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In these three NFB films, Speakers for the Dead, Home Feeling: Struggle for a Community and Le Quatuor de l’exil, the alienation of Black people – some born in Canada, others in the Caribbean and still others in Africa – jumps off the screen.

Watching the three films one after the other, one almost wishes that the people in each documentary could meet and support one another. They would have much to talk about. 

In Speakers for the Dead, directors Jennifer Holness and David Sutherland examine an aspect of Black history largely ignored in Canada. In Priceville, a rural Ontario area slightly south of Owen Sound, the cemetery remains of a 19th-century Black community were ploughed up and planted over in the 20th century. Efforts by local advocates to discover and preserve historic headstones in the destroyed cemetery roused considerable local opposition and managed at the same time to bring together a number of Black Ontarians who seemed relieved to have the opportunity to commemorate their ancestors and to have their own history celebrated.

The story wouldn’t have contained much drama if this had been an easy process from the start. But as various interviewees indicate, Blacks were segregated and vulnerable when they first settled in the Priceville area in about 1830. Some were promised land in exchange for having served the British in the War of 1812, but apparently the land grants never came – although they were given to Whites in the area. Blacks who had cleared the land and already built homes there were refused land grants retroactively, and in some occasions were forcibly removed. Consequently, the Black community in the area dwindled. 

Flash forward more than a century to about the year 1989, when members of a local community group prepared to reclaim and restore the old cemetery. Some residents fiercely opposed the idea, and as the reclamation project moved forward, ugly stories were uncovered. It was alleged that one farmer ploughed up the cemetery, planted potatoes in it and used the headstones to cover the dirt in the floor of his farmhouse basement. It was also alleged that some people desecrated cemetery stones in order to erase proof of Black ancestry within their own families. Older community members recalled painful incidents of racial segregation, and the very ghosts of 18th-century racism seemed, sadly, to resurface late in the 20th century as efforts were made to find and restore the headstones. All in all, the viewer is left with the thought that Black people in the Priceville area were twice made to feel that they really didn’t belong there at all– in the 19th century and again in the 20th.

In Home Feeling: Struggle for a Community, directors Jennifer Hodge and Roger McTair document life in Toronto’s Jane-Finch area in the early 1980s. Canadian history has rarely seen geographically clustered Black communities – some notable exceptions being the Black Loyalist communities and subsequently Africville in Halifax, Victoria and Saltspring Island around 1860, and the Wilberforce and New Dawn communities in 19th-century Ontario. However, Toronto’s Jane-Finch community has stood out for decades as one modern-day community with a large, notable, clustered Black presence.

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