Chapter 1 Memoryscapes Canadian Chattel Slavery, Gaslighting, and Carceral Phantom Pain

Canadian Chattel Slavery

Maureen Elgersman (2013) traces the start of Canadian chattel slavery to 1689 under French occupation, and records its sporadic growth under British occupation starting in 1760. Robin Winks (originally published in 1971 and reprinted 1997) located records of Canadian Black enslavement dating back to 1628, nine years after the first group of African captives arrived to occupied Turtle Island in Viginia. It was during this time that “David Kirke, the so-called English Conqueror of Quebec” brought an enslaved child to French occupied shores. Black folks “were present in New France and in British North America thereafter” (ix). Records indicate the African child’s colonial name at death was Olivier Le Jeune. Citing The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, Winks writes of a priest baptizing Olivier in 1632 claiming “all men were one when united under Christianity” to which Olivier responded, “You say that by baptism I shall be like you: I am black and you are white, I must have my skin taken off then in order to be like you” (quoted in Winks 1997, 1). Branded within these early records of Canadian chattel slavery is the large and small acts of resistance that get omitted from public memoryscapes of African enslavement. The annexation of such histories from public memoryscapes disinherits living Black communities from accessing the roots and powers of ancestral legacies of resistance. Also, unearthing this history allows us to see clear overlaps between historic slaver ↔ colonizer narratives of white saviourhood through abusive systems of white power and contemporary arresting ↔ imprisoning ↔ colonizer narratives of white saviourhood extended through the criminal-legal system.

Regardless of silence on these matters, the truth is that historically, French colonists in Canada further established and expanded their militarized occupation of Indigenous lands ↔ resources by passing a series of enslaving laws in 1663. By 1685, French colonist ↔ slavers had formed a local militia in Montréal to further institutionalize and expand their colonizing ↔ enslaving industries. After committing genocide and displacing Indigenous nations from these lands, French Canadian colonists complained to their king about a need to “populate” the colony claiming, “slavery appeared to be one means of increasing manpower . . . the fisheries, the mines, the agriculture all offered potential wealth too great for only nine thousand colonists to tap” (Winks 1997, 4). By 1685, Code Noir had been passed for France’s colonist ↔ slavers in the Caribbean and French Louisiana in the United States. This promoted French Canadian colonist ↔ slavers to write to their king for permission to “import” enslaved Africans from French colonies ↔ plantations in the islands “to help solve New France’s chronic shortage of unskilled labor” (Winks 1997, 5). Their letters and appeals unearth the foundational role chattel slavery occupies in the colonization of Canada and dispute any suggestions that minimize its presence and significance.

After Britain won the Seven Years’ War, it became the “most powerful slave trading nation” in the world (Cooper 2006, 83). The end of this war between Europeans brought negotiations that moved the majority of Indigenous lands occupied by New France into British control:

By the time of the Conquest of Canada, Britain had transported hundreds of thousands of captive Africans to the New World in numerous slave ships. Britain also had a large slave empire centered in the West Indies and the United States, with slave colonies in southern India and south Africa. (83)

As occupation expanded past New England in the United States (when they were still a British colony) and into British North America in Canada, British colonist ↔ slavers migrating north brought captured ↔ enslaved Africans. This onset meant a significant increase of enslaved African presence upon these occupied lands. Mapping memoryscapes of northward extensions of the middle passage inland allows a more comprehensive vision of the global pathways of historic chattel slavery. And while New France had a significant growing reliance on African enslavement in Canada, it was through the transfer of power into British rule that enslaved Africans began to outnumber enslaved Indigenous people in Canada (Rushforth 2012) and “consequently, enslavement gradually became identified solely with Africans” in Canada (Cooper 2006, 84).

Memoryscapes into Canadian ↑ Northward Slave-Catching Pathways and ↓ Southward Underground Railroad Routes to Freedom

In 1924, William Riddell published “Further Notes on Slavery,” revealing the persistence of Canadian slavery under British colonialism ↔ occupation. Among these records was a “bill of sale” dated 13 June 1777, recording the purchase of Sylvia, a Black woman enslaved by a white man in New York whose estate was being liquidated to repay his debts. The highest bidder for Sylvia was a colonist ↔ slaver living in Montréal named Edward William Gray. He paid £60 (about $150 at the time) for control over Sylvia. He returned to Canada with Sylvia as his legal property in 1777 (Riddell 1924, 26–27). Also in Riddell’s paper, we learn of the colonist ↔ slaver Alexander Harrow, a “Scotsman who came to this continent in 1775 as a lieutenant in an armed ship for the defence of Quebec. . . . His diary for some years is extant. It shows that slavery was common in Upper Canada in those days.” (28–29).

In his first diary entry, dated 27 July 1791, Harrow records the amount of money he was sending to a businessman and doctor to purchase salt, pork, and “a little Pawnese” to be delivered to him. “Pawnese” or “Panis” in French history refers to Indigenous persons enslaved by French colonizers↔slavers (Rushforth 2012). Harrow’s subsequent diary entries infer that “Dr. Mitchell had not sent the ‘Pawnese’” for on September 23 that same year Harrow wrote again from Fort Erie explaining he had received the doctor’s “letter about Salt and Pork” and to send “the boy he mentioned of 12 or 16 years old if not exceeding £40 or £50 or thereabouts . . . if the Boy was a little [African], the better” (quoted in Riddell 1924, 29). Riddell recorded several more diary entries by Harrow requesting to purchase young, enslaved Africans.

In Harrow’s diary we also learn about the northward trajectories of European slave-catching networks throughout Turtle Island, the continent of North America. In an entry dated 13 February 1797, Harrow writes of his discovery that Sampson, an enslaved African man, had escaped. He requests assistance recapturing and/or selling Sampson, citing British law and existing transnational slave↔catching ↔ carceral networks. In his footnotes, Riddell writes about Lochvan, whom he infers was a “bound servant”—a term used in early Canadian archives to describe enslavement. Lochvan had escaped, and Harrow was requesting his imprisonment “to cool or be sent back to make up lost time” (Riddell 1924, 31). Through Harrow’s diary entries we expand our vision of how Canada ↔ US pathways into colonialism ↔ enslavement interlock to include, not only the familiar and recognizable Underground Railroad’s northern trajectories toward freedom in Canada, but also their mirror image (the same and reversed) northern pathways that kidnapped ↔ imprisoned ↔ deported escaped Africans from the United States back to their colonizers ↔ slavers in Canada. Furthermore, we must bring back into public memoryscapes that the Underground Railroad’s northward freedom trajectories so publicly celebrated today took place illegally and in the dead of night, while the slave-catching trajectories that brought escaped Africans back into Canadian enslavement were legal and operated in plain sight, yet are now obscured and buried within racist Canadian mythologies and violent exceptings of history.

Afua Cooper (2006) further debunks the myth of the Underground Railroad as a strictly northern trajectory. She explains that gradual abolition laws generally declared enslaved Africans would remain enslaved within their existing territories (gradually dying or aging out to abolish slavery) while proclaiming newly arrived enslaved Africans as free upon arrival. This prompted enslaved Africans in the United States to travel north for freedom, while enslaved Africans in Canada had to travel south into northern US colonies that had passed similar laws. These memoryscapes of freedom trails complicate and expand our vision of Canadian freedom and US racism. They also bring into our memory and vision the overlapping relationships that exist between various institutions, most notably, the long-standing structural relationships between the criminal-legal system’s imprisoning ↔ immigration↔deportation schemes and these histories of enslavement and fugitive recapture. While Canada has a very public historic memory of its place upon the northward ↔ freedom trajectories of the Underground Railroad, that is neither the start nor the end of this memoryscape. In addition to southward ↔ freedom trajectories out of Canada, there was the realities of unfreedom and violence faced by fugitive Africans who escaped into Canada. While they were no longer legally enslaved, they did not experience freedom in Canada—they faced violence and disenfranchisement upon arrival ↔ forward into present days (Maynard 2017).

Unfreedom along the Freedom Trails

Black disenfranchisement is clearly documented within the archives and lived realities of Black Canadians in many arenas of life, then and now. The memoryscapes of Black disenfranchisement live within the policies and actions taken against Africville, Canada’s oldest Black community. Established in Nova Scotia in the mid 1700s, Africville was founded and built by freed, escaped, or deported Africans (discussed below). In the 1960s, the city of Halifax smashed Africville under bulldozers after centuries of dumping toxins and sewage there, forcing industrial land use upon its residents. Industrial land use, colonization’s words for violating the land, hauntingly included a cotton factory and the building of a railroad through the middle of the community. White-settler Canadians also commissioned and built a prison and an infectious disease hospital there in the mid 1800s. By the mid 1960s the city of Halifax began implementing a years-long plan of eliminating Africville altogether from Nova Scotia—continuing the trajectories of annexation and dismemberment started by their ancestral colonizers ↔ slavers. The city systematically tore down homes and community infrastructures that had survived previous attempts of destruction. The demolition of Africville’s Black church in the middle of the night in 1967 was said to be the biggest blow against Canada’s oldest Black community (Clairmont and Magill 1999; Carvey 2008).

Regardless of this rather recent history, national narratives and dominant white-settler identities frame and reframe Canada as a place of refuge and escape from oppression. Canadian narratives on slavery and the Underground Railroad distract and project outwards the histories of racial violence and colonial ↔ slavery that abound within (Maynard 2017). More than anything else, Canadian critiques of slavery ↔ racism ↔ immigration are aimed at the United States in a way that underwrites a “Canadian nationalist, anti-Americanism” (Clarke 2017, 23) that functions to obscure white Canadian racism by denying its existence as an extension of the same European imperialism that created both Canada and the United States. At the same time, memoryscapes in the United States project back upon Canada its own false sense of progressiveness, freedom, and equality—not as a proper critique of racism or in full recognition ↔ rejection of racial brutality, but as a limit upon what freedom could constitute within the United States. Gentzler’s (2018) writings for the Oklahoma Policy Institute provide an example of this:

Oklahoma incarcerates about 1,079 per 100,000 of our residents. . . . When counting only adults, our incarceration rate is even higher: 1,300 out of every 100,000 adults, or 1.3 percent. . . . These numbers put Oklahoma at the very top of the list of states, just more than Louisiana and Mississippi, and over 50 percent higher than the national incarceration rate. And we’re far out of step with the rest of a country that is already far out of step with the rest of the world. Oklahoma’s incarceration rate, for example, is nearly 10 times higher than that of Canada.

In this narrative, the expansive use of carceral violence in the United States is not contextualized within enslaving structural exploitation and colonial racial violence against Black and Indigenous people ↔ communities ↔ nations. Instead, mass violations are framed as a problem of excessive unfreedom in the United States relative to Canada’s “sparser” use of the same colonizing ↔ enslaving ↔ carceral violence. As a result, freedom in the United States is limited to what Canada is seen to have achieved from within the confines of white ↔ settler ↔ nationhood, while freedom in Canada is defined, not by the absolute absence of carceral ↔ white ↔ supremacy, but by how much or little of it is “seen” to exist in comparison to the United States.

Multicultural White Power: Homeland Refugees, Deportation Schemes, and Political Campaigns

Multiculturalism has served a role similar to that of the Underground Railroad, allowing Canadian state officials and the general public to congratulate themselves on Canada’s comparative benevolence, while rendering invisible the acute economic and material deprivation currently facing Black communities. . . . While economic violence has played an important role toward this end [through devaluation of Black labour and Black life], it does not, by far, encapsulate the full extent of Black dehumanization in Canada. (Maynard 2017, 82)

In 1655, the British “took” Jamaica from the Spanish and declared it a British colony. As Spanish colonizers ↔ slavers fled from the island, enslaved Africans seized the opportunity and escaped into the hills, establishing marooned free Black communities. They grew to resist ↔ accept ↔ assist arriving enslaved Africans under British rule in Jamaica. The British viciously suppressed marooned communities in many ways, including the deportation of hundreds of Africans from Jamaica northward to Nova Scotia (Whitfield 2018). In 1776, thirteen years after the Seven Years’ War ended, more than 150 families were uprooted when 549 Jamaican Moors were forcibly migrated via “three large transports” from Trelawney Town into Halifax. They were deported after an eight-month battle against British forces that took the lives of hundreds on all sides (Chopra 2017, 6–7).

By the 1990s, the mirror-image (the same and reversed) of these colonizing ↔ slaver pathways reemerged as Jamaicans became the most deported group of Caribbean nationals out of Canada, the United States, and Britain (Burts et al. 2016). These southward ↔ northward ↔ southward loops of deportation across memoryscapes of time and colonized space are mirror-imaged within the northward ↔ southward ↔ northward trajectories of the Underground Railroad. The sterilizing contours of white settler narratives obscure history, presenting a false, singular, southward trajectory of deportation, and a false, singular, northward trajectory toward freedom. These false narratives reproduce and reinforce white power mythologies that project false freedom ↔ civilization images within white northern settler territories juxtaposed against unfree ↔ uncivilized (and criminal) images upon Black nations formerly occupied by white colonizing ↔ carceral ↔ slavers.

And yet, in the 1850s there are “scores of self-congratulatory newspaper articles appear[ing] each year in Toronto, London, Hamilton and Windsor on the theme of how the slave found freedom in Canada” (Winks, 1997, ix–x). Further, there is an official plaque that “notes the spot on the banks of the Detroit River where the Underground Railroad is said to have had its terminus. There, the monument [falsely] proclaims, the fugitive ‘found in Canada friends, freedom, protection, under the British flag’” (Winks 1997, ix–x, notes in brackets added). Ironic since it was under British rule that so many enslaved Africans were transported to Canada.

In 2017, Trump declared that all citizens of seven majority Muslim countries could not enter the United States for ninety days, including by “legal” means. These ninety days were meant to buy him time to solidify a long-term plan to ban Muslims permanently.1 In response to these outward acts of border ↔ violence, the Canadian prime minister took to Twitter on the same day, declaring ↔ extending the false narratives of the underground railroad: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.”

In 2018, Fortune Magazine published an article titled “Canada’s Advantage over the United States? Immigration, Says Justin Trudeau.” In it we stumble upon several versions of Canada’s hundred-year-old lie tangled up within historic letters to King Louis XIV on importing labour to populate and work white-occupied Indigenous lands:

“We’re a country that is open to immigration right now,” Trudeau said at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International Summit in Montreal Monday night, responding to a question about how Canada is competing with the United States on attracting business. “[That’s a] hell of a competitive advantage I don’t see the U.S. matching anytime soon,” he added. (Hinchliffe 2018)

The same article noted a prior interview in which Justin Trudeau declared that “Canadians are positively inclined toward immigration.” The article continues on to say, “It’s an advantage that [Trudeau] says places Canada ahead in the business world despite the United States’ recent lowering of corporate tax rates.” In practice, Canada’s carceral ↔ immigration ↔ deportation policies are stringent, and visa application rejections are rising steadily. In fact, Canada has one of the “world’s most restrictive visa rules. A World Economic Forum survey . . . ranked Canada among the worst in the world—120 out of 136 countries—for the restrictiveness of its visitor visa requirements” (Keller 2018). Despite these facts, dominant Canadian narratives claim the opposite. In 2019, ThinkProgress policy analyst Ryan Koronowski published a piece claiming “Canada Knocks U.S. from Perch as Top Destination for Refugees,” with a tag line reading, “Tired, poor, huddled masses are being directed to breathe free in the Great White North.” These false narratives on Canadian carceral ↔ immigration ↔ deportation policies bleed between and within progressive ↔ liberal ↔ conservative ↔ far right political platforms. For example, Maxime Bernier, of the “People’s Party of Canada,” proposed the following immigration policy in his 2019 electoral campaign:

Canada has always been a country largely open to immigration, because of its vastness and its relative youth. I believe that by and large, our immigration policy has been very successful. However, Immigration should answer the needs of sectors where there is a scarcity of manpower with specialized skills; and in more general terms contribute to increasing the number of younger workers in a society that is fast aging. It shouldn’t be used as a social engineering program for ideological purposes (People’s Party of Canada 2019).

Bernier’s platform is full of “human resource” incentives mirroring entry to Canada within chattel slavery’s legacies of requesting power to import labour. This is especially evident when mapped alongside immigration as a racial phenomenon juxtaposed against the colonizing framings of whiteness as naturally “settled” and “at-home” upon these Indigenous lands. Regardless of citizenship or nation of ancestral origin, white is almost always framed as naturally present upon newly born Canadian territories, while immigration for everyone else is cast as necessary only when productive for white-settlers ↔ colonizers.

These patterns of exploitation mirror one another, echoing across memoryscape’s time, endlessly repeating, reverberating loud and clear. Both progressive and far-right narrators, alongside variations of themselves within the white ↔ colonizing political spectrums, uphold these politics because they all rely upon the same historic systems of colonizing white supremacy to extend their wealth and power. Andrew Scheer, the Conservative Party representative running for prime minster in the same election as Bernier declared and echoed the following in his “Immigration Plan”:

Canada is the greatest country on earth.

It is built on a rock-solid foundation of enduring values, democratic institutions, the rule of law, and fundamental and universal human rights. We absolutely must protect these values—because they are what set us apart.

They allow Canada to offer what so many other countries simply cannot: the freedom to preserve and pass on their cultural traditions; and the opportunity to live in peace with those around them; and the economic freedom that so many governments around the world deny their people.

But with each passing day, Justin Trudeau and the Liberals undermine this proud legacy.

In four years, they have not only undone the progress the previous Conservative government made to strengthen our immigration system—they have managed to undermine the long-standing consensus that immigration is indeed a positive thing for this country. (Conservative Party 2019; italicized emphasis in original, bold emphasis added)2

Declaring Canada an unrivalled landscape for freedom, Scheer invokes the previously constructed “clean historic record” and “rock-solid foundation of enduring values.” Dissolved within these false narratives are the annexed histories of Canadian chattel slavery and facts of militarized exile in wars waged and genocides committed against Indigenous people ↔ nations. Buried within the memoryscapes of these narratives is the intergenerational enslavement of Africans and Indigenous peoples ↔ nations massacred, enslaved, displaced, imprisoned within reserves, asylums, prisons, and residential schools ↔ mass graves. Within Scheer’s proclamations we map multicultural white power made possible by an impairing dissolution of the unnamed first refugees in these narratives: enslaved Africans escaping tyranny and unfreedom from southern white-settler-occupied regions, and Indigenous peoples and nations rendered refugees within their own homelands.

Multicultural White Power: Within Canada’s Enslavement↔Imprisonment Pathways

Ontario, Québec, and the Maritimes are regions holding significant histories in Canadian chattel slavery (Cooper 2006; Donovan 1995; Elgersman 2013; Whitfield 2018). The legacies of this violence upon these occupied lands extends literally through carceral institutions. The Government of Canada’s Research and Statistics Division (2022) reported that Ontario and Nova Scotia had higher than average provincial imprisonment rates for Black folks. The Office of the Correctional Investigator reported (2022) that Ontario, Québec, and the Maritimes held captive 79% of Canada’s imprisoned Black population. In 2013, collectively, these regions held captive 86% of Canada’s imprisoned Black population (Office of the Correctional Investigator 2013, para. 6). Echoing the principles of multicultural white power, the 2013 report states that the “Black inmate population is a very diverse group and includes a variety of ethnic backgrounds, nationalities and experiences. Just over half (53%) of Black inmates were born in Canada” (para. 9), meaning that 47% of imprisoned Black people in Canada are immigrants, countering the claims that Canada is an oasis for immigrants or refugees. The report continues that for “those that were foreign born, Black inmates were most likely to be born in Jamaica and Haiti (17% and 5% respectively)” (para. 9). It is important to recognize that Jamaica is a former British colonial↔enslaving ↔ plantation and Haiti is a former French colonial ↔ enslaving ↔ plantation, and to understand that the relationships between that past and this present are extensions of each other. Ensuring full allegiance to multicultural white power, the report affirms that “there are also sizable populations from Barbados, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Somalia and Sudan, representing many different cultures, traditions and customs” (para. 9). And finally, the report concedes:

The high proportion of Black inmates born in countries other than Canada presents CSC [Correctional Service Canada] with some challenges as many of these inmates may speak a language other than English or French as their first language. While the majority of Black inmates reported affiliating with some form of Christianity, other religious faiths were represented as well, including Muslim (23%) and Rastafarian (6.5%). Differing religious diets, clothing, medicines, books and worship practices adhered to by the faithful must be accommodated by the CSC (para. 9).

The 2022 Correctional Investigator’s report stated there had been “little progress” on the racialized issues identified in the 2013 report, while at the same time reporting that Correctional Service Canada (CSC) had developed an Ethnocultural Action Framework (EAF) in April 2021, and adopted an updated Anti-Racism Framework in December 2021 that claims to contain “a number of corporate-wide actions aimed at engaging staff, incarcerated persons and stakeholders to ‘create an anti-racist organization that is more inclusive, diverse and equitable.’” Imprisoned Black prisoners interviewed for the 2022 investigation confirmed racism still thrives inside prisons. Regardless of language, intent, and even policy, the CSC’s outward proclamation of progressive “tolerance and accommodation” and “anti-racism” is disrupted by the facts of Black unfreedom rooted within the very existence of the CSC.

Phantom Pain: White-Settler Cortical Maps

I recently learned that the human brain has a map that connects the brain to our whole body. When a limb is amputated, the portion of the brain associated with that limb continues to exist until the cortical [brain] pathways can be reorganized to account for this loss. Because the cortical maps do not immediately register the loss of a limb, phantom limb pain can manifest. Originally categorized as a psychiatric illness by white war surgeons, phantom limb pain was first described by French military surgeon Ambrose Paré (1510–1590). The term was coined by the “father” of American neurology, Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), while working with injured soldiers during the US civil war over slavery. Mitchell heard repeated reports of pain in limbs that had been amputated (Kline 2016) and coined the term “Phantom Limb Pain” to describe this experience.

We now know that phantom limb pain is a product of a delayed “cortical reorganization,” or a “remapping” of the brain’s pathways or “cortical maps” to account for the loss of that limb. Cortical [brain] maps are comprised of response-based organization of information that moves between neurons in the same cortical area of the brain. Importantly, cortical maps “provide important clues about how we form and maintain representations of the external world” (Bednar and Wilson 2015, 1). When the body loses a limb, the portion of the brain associated with that limb continues to exist producing phantom pain that can only be healed when cortical maps are redrawn to account for the trauma of amputation. As McKittrick explains, “The site of memory is a powerful black geography because employing it assumes that the story of blackness in the diaspora is actual and possible, and that the discursive erasure of black people does not eliminate how they have been implicated in the production of space” (2006, 34).

White settler nation bodies hold institutionalized memories (cortical maps) of African and Indigenous colonization ↔ enslavement ↔ displacement. The continued and false insistence on their absence extends the power of institutions rooted within human suffering to further instill phantom racial pain: a disorienting “now you see it ↔ now you don’t” symbiosis that structurally gaslights and disables freedom from colonialism ↔ enslavement.

Memoryscapes that annex colonizing ↔ slavery’s existence manifest traumatizing and entrapping pathways that feed and extend the roots of white carceral power—even the slightest questioning of these annexations dissolves their reality. For example, many in the US vehemently (because it is not true) insist that slavery is in the past and therefore devoid of consequences in the present. On the other side of Europe’s colonizing border, Canadians (falsely) declare that slavery never existed and therefore also deny the existence of anti-Black racism and institutionalized white power in Canada (mainly in comparison to the US). Others in Canada adopt a hybrid middle ground model declaring (inaccurately) that although minor or minimal occurrences of chattel slavery existed, these are on the periphery and therefore inconsequential to modern Canadian life.

To deconstruct these narratives, we must contextualize them through each other. To undo their power we must move them beyond the controlling ↔ categorical↔binaries of colonial thinking. Mapping white-settler proclamations side by side as they exist above and below the settler ↔ colonial ↔ Canada ↔ US border allows us to see that when placed in proximity they unravel each other: if Canada has a “smaller” problem with racism than the United States because chattel slavery was not practiced in Canada, this means that history does impact present life ↔ death conditions, and US mythology on “the past being the past” falls apart. In the same breath, if, as so many in the US insist, “the past is the past and people just need to get over it,” then why do Canadians work so hard to construct and extend mythologies of a “rock-solid foundation” and “clean historical record” that uphold half-truths (therefore total lies) about origin stories of this white-settler nation-state? The answer is both mythologies are based on falsehoods reverberating within the echo chambers of white power logistics and abusive tales.

Gaslighting: Mapping Canada’s Structurally Abusive Race Relations

In “Black Feminist Hauntology” (2015), I describe colonizing race relations as inherently abusive. To start, enslavement ↔ colonialization↔imprisonment structurally separate their targets from kin, loved ones, identities, and communities in the same way abusers isolate and separate their targets from all who would defend them. In “An Abolitionist Theory of Crime” (Saleh-Hanna 2017), I mapped institutionalized racism in the United States through the cycles of abuse identified by Lenore Walker (1979) and locate how that the trajectories of interpersonal abusive relations are mirrored within institutional race violence, not only in the onset of these dynamics through enslavement ↔ imprisonment’s isolation and control, but also in the prolonging of these relationships through veiled apologies ↔ false promises of change in the form of reforms and white legalization of Black freedom.

In the United States, institutionalized cycles of structural abuse hold overt Middle Passage distinctions that clearly isolated Africans from Africa. These isolations led to hundreds year long beatings and abuse in the form of auction blocks and plantations. These prompted the expected threatening apologies of abusers who promise to change while continuing to blame their victims for their own explosions of manipulative, exploitative, extractive violence: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime” (Section 1, Thirteenth Amendment, emphasis added). This promise to stop slavery’s abuse if Black folks “behaved” according to white power’s criminal-legal system’s laws is abusive. These genocidal ↔ rapist ↔ colonizer ↔ slavers declared themselves the moral authority and enforcers of the penal code in the same way that abusers declare themselves the authority and guiding light over their victims’ lives.

The apologies and gift-giving portions of the cycle (here the flowers are presented in the form of an ill-written Thirteenth Amendment) is often followed by periods of superficial calm (referred to as Black Reconstruction in the United States), only to be followed by rising tensions that lead into the next set of institutionalized explosions of overt violence. It was the rise of overt white nationalism (the child of colonial white imperialism) that ushered in decades of lynching, followed by the next structural apology ↔ promise of change, accompanied by an abuser’s bouquet of flowers in the form of the Civil Rights Act. This was followed by rising tensions and increasing controls that paved pathways into the next institutionalized explosions of violence through COINTELPRO’s suppression of Black, Indigenous, Asian, queer, and anti-colonial freedom movements in the 1970s ↔ the rise of the war on drugs in the 1980s ↔ the opening of doors into racialized mass incarceration in the 1990s ↔ the increasing militarization of policing↔onward into the present.

These abusive structural explosions of violence in the US were followed by Obama’s presidencies rife with promises of change (his campaign literally declared “change we can believe in” and “yes we can”) underscored by rising tensions and growing white resentment made visible through incidents of viral policing caught on tape. This led to the rise of Black Lives Matter and freedom uprisings that demanded an end to intergenerational structural violence, threatening a full exit from the abusive relationship. As we know, some of the most lethal use of force within abusive relationships occurs when abusers realize the trapped ↔ captured person is taking actual steps (psychological, physical, economic, etc.) to get out (Campbell et al. 2003). Within the context of the United States, the desperate move to keep control and power within the abusive structures of this white-settler-nation-state manifested through Trump’s toxic presidential campaign and his electoral victory solidifying an openly threatening and abusive allegiance to racist ↔ sexist ↔ heterosexist ↔ classist ↔ ableist↔nationalist white violence. Trump ushered in the next formation of overt institutionalized beatings currently in the making as I write this chapter. The impact of this next level of institutionalized abuse is being felt worldwide.

As calls to defund the police emerged on all sides of the colonial border, we witnessed carceral power’s attempted transformation into new ↔ expansive institutions, and for a moment, it seemed that “behavioural health” would become dominant within progressive ↔ liberal discussions on alternatives to policing while more funding and police defence would take over the right. Scholarship by Syrus Marcus Ware, Giselle Dias, and Nwadiogo Ejiogu’s writings on disability justice (Ejiogu and Ware 2019; Ware, Ruzsa and Dias 2014) and Liat Ben-Moshe’s (2020) work on decarcerating disability is crucial to our understandings of these traps and cooptations of freedom from the cycling carceral landscapes of colonialism ↔ enslavement.

“Whereas [the United States of] America loves to broadcast the vivid black-and-white contrasts in its red-white-and-blue, Canadians prefer pastels and greys. What is clarity in America—slavery, a civil war to end it, segregation, the civil rights movement—is foggy here” (Clarke 2012, 81). Canada is like that house on the block sitting pretty and looking peaceful while behind closed doors abuse is rampant and dangerous. And while the exterior is looking fine, the abuser within is pointing to the loud, openly abusive household across the street, declaring to his victims (because patriarchy centers male power, no matter the form in which it arrives) that they should feel lucky he is not doing to them what the abuser across the street is doing to his targets. Mapping Canada’s colonizing ↔ enslaving race relations through Black feminist hauntology’s frames of reference allows us to see what abusive race relations look like on this side of the colonial border. In Canada, structural abuse is obscured and veiled within the arsenals of structural gaslighting manifested through an abuser instilling within their targets “false information in order to bring that person to doubt his or her perceptions and memories” (Kluft 2010, 55). The National Domestic Violence Hotline (2014) explains that the term gaslighting

comes from the 1938 stage play Gas Light, in which a husband attempts to drive his wife crazy by dimming the lights (which were powered by gas) in their home, and then he denies that the light changed when his wife points it out. It is an extremely effective form of emotional abuse that causes a victim to question their own feelings, instincts, and sanity, which gives the abusive partner a lot of power (and we know that abuse is about power and control). Once an abusive partner has broken down the victim’s ability to trust their own perceptions, the victim is more likely to stay in the abusive relationship.

They list a “variety of gaslighting techniques that an abusive partner might use,” including withholding, countering, blocking/diverting, trivializing, and forgetting/denial. In the Canadian context, so much of the history highlighted in this chapter (and beyond) is steeped in structural gaslighting:

• The mass dis-re-membering of Canadian chattel slavery, constitutes structural gaslighting.
• The suppression of “legal” acts of Canadian chattel slavery from dominant narratives while celebrating the “illegal” Underground Railroad and simultaneously insisting that the criminal-legal system is necessary and legitimate, constitutes structural gaslighting.
• Suggesting that Canada welcomes refugees and “values” immigration while enforcing one of the most impenetrable colonial borders is gaslighting. Placing this image within the history of an underground railroad that ran both ways is an expansion of this gaslighting.
• Referring to enslaved Africans as “slaves” (as if slavery is not enforced by an external power) and imprisoned people as “inmates” (as if they voluntarily checked themselves into “correcting service facilities”) or “prisoners” (as if imprisonment is not enforced by an external power), constitutes gaslighting.
• Failing to identify the acts of arrest, deportation, imprisonment, and enslavement as militarized kidnapping rooted within histories of land theft and enslavement is gaslighting. As is failing to reference colonialism and slavery as wars waged against people while reserving the historic use of that term for white-on-white violence over Black and Indigenous land↔bodies ↔ labour ↔ time ↔ life.
• Building a cotton factory near Africville in full knowledge of the violent symbolism and exploitations associated with “cotton-picking” and the significance of cotton in slavery’s power, constitutes structural gaslighting.
• Spending years intentionally transforming Africville into an industrializing and toxic space and then tearing it down because it is industrial and toxic, constitutes structural gaslighting.
• Referring to lands that Indigenous people are pushed into as “reservations” while actively engaging in genocide (annihilation is the opposite of reserving anything), constitutes structural gaslighting.
• Referring to prisons for Indigenous children as “reform schools” that teach “civilization” while actively using these sites to savagely mass murder children whose graves are still being unearthed, constitutes structural gaslighting. Using that same term—reform—to speak about modernizing or civilizing prisons and policing, constitutes structural gaslighting.
• Suggesting that imprisoned and criminalized people are fully responsible for the violence that the state imposes and perpetuates through criminal sanctions, constitutes structural gaslighting.
• Suggesting that prisons can become “anti-racist” is structural gaslighting!
• Referring to punitive ↔ colonizing↔enslaving violence as (criminal) justice, constitutes structural gaslighting.
• Deporting Black people to Canada in the name of “saving Jamaica” in the 1700s and reversing that trend centuries later under the guise of “saving Canada” from crime constitutes structural gaslighting. This is especially true when we consider the actually dangerous acts of structural violence (mass enslavement) that promoted the first round of deportations northward into Canada, and the actually dangerous acts of structural violence (mass racial capitalism) prompting current rounds of deportation southward and out of Canada. All of this constitutes structural gaslighting.
• “Emptying” the land of Indigenous people and then writing to the king of France to request enslaved Africans to populate and work these lands constitutes structural gaslighting.
• The manners in which Canada ↔ US narratives interlock within the shadows of their colonizing border to uphold each other’s white power structures, while performing binaries that construct themselves as “oppositional” constitutes structural gaslighting.

Concluding on Amputated Histories and Carceral Phantom Pain

Canadian chattel slavery has been dismembered from public memoryscapes to strengthen structural white power within the white settler nation-body. This shields the roots of white power in manners that grow and perpetuate its impact. Colonizing histories and their institutionalized dismemberments produce phantom racial pain. As I illustrate in this chapter, carceral phantom pain extends and flexes itself through the criminal-legal system and its expanding, spiraling, carceral, immigration ↔ imprisonment ↔ deportation pathways that form the cortical maps of Canadian colonial rule, perpetuated within Canada’s structurally abusive race relations. Regardless of white power’s colonizing power and its institutional might under enslaving↔carceral occupations, white settlerism cannot undo its own past, cannot erase the source of its power, and cannot change history or avoid the impact of both its existence and its wrath. Contrary to abuser narratives, our survival resides within a collective exit from the structurally abusive structures for Canadian racism. Memoryscapes paving pathways into structural remembering are but one tool we can use to look at that which we have been conditioned to overlook, to name—out loud—that which we have been conditioned to silence, to connect “↔” that which we have been taught to disconnect, so that we can re-member that which has been dis-membered. Chattel slavery is a part of Canadian history. Nothing colonizers ↔ slavers ↔ arrestors ↔ imprisoners say or do can change that. It is time to move forward with awakened spirits and seeing eyes that allow us to pave pathways off the beaten pathways of colonization’s cortical pathways into abuse and unfreedom. We must end these structural cycles of abuse. We must end them now.

Notes

1. 1 Buying time is a carceral concept born out of chattel slavery.

2. 2 During the writing of this chapter, “Andrew Scheer’s Immigration Plan,” Conservative Party of Canada, 2019 was available at https://www.conservative.ca/cpc/andrew-scheers-immigration-plan/, but the page has since been taken down.

References

1. Absolon, Kathleen, E. (Minogiizhigokwe) 2022. Kaandossiwin: How We Come to Know. 2nd ed. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.
2. Barragan, Yesenia. 2021. Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Bednar, James A., and Stuart P. Wilson. 2015. “Cortical Maps.” Neuroscientist 22, no. 6: 604–17.
4. Ben-Moshe, Liat. 2020. Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
5. Campbell, Jacquelyn C., Daniel Webster, Jane Koziol-McLain, Carolyn Block, Doris Campbell, Mary Ann Curry, Faye Gary, et al. 2003. “Risk Factors for Femicide in Abusive Relationships: Results from a Multisite Case Control Study.” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 7: 1089–97.
6. Chartrand, Vicki. 2019. “Unsettled Times: Indigenous Incarceration and the Links Between Colonialism and the Penitentiary in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 61, no. 3: 67–89.
7. Chopra, Ruma. 2017. “Maroons and Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, 1796–1800.” Acadiensis 40, no. 1: 5–23.
8. Clarke, George Elliott. 2012. Review of Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760–1840, by Frank Mackey. University of Toronto Quarterly 81, no. 3: 685–87.
9. Clarke, George Elliott. 2017. “‘There Is No Hearsay’: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives.” In Directions Home, 19–29. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
10. Conservative Party of Canada. 2019. “Andrew Scheer’s Immigration Plan.” https://www.conservative.ca/cpc/andrew-scheers-immigration-plan/ (page no longer extant).
11. Cooper, Afua. 2006. The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
12. Donovan, Kenneth. 1995. “Slaves and Their Owners in Île Royale, 1713–1760.” Acadiensis 25, no. 1: 3–32.
13. Ejiogu, Nwadiogo, and Syrus Marcus Ware. 2019. “Calling a Shrimp a Shrimp: A Black Queer Intervention in Disability Studies.” In Queering Urban Justice, edited by Jinthana Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, Syrus Marcus Ware, and Gabriela (Rio) Rodriguez, 21–137. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
14. Elgersman, Maureen G. 2013. Unyielding Sprits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica. New York: Routledge.
15. Gentzler, Ryan. 2018. “Accepting Our Highest-in-the-World Incarceration Rate Means Believing That Oklahomans Are the Worst People.” OKPolicy (blog), Oklahoma Policy Institute, 19 June 2018; updated 21 February 2020. https://okpolicy.org/accepting-our-highest-in-the-world-incarceration-rate-means-believing-that-oklahomans-are-the-worst-people/.
16. Government of Canada. Research and Statistics Division. 2022. Overrepresentation of Black People in the Canadian Criminal Justice System. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/obpccjs-spnsjpc/index.html
17. Hinchliffe, Emma. 2018. “Canada’s Advantage over the United States? Immigration, Says Justin Trudeau.” Fortune Magazine, 6 November 2018. http://fortune.com/2018/11/05/canada-advantage-over-us-immigration-trudeau/.
18. Keller, Tony. 2018. “Canada Has Its Own Ways of Keeping Out Unwanted Immigrants.” Atlantic, 12 June 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/canadaimmigration-success/564944/.
19. Kline, David G. 2016. “Silas Weir Mitchell and ‘The Strange Case of George Dedlow.’” Journal of Neurosurgery 41, no. 1: E5.
20. Koronowski, Ryan. 2019. “Canada Knocks US from Perch as Top Destination for Refugees.” ThinkProgress, 20 June 2019. https://thinkprogress.org/un-report-canada-now-top-resettler-refugees-not-united-states-eaa778ac2dae/.
21. Maynard, Robin. 2017. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Blackpoint, NS: Fernwood Publishing.
22. McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
23. Office of the Correctional Investigator. 2013. A Case Study of Diversity in Corrections: The Black Inmate Experience in Federal Penitentiaries, Final Report. Ottawa: Office of the Correctional Investigator. https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2014/bec-oci/PS104-8-2013-eng.pdf.
24. Office of the Correctional Investigator. 2022. Annual Report: 2021–2022. Ottawa: Office of the Correctional Investigator. https://oci-bec.gc.ca/sites/default/files/2023-06/annrpt20212022-eng.pdf.
25. Owusu-Bempah, Akwasi, Maria Jung, Firdaous Sbaï, Andrew S. Wilton, and Fiona Kouyoumdjian. 2021. “Race and Incarceration: The Representation and Characteristics of Black People in Provincial Correctional Facilities in Ontario, Canada.” Race and Justice. Published online 8 April 2021. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21533687211006461.
26. People’s Party of Canada. 2019. “Maxime Bernier Campaign Policy: ‘Focus on Recruiting Immigrants with Specialized Skills Who Will Contribute to Our Economy.’” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Party_of_Canada.
27. Riddell, William R. 1924. “Further Notes on Slavery.” Journal of Negro History 9, no. 1: 26–33.
28. Rushforth, Brett. 2012. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
29. Saleh-Hanna, Viviane. 2015. “Black Feminist Hauntology: Rememory the Ghosts of Abolition?” Champ pénal/Penal field 12. https://doi.org/10.4000/champpenal.9168.
30. Saleh-Hanna, Viviane. 2017. “An Abolitionist Theory on Crime: Ending the Abusive Relationship with Racist-Imperialist-Patriarchy [R.I.P.].” Contemporary Justice Review 20, no. 4: 419–44.
31. Stockburger, Stephanie, Mandakini Sadhir, and Hatim A. Omar. 2016. “Phantom Limb Pain.” Journal of Pain Management 9, no. 2: 161–64.
32. Walker, Lenore E. 1979. The Battered Woman. New York: Harper and Row.
33. Ware, Syrus, Joan Ruzsa, and Giselle Dias. 2014. “It Can’t Be Fixed Because it’s Not Broken: Racism and Disability in the Prison Industrial Complex.” In Disability Incarcerated, edited by Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, 163–84. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
34. Whitfield, Harvey Aman, ed. 2018. Black Slavery in the Maritimes: A History in Documents. Peterborough, ON: Broadview.
35. Winks, Robin William. 1997. The Blacks in Canada: A History. 2nd ed. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.