The Black Women Who Helped Build Canada
By Bee Quammie
Much of my time as a first-generation Black Canadian woman is spent contemplating the ideas of identity, belonging, culture, and history — and the older I get, the more this last point rises in importance. What am I made of? Where do I come from? What impact have my people made in the lands that I call home? Finding the answers to these questions has been a complicated task, and leads me to liken my familial and cultural histories to a broken necklace: the strings holding it all together have snapped and the beads have been strewn about the place, but I’m slowly able to find and gather the pieces and make it whole again.
I’ve been particularly interested in uncovering the stories of Caribbean women in Canadian history. What made up the mettle of women who, like my own mother, left the life they knew for the hope of something better?
Until the “liberalization” of immigration policy in the early 1960s, Canada had racially discriminatory laws designed to prohibit non-whites from entering the country. In order to fill its post-war need for domestic labor in the 1950s, Canada began recruiting Black women from the Caribbean. The West Indian Domestic Scheme launched in 1955 and brought thousands of women from the region to Canada — in exchange for one year of service as domestic workers, these women were granted…
