Dan the indigenous Blacks …..

 

The first Black person in Nova Scotia, Mathieu da Costa, a Mikmaq interpreter, was recorded among the founders of Port Royal in 1604. West Africans were brought as enslaved people both in early British and French Colonies in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Many came as enslaved people, primarily from the French West Indies to Nova Scotia during the founding of Louisbourg. The second major migration of Blacks to Nova Scotia happened following the American Revolution, when the British evacuated thousands of slaves who had fled to their lines during the war. They were promised freedom by the Crown if they joined British lines, and some 3,000 African Americans were resettled in Nova Scotia after the war, where they were known as Black Loyalists.

 

The next major migration of Blacks happened during the War of 1812, again with African Americans escaping slavery in the United States. Many came after having gained passage and freedom on British ships. The British issued a proclamation in the South promising freedom and land to those who wanted to join them. Creation of institutions such as the Royal Acadian School and the African Baptist Church in Halifax, founded in 1832, opened opportunities for Black Canadians. During the years before the American Civil War, an estimated ten to thirty thousand African Americans migrated to Canada, mostly as individual or small family groups; many settled in Ontario. A number of Black Nova Scotians also have some Indigenous heritage, due to historical intermarriage between Black and First Nations communities.[18

 

Indigenous Black Canadians is a term for people in Canada of African descent who have roots in Canada going back several generations. The term has been proposed to distinguish them from Black people with more recent immigrant roots.Popularized by Black Canadian leaders such as Rinaldo Walcott, Walter Borden, George Elliott Clarke, and Rocky Jones, the earliest use of the term goes back to the 1970’s when Canada began receiving a large influx of immigrants from the Caribbean.[3]