They thwart the rutted assumption of Ontario’s rural spaces as ‘originally’ or primarily white and nuance an oft-simplified Indigenous/white binary in the country. This long history also upends the way many white Canadians think of the racial and ethnic diversity of the urban centers of Canada as something relatively new, a supposed divergence from the historically white demographics of early Canada.
That the Queen’s Bush Settlement nearly disappeared from contemporary white Canadian memory is not a neutral forgetting. When you forget something, its reappearance causes surprise. But surprise will only get you so far. It starts to get old, especially for those who were never surprised to begin with, who are forced to continuously encounter these perennial bouts of white astonishment.
Surprise might be the first reaction, but it can’t be the last.
The Queen’s Bush Settlement is slowly breaking back into the present. Maybe. At least, that’s the long suggestion made by the newspaper clippings Alma Frede handed me in August 2017. At ninety-five years of age, Frede is still the local historian of record for the village of Wallenstein although she now lives at a seniors’ center in nearby St. Jacobs. She moves slowly by aid of a walker, but at her kitchen table, she’s all energy and wit. Chock-full of the many birth-marriage-death dates that web together our Mennonite relations, she recalls local events nearly a century past that are as significant as they are quotidian. “But I don’t give the story,” she insisted with a pointed finger. “I just give the facts.”
And the facts are plentiful. Frede’s file folder—Black History in Canada—contained news articles across four decades that spotlighted racial profiling by police in Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto. Others were written in commemoration of Black History Month or the 1990 fundraising effort to repair Buxton’s freedom bell. Many of the articles recounted the wanton demolition of Africville in Halifax and described the decades-long fight for remuneration by displaced residents.
Scattered throughout the folder were clippings from the 1970s, 1990s, and 2000s that focused specifically on the Queen’s Bush.