An excerpt from the spring 2026 edition of British Columbia History

Tintype photo of shayna-adjowa on a cabin stoop beneath a willow tree, near her home in Argenta, 2023. (Courtesy Tekoa Predika)

By shayna-adjowa jones

In the spring of 2020, the mostly white rural village of 1,200 that I live in held a Black Lives Matter rally. Incredible? Yes. Easy to endure? No.

You see, I am a Black-as-night woman and can count the number of other Black folk who live within a 50-kilometre radius of my home on my two hands and still have fingers to spare. The village coming together like this was astounding. The fact that the senseless murder of an urban Black man named George Floyd, over 2,000 kilometres away in Minneapolis, actually touched their hearts enough to do something was staggering.

Their supportive words and “We’re with you!” smiles were already a strange addition to my days. A simple walk down our village’s one main street would yield story after story of Black folk they had loved over the years, or assurances that they don’t see colour — or how much they really love my colour — and “Thank God nothing like that ever happens here, eh?”

“Yes!” I’d answer back. “Yes!” I’d smile into their glowing and concerned faces, all the while writhing inwardly to get off the damned street and back home.

Now don’t get me wrong. Through it all, I wanted with all my might to feel strong, to rise up as an unflinching political activist championing the cause for my people from my own backyard (YES!). But when the day of the rally came, Cultural Isolation, Racial Vulnerability, and the Empowered White Gaze ripped the “yes” right out my chest.

As my white townsfolks protested along our one main street, I shrank in my office above, clinging to a Langston Hughes poetry book.

Lovely, dark, and lonely one,

Bare your bosom to the sun,

Do not be afraid of light

You who are a child of night.

Like a motherless child, I chanted Langston’s poem aloud to myself, over and over, bathing my ears and my heart in his surgical insight.

… Face the wall with the dark, closed gate, beat with bare brown fists and wait. [1]

I did not set foot near the rally

That fateful day has shaped my research and artistic career profoundly. At that juncture, I earned my keep almost exclusively in the world of applied folkloristics — studying, interpreting, and embodying Afro-diasporic folklore and folkways as a professional performance storyteller and theatre artist. Anansi and Br’uh Rabbit, Little Eight John, and Mary May with her Redfish were among the Black figures I mined, compared, and contrasted across the diaspora to honour what their tales have meant for our people.

However, on the fateful day my little white town rallied for Black life, I found myself suddenly desperate for another kind of story — desperate to know if other Black folk like me, tucked away, alone, in rural settings, even existed. And if they did, if they were out there, I was now hungry for them. I spent nearly two years after that day slowly and deliberately seeking out and interviewing rural Black individuals from across the country. I had over 40 conversations with folks from all walks of life. It was a slow but steady river of inquiry, connection, and relationship that quietly began to repurpose my whole life and rural vision.

“Cotton Picking, Oakhurst Plantation — 1907. Clarkesdale, Miss.” Postcard is of a Mississippi cotton plantation near fields shayna-adjowa’s family members would have worked. (Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History)

Two-thirds of my interviewees were based in western Canada, where the Black population is significantly lower than in the eastern provinces. These Canadians in particular spoke to the complex experience that rural living afforded them. Several juxtaposed the freedom from the dramas faced by many Blacks in dense urban settings with the tensions of living in spaces where their neighbours regard their presence as a novelty.

Others spoke to the double-edged sword of having no one to witness them while out in the countryside, articulating the freedom from society imposed narratives regarding who they are and what they should and should not take interest in as Black individuals (living outside of an urban landscape subverted these assumptions implicitly). Yet, several of these same voices articulated the nebulous fear of finding themselves alone in the bush — hiking, foraging, etc. — with no one to witness what might happen to them when they encounter white countryfolk who subconsciously (or not so subconsciously) distrust their presence there.

One interviewee, a PhD candidate investigating the socio-political barriers between Blacks and the wild landscapes of Canada, shared the following:

[There is] the simple fact that slavery had Blacks working in specific places. Blacks found out in the woods were suspected to be up to no good. Plotting revolts, fleeing, hiding out, etc. … [this] takes you back to the history around how our mobility has been confined, in the sense that if you’re in the urban areas you are known … you’re in a little check box. But if you’re not in urban areas, if you’re in the rural areas or in the wilderness, you’re out of that check box. And the roots of that go back to slavery.

Her words resonated with me profoundly.

The relationship between Black presence in rural settings in North America and the horrific history of African chattel slavery are deeply intertwined. I, myself, come from the throes of this destructive history. My family, like countless others, endured generations of enslaved labour on plantation fields throughout the southern United States. From the first light of dawn to the pitch black of night, my ancestors worked bent-back amid rows of cotton and tobacco — the slave drivers whip as fierce as the hot sun. This was the reality for innumerable families like mine on Turtle Island for over 400 years.

Then, in the decades following the American Civil War, millions of freed slaves migrated away from the rural and deeply racist south toward the urbanized North, Mid-east, and West in search of social reprieve and greater opportunity. To remain a labourer on the land was to remain uneducated and in chains. The choice for many was simple.

Yet, to tell this story alone would be a lie and a lie that perpetuates a damaging myth of popular culture.

Though it is true that millions of Blacks settled in urban spaces, there were still those who chose to retain and build upon the agricultural knowledge they had honed through enslavement. Blacks, for example, who crossed the forty-ninth parallel into Canada forged strong farming communities in Nova Scotia (Cherry Brook and North Preston, among many others); in Saskatchewan (Maidstone); Alberta (Amber Valley); and right here in British Columbia (Vancouver Island and Salt Spring Island). They cleared, worked, and cultivated land to exercise the full rights of freedom, equality, and basic human dignity that they deserved and fiercely sought.

Stark Family members who were part of a strong Black community on Salt Spring Island in the late 1800s. (Salt Spring Island Historical Society Digital Archives, Accession number: 98902401)

Yet still, the dominant narrative of Black life in popular culture continues to perpetuate the “Black means Urban” stranglehold. And the tragedy of this, as I’ve come to see it, is that far too many Blacks in North America are robbed of access to an immense heritage of Afro-centric and Afro-Indigenous land-based praxis and wisdom. Our Indigenous ancestors forced to cross the Atlantic were people of profound relationship with the life of, and within, the natural world. Our diverse healing modalities and medicines, cosmologies, folklore, and spiritual teachings from within the societies where slave labour was stolen (and beyond) attests to this. Yet, with Black life continually relegated to inner city streets there is precious little opportunity for us to recognize ourselves as intimate relations of the earth — creatures who not only have a meaningful place within it, but a visceral and ancestrally alive reason to protect it.

My journey with the Black & Rural project continues to this day — some five years later. What began as a desperate need to discover other rural dwelling Black Canadians in the face of paralyzing isolation in my little white town has blossomed into a journey of reclamation, restoration, and celebration of Afro heritage land-based wisdom, knowledge, and praxis on Turtle Island.

This, I’ve come to realize, is at the heart of why I choose to live where I do — to dare to believe that it is possible to be deeply connected to one’s ancestral roots while living as uninvited (and historically unwilling) guests upon unceded land. And now, through the work of Black & Rural, I have also come to realize that I am here in solidarity with all other Afro-heritage Canadians who dare to believe and embody the same.

Endnote

1. Langston Hughes, “Song,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation (Albert & Charles Boni, 1925).

shayna-adjowa jones is an Afro-centric folkloreist, researcher, and performance artist. She lives in the remote community of Argenta, with her three children and a conspiracy of ravens. Learn more about her work through her website, www.wearestoryfolk.com, or Instagram account, @wearestoryfolk.