The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology ed. by Karina Vernon

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology ed. by Karina Vernon Ludwig Deringer Vernon, Karina, ed. The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2020. Pp. xv + 576 pp index. CDN$44.99 paper-back; CDN$26.99 ebook. It is in the earliest exploration reports of Canada and the United States that the presence of Black people in the North and on the Plains is attested. Thus, an African slave by the name of York contributed to the success of the first transcontinental exploration of the United States, the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–06). A Black- Indigenous man, Pierre Bonga, served as a member of the first expedition to the Arctic Ocean, led by Samuel Hearne (1771) (see Vernon 374–78). Individual attestations such as these are paradigmatic of the picture at large, even to this day: a lack of awareness of Black culture in the North and on the Plains in general, and of its beginnings as early as the eighteenth century in particular. One of Karina Vernon’s main aims in The Black Prairie Archives is to familiarize readers on a wide scale with the rich body of literature by Black authors from the Canadian prairie region, what today are the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Some texts are published in the Anthology for the first time. In her comprehensive introduction (1–35), the editor succinctly addresses the key issues in nuce. Vernon conceptualizes this archive as dynamic and processual, comprising both historical and future works and reflecting their authors’ intellectual, ethnic, linguistic, literary, and cultural networks. To her, in this archive converge “the geographies black prairie writers are connected with, including other parts of Canada, the US, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Africa” (3). By the same logic, it incorporates the authors’ interrelations “with Indigenous peoples, and South Asian, Chinese, and European diasporas” (8). The role of the pertinent languages is preeminent: they include “Arabic, Bantu, Ebonics, Creole, Portuguese, Swahili, and many more” (3). Vernon, a native of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, prefers “the term ‘black’ over ‘African Canadian’ because it suggests that the nation does not function as the dominant point of reference in determining black identities” (11). Each author represented in the Anthology is introduced with essential biographical-critical material, often containing fresh information from the editor’s first-hand correspondence. The human, linguistic, and artistic complexities of one immigrant’s situation are captured in the following sample, a poem in Portuguese, “Na Corrente do rio” (2012), by the bilingual Angolan Albertan author Francisco Alexander Fwallah (born ca. 1980), translated as “In the River Flow” by poet Erin Mouré, with the two texts set in parallel columns: Sou I’m Teu Your Irmão Brother Refugiei-me I took refuge Na In Poesia Poetry (460, lines 12–17) [End Page 422] Vernon divides the historical development into four periods of migration and subsequent literary production as follows: ca. 1790–1900, covering the fur trade and early settlement; 1905–1912, the years of Black Americans’ migration from Oklahoma to Canada; 1960s to early 1970s, the era of international immigration; and 2012 to the present, reflecting “neo-liberal immigration and asylum” (11). This division, however, is not replicated in the volume’s outward arrangement; instead, the authors appear in chronological order by birth date. Vernon’s selections widely vary by author biography, theme, genre, and author intention, featuring historical records, novels (in excerpts), short stories, drama, poetry, creative nonfiction, and expository prose. The most recent pieces in the Archives date from 2017–18. For the first and the second period of Black migration to the prairies, relevant collections of document sources are housed in the North West Company Archives, the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, the three Provincial Archives, and in municipal repositories such as Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and Archives. Significantly, as Vernon points out, the writing of this time span intersects with the literature of the colonial Black Atlantic. In the early periods, “non-textual practices” (16), i.e. oral and gestural ones, predominate over written text types such as the aforementioned fur trade company records, oral histories of individual settlers, pioneer diaries, or the local...