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Before Europeans arrived, hundreds of people were enslaved by aboriginals along the northwest
coast. Slaves were usually, though not always, captured in war. Valued for their labour
and as items of exchange, slaves were central to the hunting and fishing cultures of the
northwest. Aboriginal slavery continued in the northwest until the 1880's.
Slave holding in Canada after European contact was part of a broader phenomenon that began
in the sixteenth century when the first slaves were brought from Africa to America. The
French enslaved the first blacks in Canada as early as 1608. By 1759, the end of the French
regime, there were 3604 slaves in Canada, 1132 of whom were black. The majority of the
slaves were Panis. The term Panis, derived from the Caddoan tribes of the Great Plains,
included slaves from more than twenty aboriginal societies such as the Fox, Sioux, Iowa,
Kansa, Chickasaw, Blackfoot and Comanche. The French name Panis had become a generic term
for aboriginal slave by 1750.
There is little evidence that slavery in Canada during and after the French regime differed
much from that in New England and the Middle Atlantic Colonies of British North America.
Throughout the northern colonies of British America, unlike the plantation economies of the
south, living conditions mitigated the harshest aspects of slavery. Employed on farms throughout
the countryside, and working as house servants in the towns, slaves lived in close proximity
to whites. Owning only one or two slaves, most slave holders remained confident of their
hegemony, and hence slaves were allowed a certain degree of autonomy. Slaves in Canada
represented less than one per cent of the population and thus Canada was a society with
slaves, not a slave society.
During the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) black slaves in the American colonies
were offered refuge by the British if they left their rebel owners. Some 3, 550 black people
eventually emigrated from the American colonies to Nova Scotia. Loyalists who emigrated
to Nova Scotia also took their slaves so that 1232 black people, 34 percent of the total
black emigrants, remained slaves in Nova Scotia. During the late eighteenth century
practically every town and village in mainland Nova Scotia had slaves and this story
remains to be told. Recent research has also revealed there were more than 400 slaves
in Cape Breton during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hundreds of slaves
were also brought to Ontario and Quebec with their white Loyalist owners. Although
legislative and judicial measures had restricted its development, slavery remained
technically legal in British North America until abolished by the Imperial Parliament
in 1833.
Contributed by Kenneth Donovan.
Kenneth Donovan is an historian with Parks Canada at the Fortress of Louisbourg National
Historic Site of Canada and teaches history at Cape Breton University. Widely published in
Cape Breton History from the eighteenth to the twenty first century, his most publications
have appeared in French Colonial History (Michigan State University Press) and Gerald
Hallowell, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian History ( Oxford University Press).
Kenneth Donovan’s Publications on Slavery
“Slaves in Ile Royale, 1713-1758" French Colonial History, Michigan State University Press,
vol. 5, (2004), pp. 25-42.
“Marie Marguerite Rose” in Gerald Hallowell, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian History
(Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 549.
“Slavery” in Gerald Hallowell, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian History,
(Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press), 2004, p. 585.
"A Nominal List of Slaves and Their Owners in Ile Royale, 1713-1760", Nova Scotia
Historical Review, Vol. 16, No. 1 (June, 1996), pp. 151-62.
“Slaves and Their Owners in Ile Royale, 1713-1760", Acadiensis, vol. XXV, No. 1
(Autumn, 1995), pp. 3-32.
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