Marie-Joseph Angélique and Marie Manon: Remembering Slavery in Canadian History

Abstract: Focusing on twentieth-and-twenty-first-century representations of slavery in eighteenth-century New France, including in a play, a documentary film, and podcast episodes, demonstrates how centering the African diaspora successfully counters Eurocentric narratives by emphasizing the historical roots of anti-Blackness in Canada. However, as an unintended side effect, these works minimize the dominant mode of slavery in eighteenth-century New France—the enslavement of Indigenous peoples. This lack of engagement with Indigenous histories is illustrated by the little attention paid to the relationship between Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved woman of African descent who was executed for setting a fire that burned Montréal in 1734, and Marie Manon, an enslaved woman of Indigenous descent who played an important role in Angélique’s trial. Remembering Manon demonstrates how historians, authors, playwrights, and artists can grapple with and narrate complicated, entwined histories of Black and Indigenous peoples within the development of the Canadian patriarchal settler state.