Haiti’s past holds keys to Black future
Michaëlle Jean doesn’t think it was a random act of fate that she was the governor general who launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission along with survivors of the residential school system in 2009.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Jean told the Star in an exclusive interview this week. “I will always remember that moment. For our history to see the first Black woman as governor general of Canada being with Indigenous people in that time where we had to launch together and make that call of how important it is to consider history … because reconciliation is about justice.”
Indigenous-Black solidarity has remained a continuing theme in Jean’s quest to eliminate racism since her time at Rideau Hall, whether it’s manifested in last year’s historic Halifax Declaration, demanding racial justice for Black Canadians, or at the Big Thinking lecture series Wednesday at a York university conference, where she homes in on Haiti’s revolutionary past to serve as an inspirational road map to the future.
While the diverse Black and Indigenous communities in the Americas have distinct histories, both groups bore, and bear, the harshest brunt of colonialism via dehumanization and dispossession.
Statistics Canada data that show both groups continuing to be most impoverished and most subjected to racism “speaks very clearly and loudly of the situation that also comes from a terrible legacy,” Jean said. “The history of the peoples of Africa and so-called Americas is tainted by an experience from which one does not emerge unscathed. It’s one of pervasive racism, total dehumanization and genocide of untold proportions.”
Haiti marks a vital historical meeting point of those shared experiences between Indigenous Peoples and Africans.
Jean spends more than an hour on the phone passionately telling stories and evoking images of Haiti’s past that she said she feels proud to share. “Every time you hear again and again, Haiti stigmatized with this qualification of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere … well, we need to understand that its history remains as a record of Black struggle, existence and possibility.”
Haiti was the first independent Black republic in the Americas, and the only enslaved society to successfully overthrow the system of chattel slavery.
That defining moment in 1804 came after 13 years of revolt, of brutality and bloodshed. “But nothing,” said Jean, “nothing like the bite of the whip and the shooting and the rape and the hate. Nothing like the centuries of infamous racism that fed the inhuman slave trade.”
Haiti paid a hefty price for its conviction. Nations including France, the United States and the U.K. refused to recognize it. France demanded, at gunpoint, compensation for the “property” — enslaved labour — it had lost. Haiti took nearly a century to pay off the 150 million francs, estimated at between $20 billion and $30 billion in today’s U.S. dollars.
“It’s a debt so large and so lasting that it would help cement Haiti’s path to poverty and underdevelopment,” Jean said. “We had to pay those who owned us the privilege of taking back our freedom and our dignity after centuries of violence, genocide, abuse and forced labour to their benefit.”
Andrea Davis is a York University professor in Black cultures of the Americas. She is the academic convenor of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which runs today through Friday. She said she chose Jean to deliver the Imagining Black Futures lecture on Wednesday because she wanted that conversation to connect Canada to Haiti. “For a lot of us, Haiti posed a contradiction of Black possibility and Black impossibility,” she said.
All the Big Thinking lectures this year are being delivered by Black and Indigenous speakers. Davis said this was a deliberate decision for this first in-person conference in four “pivotal years globally” to elevate Black thought and Indigenous knowledge “as a way of answering the concerns as humanities and social science disciplines, as well as the concerns of the wider world.”
“For me and for the Black scholars I know, we don’t think that a future for Black people is possible without for a future for Indigenous Peoples on whose land we are.”
That interconnectedness has historical roots in Haiti. On the phone, Jean launches, podcast style, into an engaging tale of that past.
“The Spaniards disembarked on the island of Ayiti Bohio Kiskeya (the land of many mountains) where lived Indigenous peoples for time immemorial,” she said.
What unfolded is a familiar story. The Tainos and Carib offered the Spaniards, led by Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, fruit dishes, tobacco pipes, hot sweet drinks, coffee and chocolate and “all the exotic products and flavours totally unknown to Europe” as well as necklaces adorned with gold nuggets.
“We call these Indigenous Peoples our ancestors because they are,” Jean said.
Soon the swords and firearms of the Spaniards turned on the locals. Chiefs were massacred, the Tainos captured and hanged, the rest of the Indigenous populations enslaved to extract the gold that would make Spain one of the richest powers of Europe.
After hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people were killed, a Spanish missionary priest of the Dominican order by the name of Bartolomé de las Casas, known for his denunciation of the practices of the Spanish colonizers and for his defence of the rights of the Indigenous people, recommended that Black people be taken as slaves from Africa to compensate for mortality among the Natives, Jean said. “Las Casas eventually realized his blunder … and thereafter he went on to advocate for the Black peoples as well as the Indigenous Peoples. And he repented until his last breath, his fatal error.”
That 400-year-old Black-Indigenous connection is featured prominently in the Halifax Declaration for the eradication of racial discrimination. The final version of the 30-page document, which was released this month, is the outcome of the first national Black Canadians Summit, hosted by the Michaëlle Jean Foundation last year.
“We believe the wounds of history can be healed,” it declares, and offers a clear list of solutions and demands from all levels of government in areas such as criminal justice, housing, education, health care. “Like Indigenous peoples, our African ancestors were stripped of their land, language, culture, of their rights and fundamental humanity,” it said.
You would never see a truth and reconciliation commission in the United States or in France, Jean said. “So if we’ve had the courage to do that, we need to continue on that path,” for there are also other peoples still suffering from the legacy of colonization.
“We cannot underestimate how much exclusion is creating a deficit of our participation, our contribution, our energies and opportunities of synergies, our perspectives. It creates a deficit of democracy,” she said. “That’s why we need to examine and to question and to eradicate systemic racial discrimination, because it becomes a loss for all the common good and for Canada as a whole.”
We cannot underestimate how much exclusion is creating a deficit of our participation, our contribution, our energies and opportunities of synergies, our perspectives. It creates a deficit of democracy.
MICHAËLLE JEAN