than include talking-head scholars who are not part of the community). This decision highlighted the descendants as the experts of their own history.

The documentary shows the history of blacks in Canada from the early 1900s to the present. It begins with Canada launching a recruitment campaign at the beginning of the twentieth century to entice settlers to this last great frontier: the Canadian prairies. Over 1,000 African Americans seized the opportunity to escape Jim Crow laws that were spreading across the country. The large influx of African Americans immigrating to Alberta and Saskatchewan surprised Canadians, who had assumed that only whites would answer their homesteading advertisements. The Canadian government, supported by many of its citizens, enacted racist immigration practices to discourage African Americans from entering the country, but many families persisted.

Experiences of discrimination varied between settlements. Settlements such as Amber Valley were predominantly black and residents faced little discrimination, whereas settlements like Wildwood were also home to European immigrants (Ukrainians, Germans, Polish, etc.) who sometimes, as the film's narrators explain, acted prejudiced out of their ignorance of blacks. Narrator Gladys Leffler remembers the whites and blacks in Maidstone working together to help the community survive the Great Depression. Campsie was a settlement where blacks were in the minority and faced segregation when they wanted to send their children to school. The irony in Campsie, however, was that the black school was for both blacks and European immigrants rather than the strict division of skin color that was prevalent in the American South. Settlements in rural Saskatchewan, such as Fiske, had few black families and a large Ku Klux Klan presence that regularly intimidated the black residents. The KKK...