The University of King’s College launch of a new scholarly inquiry into potential ties to the slave trade is a significant step in addressing little-known darker parts of Canada’s history.
From Japanese internment camps to residential schools, it is clear from history that there is still much to learn and discover about Canada’s involvement with ugly facets of human society.
In recent years, Canada has had a glowing global reputation as a progressive country, but we must recognize that this reputation has only been developed in the last few decades. Just the fact that a university in Canada feels the need to do more in-depth research into its own history related to slavery, shows how much more needs to be learned.
For example, in 2017, Charmaine A. Nelson, an art history professor at McGill University, shared her research on Canadian newspaper notices which listed slave sales, slave auctions, and fugitive slave advertisements, with Harvard University.
A few decades of progress in human rights and freedoms is incomparable to centuries of oppression. The more we learn about the dark parts of Canada’s history, the better we will understand how to not repeat it.
