The Story of Blackness in Amber Valley, Alberta
February 14, 2023
Up until recently, I didn’t know that Amber Valley was a unique Black community about 170 kilometers north of Edmonton. It shocked me to find out that the history of this small community is one that is on the verge of being forgotten. Continuing the focus on sharing my learnings of Canada’s Black history, I use this piece to spotlight one of the biggest Black settlements in Western Canada.
The arrival of Black people to Western Canada can be attributed to the federal government’s Dominion Lands Act of 1872, which laid the groundwork to encourage settlement on the prairies. With the foundation laid, the government began spreading awareness through a series of advertisements that labelled the Canadian prairies as “the best West”, ultimately attracting a range of settlers from Eastern Europe, but also Black people from Alabama, Texas, and Oklahoma. At the core of the messaging of the advertisements was a desire for American farmers to permanently move to Alberta and Saskatchewan.
In response to these advertisements, scouts from Oklahoma travelled to the West in 1905 to see the land. With the approval of the scouts, the general migration of Black people to the prairies began in 1907. It so happened that this was the same year that Oklahoma became a state. What reigned at this time in the U.S were Jim Crow laws which carried on the spirit of slavery—treating Black people as second-class citizens and allowing one-sided racial violence. As such, it was the advertisements that called for Black people, in combination with the oppressive conditions in the U.S that made migrating to Western Canada an attractive idea that many would choose to explore.
When the Canadian government initially sent the word out for Black settlers to migrate, they weren’t expecting a large response, particularly because the environmental conditions in Canada were harsh—possibly too harsh for the migrants to manage. Contrary to these concerns, nearly 300 people left the U.S to move to Amber Valley. Many of the Black people that moved in response to these promotions had a deep desire to escape racism and the conditions of inequality in the U.S. Descendants of the families of Amber Valley also say that their families had a strong desire for a better quality of life for themselves and their children.
The mass migration to Amber Valley helps to tell the story of the community’s uniqueness. Often when we think about historically Black communities, they often benefit from successive influxes of Black people, helping to maintain the community until they’re displaced by the government. For Amber Valley, there was only one migration, growing from 300 to approximately 1000 at its largest. This migration occurred between 1910 and 1912. With the people that settled there, it became known as a farming community.
The initial concerns of the harsh weather had an impact on the Black community that lived in Amber Valley. Coming from the South, the winters in Amber Valley were particularly difficult, especially considering how unequipped they were, having poorly insulated homes and scarce resources to travel in the cold. Yet they stayed. And they stayed because they feared that returning to the South meant giving up their freedom.
This isn’t to say that overt anti-Black racism and oppression weren’t prevalent characteristics of the Canadian system. In reality they were. For example, the Ku Klux Klan was noted to have extremely active chapters in Alberta and Saskatchewan during this time. Further consider how federal, provincial, and municipal governments deemed Black people “unsuitable” for Canadian weather because they feared that a takeover would be imminent if migration patterns of Black people continued. With this label from the government and the overall degradation of Black people, they furthered their agenda to limit the numbers of Black people by hiring a preacher to go to the South and to spread misinformation, telling them that nothing grows in Amber Valley, and that they would starve and die.
This plan from the government succeeded. Black people no longer saw Amber Valley as a destination for freedom, opportunity, and a better life. They opted to stay in South under the Jim Crow system because they were sold a lie, leaving them to choose between lives of aggressive exploitation over death. This contributed to the ending of Amber Valley. Indeed the residents lived simple and joyful lives during their time there, but this was until they started to run into trouble with their land. The biggest issue was that the farms weren’t big enough to support all of the people living on it. As a result, people transitioned to other industries such as becoming railway porters.
Access to higher education and better shelter was another issue. Some decided that they needed further education or couldn’t carry on in the cold conditions on the farms. To improve their circumstances they moved to cities like Edmonton and Calgary. Ultimately this meant that the community’s future was disrupted given that the conditions made it untenable for a comfortable life.
Although no longer a community or settlement destination for Black people, the legacy of Amber Valley, and the impact of those from the community, lives on today in Canada. Out of this small community came some of Canada’s most innovative and intelligent professionals. Oliver Bowen, a Canadian engineer, was born in Amber Valley in 1942. He went on to be the architect of Calgary’s CTrain system, forever changing how residents of Calgary travel. Violet Pauline King Henry, born 1929 was another one. Henry was the first Black woman lawyer in Canada, and the first Black person to graduate law in Alberta, and to be admitted to the bar. Ultimately, her hard work and achievements opened the door for other Black lawyers and aided in dismantling stereotypes of Black intelligence.
Today we remember Amber Valley and hope that its story won’t be forgotten.
Another much appreciated read.