
Archives nationales du Québec, P48,S1,P9685, Conrad Poirier fonds, Pistard Collection, Centre:
BAnQ Vieux-Montréal.
Author: Dr. Ornella Nzindukiyimana
Assistant professor in the department of Human Kinetics at St. Francis Xavier University
In 2010, at the end of my undergraduate degree, I stumbled onto the field of sport history by accident. Initially interested in the sciences, I would go on to complete a doctoral dissertation on Black women’s sport history in Ontario. As a huge soccer fan and Black woman who immigrated to Canada from Rwanda at a young age, my research, since the very beginning, has aimed to examine Black people’s stories as they relate to sport. There was an abundance of histories about African Americans in sports, but I wondered: where are such narratives in Canada’s social and political context? After 13 years of researching Black sport histories, it became very clear to me that public Canadian archives were part of the problem.
Archival collections that do contain documentation on Black life often do not focus on sport and physical culture, which refers to all manner of activities that aren’t necessarily a traditional sport and other active forms of using the body. Sport archives often contain little to no labelled records of Black organizations and activities. Archival records are even more devoid of evidence of Black women in sport. One might, for instance, stumble upon a basketball team’s photograph in a scrapbook but have no further information about when and/or where it is from. For this reason, a well-thought out strategy is required to investigate Black sport history in Canada’s archives.
Diving in
My first major foray into the archive was for a study on the social history of swimming from the perspective of Black Canadians during the twentieth century. Digitized collections, from Ontario to Québec to British Columbia, represented a small portion of the sources I reviewed as I optimistically sought out images of Black swimmers. Captions and descriptions of photographs and other archival materials offered little guidance to find what I was looking for, such as the caption of Figure 1, which doesn’t mention race. Instead, I depended on a careful, systematic examination of items in multiple collections to identify people, sometimes amongst crowds, who ‘looked’ Black. I relied on spotting various physical markers such as skin tone and coily hair texture in the monochrome stills. But inevitably, I realized that this research process was flawed; it depended almost entirely on identification of racial characteristics in mostly monochrome photographs. The archive itself provided little guidance or assistance when it came to identifying Black people in the images.
Take British Columbian lifeguard Joe Fortes, for example. Born in Trinidad and Tobago around 1863, Fortes settled in Vancouver in the 1880s after a short residence in Liverpool, England where he learned to swim and even competed occasionally. He would go on to serve as the first lifeguard of English Bay and taught countless children to swim. When he died, he was celebrated as a local Black hero, which would have been a rare occurrence for a Black man in 1922. Fortes saved dozens of people from drowning, and in the below photograph, he might have gone unidentified if it weren’t for preliminary knowledge of his identity (Fig. 2).

From this experience I realized that navigating mainstream archives to collect histories of Black people was time-consuming, limited, and uncertain. As a rookie, I quickly found that my principled need to centre Black lived experiences meant that I couldn’t solely depend on public archives. It became clear that archives were destined to serve as a secondary, supplementary resource and never a primary recourse. As a discovery tool, archival findings of Black historical existence were often a matter of chance.
In the case of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, which I approached as I would any other provincial archive, I spent countless hours combing through every single image available in the collection that referenced swimming to find Black people, to find some of my study’s most illuminating visual artefacts. Finding them, especially through an online database, was the luck of the draw, because I had no guarantee of discovering these items, even after digging so long; I had foraged through other databases and found very little. There was nothing explicitly identifying Black subjects in this provincial database, be it digital or not, hence the optimistic, systematic digging that led to the following. A Black girl is seen entering the Verdun natatorium in a series of images from the summer of 1943 (Fig. 3).

Source: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, P48,S1, P9666, Conrad Poirier fonds,
Pistard Collection, Centre: BAnQ Vieux-Montréal.
In the same archives, I identified a young man with darker skin in a 1947 high school swimming team photograph from Montréal, though that photo is not listed here. If you look carefully at the photo below, you will see two Black children amongst a crowd of children performing kinaesthetic exercises by the pool in 1943.
In the example of Joe Fortes, the swim instructor previously mentioned who became a famous local figure during the turn of the 20th century, archives in Vancouver offered several results (although, in this case, I went looking for him). However, when I did research on Black women’s sport history in southern Ontario in both municipal and provincial archives, I couldn’t find much about their experiences. I also didn’t even know what records might reveal more information about Black women athletes in southern Ontario.
Often, research on Black sport histories are contingent upon written records, particularly newspaper records. Up to the 1960s, Black people were highly visible to mainstream readers in the sport section (Fig. 5). Here, Black people were consistently labelled ‘Negro,’ ‘Coloured,’ or ‘Dusky,’ and therefore made easily identifiable to contemporary readers and historians alike. In that respect, mainstream newspaper archives, especially Black newspaper archives, are one set of available and reliable documents that can be found within the sparse landscape of “official” archives. The Dawn of Tomorrow, a Black Canadian newspaper first published in 1923 by James Jenkins in London, Ontario, for instance, represents a major resource of Black historical material.

It is of note, however, that the surviving issues of The Dawn were only recently digitized (through the Black Press in 19th century Canada and Beyond project), along with several other notable newspapers such as Nova Scotia’s The Clarion and Ontario’s The Provincial Freeman. In 2017, when I required access to databases on Black cultural newspapers, I had to travel from Nova Scotia to Ontario in order to access the microfilm–small plastic rolls of film used to preserve delicate materials. Meanwhile, archives in Nova Scotia currently provide digital access to African Nova Scotian newspapers and archived newsletters like The Clarion, which is an invaluable record of Black and Canadian history published in New Glasgow between 1946 and 1949. There are only a few surviving issues, but they’re all accessible online. It’s extremely important that more physical records are digitized and made accessible online if we are ever to remedy the obscurity of Black Canadian histories in public archives.
Combing through massive collections, whether online or physical, in the hopes of identifying people that ‘look’ Black does not have to be the norm. In the last few years, more concentrated collections of archival material pertaining to Black sport histories have also become available through the direct initiative of communities and individuals to preserve their own histories.
Coming up for air
To uncover narratives on subjects and populations historically ignored by archives, oral histories are one recommended alternative. As my research has sought to examine early twentieth century events, oral histories collected in the 1980s and 1990s through the Multicultural History Society of Ontario represented a unique recourse to access stories about Black women’s lives from the early 20th century. Ultimately, public archives have preserved few histories of Black athletes and even fewer sports and women’s histories, even within fonds dedicated Black Canadians.
Memoirs and other personal recollections about Black experiences are their own kind of archive, and are just as integral to investigating this history. There is, notably, the collection of personal records entrusted to the Simon Fraser University archives by Valerie Jerome, who competed in the 100 metre dash in the 1960 summer Olympics, and who is also sister to bronze medalist Harry Jerome as well as granddaughter of John Armstrong ‘Army’ Howard, the top Canadian sprinter from 1912-15. Similarly, the family of Canadian multi-sport athlete Wilfred ‘Boomer’ Harding donated numerous documents on the 1930s Chatham Coloured All-Stars baseball team, which Harding joined as a teenager, to the University of Windsor. Encouraging families and communities to contribute to the practice of preservation is essential for the future of Canadian social history. The next time you wonder what the archive has to offer you, consider what you can offer the archive.
About the author
Dr. Ornella Nzindukiyimana (pronounced nzee-ndoo-key-yee-mah-nah) is an assistant professor in the department of Human Kinetics at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. Born in Kigali, Rwanda, Dr. Nzindukiyimana arrived in Ottawa, Canada at twelve years old. An avid soccer fan, she went on to pursue a Human Kinetics degree at the University of Ottawa (2011). She went on to complete an MA at Ottawa in 2013 (on Black Canadian history of swimming) and then a PhD at Western University in London, ON in 2018 (on Black women’s sport history in Ontario). Her work has appeared in forums such as Sport History Review, Loisir et Société/Society & Leisure, the Journal of Canadian Studies, and The International Journal of the History of Sport. She currently teaches sport history and sociology courses.
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