Doc explores the black experience in Alberta
Between 1905 and 1912, more than 1,000 African-Americans crossed the border to settle in small communities around Edmonton. Most came from Oklahoma, fleeing the Jim Crow laws which stripped them of their rights when Oklahoma became a state in 1907.
Amber Valley, 160 km north of Edmonton, was the biggest and best-known of their farm colonies. But there were also black communities in Wildwood, 120 km west of Edmonton; Campsie, west of Barrhead; Breton, 95 km southwest of Edmonton; Gibbons, 37 km northeast of Edmonton; and over the Saskatchewan border in Maidstone, near Lloydminster.
It’s a story that tends to be told and retold every year during Black History Month.
But what happened to the settlers afterwards? What happened when the Depression hit and they left their isolated farms, and moved to Edmonton?
That’s the crux of an intriguing and moving new documentary, We Are the Roots, which premieres this weekend.
“The documentary is a catalyst for conversation,” said Deborah Dobbins, an Edmonton teacher and the president of the Shiloh Centre for Multicultural Roots.
Dobbins wanted to make sure the voices and stories of her community’s elders and pioneers were preserved. More than that, she wanted a new generation of black youth to understand the roots of Edmonton’s black community.
She got a $60,000 grant from
Alberta’s Human Rights Education and Multicultural Fund and raised another $60,000 in matching funds. Then she commissioned Jenna Bailey, who is both a filmmaker and a professor at University of Lethbridge specializing in oral history, to make the documentary. Bailey, in turn, partnered with David Estes, a University of Calgary academic who specializes in the study of Canadian black history, who joined her in her research.
Together, Bailey and Estes recorded long and thoughtful interviews with 19 descendants of those original black settlers. The eldest was 101 years old at the time.
The resulting hour-long documentary is low-key, charming and full of unexpected twists. Bailey and Estes simply let their subjects tell their stories, without heavyhanded narration, intercutting the tales with maps, archival photos and home-movie footage.
You might have assumed black pioneers would have faced the worst discrimination in small prairie towns. Instead, as the film unfolds, person after person speaks of the warm relationships their families had with their Ukrainian, German, French and other farm neighbours.
“The purpose of our documentary was to talk about discrimination,” said Bailey. “But in the beginning, I was kind of confused about why I wasn’t hearing a lot of discrimination stories.” Estes was also surprised.
“As I interviewed people, especially those who grew up in rural areas, they said, ‘We didn’t experience racism.’”
Their interview subjects described farm communities where people of all backgrounds had to work together to survive, where early suspicions had to be put aside so that people could bring in their crops together. In one segment of the film, we learn that when school administrators tried to establish a segregated “blacks only” school near Campsie, white immigrant families defied the rule and sent their kids there anyway.
But the stories changed when drought and the Great Depression hit, when black homesteaders left their farm communities and moved to Edmonton.
Suddenly, they weren’t independent farmers cultivating their own land. They were wage-earners, dependant on white employers. No longer part of tight-knit black communities, they were isolated in a city where they were a very visible minority.
As the film relates, they weren’t allowed to attend white churches, so they had to start a church of their own. Jobs were hard to find. Apartments, too. More ominously, they faced the hostility of living in a city where the mayor, Dan Knott, authorized Ku Klux Klan rallies and cross-burnings on city property.
The film follows the descendants of those first black American settlers as they fight their own civil rights battles.
There’s a great little moment in the film where Doris Mayes tells the story of how she became Edmonton Transit’s first black woman bus driver.
“One guy got on and he looked and me and he said, ‘Gee, where I come from, blacks usually ride in the back.’ And I said, ‘Well, this is Canada,’” she tells the filmmakers.
It’s a heartwarming story. But as We Are the Roots patiently reminds us, racism here, while more subtle, remains painful and enduring. That’s the message Dobbins wants the whole Edmonton community to hear.
“As a people, we have learned to get along and not make waves and win people over,” she said. “We didn’t come here to make trouble. We came to be part of the Canadian fabric.”
We didn’t come here to make trouble. We came here to be part of the Canadian fabric.