An Emotional Documentary About Canada’s Legendary Black Cowboy Is Streaming Free Now
One of many formerly enslaved Black people who left the U.S. to make the Prairies home, John Ware was one of Alberta's most influential cattle ranchers at the turn of the 19th century.
Laila El Mugammar
Updated
Rodeo champion Fred Whitfield as John Ware. (Photo: Shaun Robinson)
The early settlements of Western Canada I constructed in my imagination have always been white. In history textbooks, the pioneers cattle ranching and churning butter were always illustrated as white people, homesteading a vast, seemingly endless expanse of violently emptied frontier land. I had an idea of why that might be: two years ago, at the Halifax branch of Library and Archives Canada, I examined a letter from an African-American sharecropper to a white minister. Expressing that he was no longer interested in settling in Western Canada, the sharecropper thanked the minister for alerting him that there was no fruit, corn, or livestock in Canada, so he could make an informed decision. Though I could not find the original letter from the minister, the lie—and the reason—for it were clear.