Rooda Lee, Scott Parker, Elizabeth Broderick
The formation of the Queen’s Bush settlement is a hidden story in Canadian history; however, detailed accounts of the Black settlement in Wellington County have been told by local historians, Jerry Prager and Linda Brown-Kubisch, in recent years. First, historians believe the settlement formed some time in the early 19th century, around the year 1820 (Ontario Heritage Trust). The settlement itself encompassed a 12 by 8 mile section of land located between the Waterloo County and Lake Huron area, more specifically, in the area which would become Woolwich in later years (Thorning). It was largely composed by fugitive slaves and free Blacks who fled the United States. Census data suggests that at its height roughly 1,500 Black pioneers settled in Queen’s Bush. In The Queen’s Bush Settlement, Brown-Kubisch argues that these “Black pioneers” had little to no expertise in surviving in such a forbidding climate and landscape; however, they were able to create a thriving, independent and self-reliant community (32). The Queen’s Bush settlement was not a rare occurrence either; black settlements such as the Oro settlement, Owen Sound, and Collingwood also provided a space for Black Canadians, former slaves and free Blacks, to make homes and build communities in Ontario (Rickards 17).
John Little experienced the many hardships of slavery before successfully escaping to Canada. Little was subject to the harsh violence of slavery: he was sold and separated from his wife and regularly beaten and tortured by his owner after he tried to escape. After escaping and reuniting with his wife, the Littles runaway to Ohio to seek freedom and from there they made their way to Queen’s Bush. Due to white owners fear that Black literacy would threaten the slave system, laws were passed forbidding slaves to learn to read or write. John Little states, “I was never sent to school a day in my life, and never knew a letter until quite late in life” (198). Little’s lack of education exemplifies the constraining of Black education as a method to suppress Black agency and rebellion. He says, “but being a slave, I did not know my age; I did not know anything” (199). Education was essential to how the Littles imagined a future of freedom and independence for their children in Queen’s Bush: in Mrs. Little’s testimony, she states, “one little girl is all that is spared to me… I intend to have well educated, if the Lord lets us” (233). The Littles’ slave testimonies reveal the efforts of former slaves to obtain education, which they viewed as an essential means of achieving racial equality and equal access in Canada.
The Littles understood that the education of African Canadian children was central to the social development of Blacks in Canada. However, Black settlers in early Canada faced a number of obstacles limiting and denying black students access to state-run schools. As Awad Ibrahim and Ali A. Abdi write, “In the country’s early days, many Canadian towns and villages did not have public school, and….towns that did have schools often refused to let black children attend. This was the case especially in Nova Scotia and Ontario, which passed laws to keep black children in separate schools” (4). Wanting to educate their children, Black parents across Upper and Lower Canada fought to create their own schools and train their own teacher. They opposed the “under-funded, poorly equipped, inadequately staffed and segregated schools” that were available to Black children, “demanding that their children receive educational opportunities equal to everyone else’s, and that they be allow to send their children wherever the saw fit” (4).
Black pioneers in the Queen’s Bush held a deep commitment to education. American missionaries travelled to the settlement to provide educational and vocational training that could help Black pioneers to live independent and self-reliant lives. In her discussion of education and the Queen’s Bush Settlement, Linda Brown-Kubish concludes that while Black leaders “urged them to obtain an education and to be industrious and thrifty, in order to prove to whites that Blacks were their equals….Blacks quickly realized that this alone did not guarantee assimilation into white society; nor did it eradicate discrimination and resentment” (23). Educational discrimination guaranteed white supremacy and subordination of Blacks in Canada in the present and persists into the present.