To me, as a Canadian woman of African origins, Black History Month is meant to share factual stories and events about North America’s African-based cultures. It is also a prime time to debunk myths and validate folklore and our cherished oral histories.

Recent articles linking Ron Jones and me to two famous historical figures are surfacing because they bare truth. Parallel histories were crafted, theirs glorious, ours inconsequential.

Comparably, our family histories are just as undeniable and magnificent as those of the notable figures we are connected to. That our past was covered up and debased does not make our rightful lineage any less based in truth.

We are a mixture of displaced African peoples, aboriginal inhabitants and usurping European founders and pioneers of Canada and the United States, a unique hybrid creation of the North American experience. The famous, infamous and homogeneous masses are indeed our forebears.

We exhibit the many shades and features inherent in these cultures because they chose to mix their genetics with ours.

The supremacy of owning another being is intoxicating. As a result, strange mental processes led to very peculiar practices. We were not recognized as human beings. As slaves, concubines and servants, we were at the mercy and whim of those who had possession of us. Our births were generally listed with the other stock, documented in curious ways or not recorded at all, blurring the truth of our parentage.

Our Blackness was quantified, mulatto (half-black), quadroon (one-quarter black), octoroon (one-eighth black) and even sextaroon (one sixteenth black); a thirty-second part black blood, which could span eight generations, branded us as slaves. Over the course of 500 years of enslavement and servitude, legal lineage was changed from patriarchal, father to son, to matriarchal, mother to child.

In that way, if a woman was held in bondage, regardless of whether the father was white or black, high-born or poor, free born or slave, any child she bore was also a slave. This meant mother and child were the property of the master. Legislated for good measure, it was illegal in most states to marry a black person.

Often the mixed-breed children of the slaveholding classes were not sold away. Instead, these darker family members were traded within the white relatives’ plantations, keeping us close, so to speak.

Sometimes we were given to white kinfolk as companions, we were household staff, coachmen and chamber maids, butlers and mammies, who raised and suckled the masters’ children, legitimate and illegitimate. These positions saved us from working in the fields and were considered privileged!

We were robbed of our rightful heritage by faulty recordkeeping, fuelled by malicious intent and greed to bar our right to inheritance which resulted in the spoils of our labour going to our white brothers and sisters.

We were trapped by a contrived injustice of confining laws and a determinedly cancerous conscious that bred hatred and alienated us from our place in the building and progress of our great nations.