In the Light of Dawn

In the Light of Dawn: The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community
by Marie Carter, Foreword by Afua Cooper
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$36.95 ISBN 9781779400468

Canada’s multicultural history is diverse and complex, and at times its narratives have been erroneously rendered. Take Black Canadian history, for example. Take the Dawn Settlement, a historical abolitionist community at the end of the Underground Railway (UGRR) in the area in and around Dresden, Ontario. Intended to be a “utopia” for emancipated American slaves, the Dawn Settlement has often been portrayed as a failure and its numerous founders overshadowed by the spotlit fame of one individual, Reverend Josiah Henson. The role of the British American Institute (BAI) has also been conflated in Dawn’s 200-year historical record. Furthermore, not all of the Black asylum-seekers who arrived in Canada via the UGRR were part of “a destitute band of fugitives” … many were members of the “Black Elite:” educated Pennsylvanian activists who migrated north and contributed intellectual and financial wealth to the “vibrant multicultural community.” These idealists fought for both the eradication of slavery and for securing equality, ie: in the segregated education system.

In her book In the Light of Dawn: The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community, historian Marie Carter shares quite a different tale of the Dawn Settlement’s past, and presents, as Afua Cooper (Dalhousie University’s Killam Research Chair in History) suggests in her foreword, a “historiographical intervention, a new history.”

Carter’s a fitting person to shed new light on the historical oversights concerning the Dawn Settlement. The “foremost expert of this story,” as Cooper asserts, Carter grew up next to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site;” that’s “Uncle Tom” of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin—and she’s spent decades researching Rev. Josiah Henson, the actual man Stowe’s character was modelled after. Carter’s lived among the descendants of Dawn’s earliest 19^th Century settlers and possesses “lived experience of the land and the people.” What she reveals in her thorough study—including “land record investigations”—

is that the Dawn Settlement was not a failure at all; the UGRR has been hugely romanticized; and Black history should not be “[restricted] to a single slavery to freedom narrative.” There were other leaders at Dawn prior to Henson’s arrival—men and women not immortalized by an American writer—and perhaps the idea that Dawn was the terminus of the UGRR is also a “mythologization,” at the very least metaphorically, as the “continuums of [Black] resistance and contribution” continue today.

Carter’s non white-centric history is threaded with research concerning the troubled BAI and the manual labor school it established, managed by Rev. Henson—Carter corrects the fallacy that Dawn’s settlers were wholly “reliant on the BAI for their survival;” reports of the many other missionaries and pioneers present at Dawn before Henson (1789-1883); studies the challenge of establishing the community’s geographic boundaries; and examines women’s role in securing freedom.

Though Stowe star-rocketed Henson’s fame as “the real Uncle Tom”—he was honoured in a 1983 Canada Post stamp—Carter tells a more complete story of the era. Her meticulous retelling beseeches genuine multiculturalism, “ensuring equity and inclusion for all.”

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