The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology by Karina Vernon

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology by Karina Vernon Mahmoud Ababneh (bio) Karina Vernon. The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2019. Pp. 593. CAD $44.99. In a recent lecture, the novelist Suzette Mayr described the "electrifying" effect of reading Cheryl Foggo's Pourin' Down Rain (1990) as a Black person living on the prairies. She noted that Foggo's book brought to light the crucial and long-standing presence of Black families in Alberta. Like Foggo's biographical work, Karina Vernon's The Black Prairie Archives documents Black presence on the prairies to show that Black folks are not an anomaly but are rather part of a larger web of reciprocal social relations. To demonstrate how these relations have been forged, Vernon meticulously engages with the works of sixty-one Black authors who have produced oral literature, experimental poetry, autobiography, history, and ethnographies. Vernon explains that an archive "as blackness" is a method of engagement with these modes of writing that empowers community members "to tell the story they want to be made public" (5). This process of engagement is radically different from and in opposition to an archive "of blackness," which "constructs blackness as an object of knowledge in the European archive" (5). By gathering an archive as Blackness, she not only reminds readers of the complicated ethics of presenting stories about Black communities that require a lengthy and necessary process of securing permissions from authors but also brilliantly challenges the dominant national archives of Blackness. This distinction between archives of Blackness and archives as Blackness is a central point in Vernon's introduction to the anthology. The introduction admirably attempts to redefine the last 150 years of Black presence on the prairies. Vernon provides a fresh lens through which to scrutinize the state archives and simultaneously proposes a different archive that purposefully constructs a radical shift in the way the prairies are perceived. The prairies, she rightly argues, have been mainly imagined through a socalled "prairie realist" school of writing. Writers working within this genre, who are mostly men, and all white, have produced a "sanitized and bounded" [End Page 183] archive of the prairie that fails to mirror its Black presence. Therefore, The Black Prairie Archives radically reconstructs the imagination of the prairies at multiple levels. For example, reading Dr. Alfred Schmitz Shadd's speech to the electorate and Reverend George Washington Slater, Jr.'s article about organizing a co-op provides important knowledge of how these Black leaders were heavily engaged in policy making and journal writings that transform the way Black presence has been monolithically narrated in the state archives. Making these important stories and histories public is a crucial step in exposing the complicity of nationally run archives and museums in concealing Black activism and Black community engagement across the history of the Canadian prairies. Vernon explains how she found "virtually nothing" about Black presence on the prairies when searching literary histories and regional anthologies. She eloquently describes her mixed feelings when she discovered that there is a Black history of the prairies. To her, this realization means that she "also discovered the erasure of it" (9). She further explains the difficulties of obtaining some of the materials because they were "buried in unexpected places," archived in "out-of-the-way rural historical societies," or "hidden in plain sight" (8). Thus, the book offers a pioneering contribution that presents these documents to the public, often for the first time. Vernon sets four goals for this book. These goals vary from transforming the imagination of the prairies as a white space to establishing a Black prairie literary tradition. Another important goal is "to assist readers' close engagements with the literature, thus opening up new scholarly and pedagogical possibilities" (1). Vernon aims to establish practical guidelines to implement these critical frameworks in her introduction. The goal of learners and educators of CanLit and Canadian history should be, according to Vernon, to pry open and identify new spaces and possibilities that revitalize conversations within these fields. The Black Prairie Archives facilitates this task and further assists readers to engage with these alternative views. Vernon structures the anthology in chronological order based...