{"id":902,"date":"2020-07-01T14:30:05","date_gmt":"2020-07-01T14:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grasac.artsci.utoronto.ca\/?p=902"},"modified":"2021-04-29T03:01:40","modified_gmt":"2021-04-29T03:01:40","slug":"the-bonga-family-an-alternative-black-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grasac.artsci.utoronto.ca\/?p=902","title":{"rendered":"The Bonga Family: An Alternative Black History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Sherry Farrell Racette and Cory Willmott<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Slave Auction, Montreal Gazette<\/em><\/a>, c.1793<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It is no coincidence that members of the Bonga family have been honored and memorialized far and wide in recognition of their accomplishments and lives well lived. They stand as exemplars of Black lives that mattered. The Bonga story begins with the little known and seldom told fact of Canadian slavery. From freed Black slaves in the late eighteenth century, men and women of the Bonga family prospered through four generations. Many of them university educated and trilingual, they pursued diverse occupations and held influential positions within the multicultural fur trade society from Hudson Bay in the north to Pembina in the west and Minnesota in the midwest. By the early nineteenth century, one branch of the Bonga family had become intermarried into the Pillager Anishinaabek of Minnesota. As Rebecca Kugel notes, Anishinaabek considered the Bongas \u201cethnically French\u201d due to their cultural, linguistic and social affinity with French and m\u00e9tis traders. Yet, as American colonizers forced Anishinaabek into reservations after 1855, growing racism in American society fell heavily on the Bongas and Anishinaabek. Prospects for the more recent generations of Bongas were crushed, illustrating all too vividly the insidious impact of racism.
 
The Bonga family story challenges the boxes we build in historiography \u2013 who is brought forward \u2013 who is forgotten. We don\u2019t think about slavery in Canada. We don\u2019t think about indentured servants. We essentialize the genesis of M\u00e9tis people into a coming together of generic \u201cIndian\u201d women, \u201cEuropean\u201d fur traders and romantic \u201cFrench\u201d voyageurs, but the events Pierre Bonga played such a key role in are generally viewed as the crucible from which M\u00e9tis peoplehood emerged. Men of the African diaspora are not included in that history, and yet one the first children born of a fur trader and Anishinaabe woman on the northern plains was his daughter. Pierre, his sons George and Etienne, his grandson and great-grandson \u2013 both named Etienne L\u2019Africain \u2013 were labourers, interpreters, and entrepreneurs in the fur trade ecosystem. Pierre\u2019s great-grandson, born in Labrador, educated in Montreal, fought in the Civil War before returning to manage small trading posts in the Quebec-Ontario borderlands with his Algonquin wife. As we tease out their stories, the complications and connections grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jean and Marie Bonga: Freed and Thriving<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

by Sherry Farrell Racette<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Richard Dillon, Jr., Michilimackinac on Lake Huron.  <\/em>Montreal, 1813.  Colored copperplate engraving by Thomas Hall.  Graphics Division, Clements Library, University of Michigan, ID# 6707.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In 1782, Jean and Marie Jeanne Bonga, two Francophone slaves, arrived at Michilimackinac with Captain Daniel Robertson, a British officer taking command of the post. The surname Bonga is common in southern Africa and Martinique, meaning \u201cto give thanks\u201d or \u201cto give praise\u201d in Zulu-Swahili. The origins of Robertson\u2019s ownership of the couple is unclear. He was posted to Martinique in 1762, and both he and his wife\u2019s Montreal family were slave owners.
 
Jean and Marie Jeanne left a sparse archive. In 1784 Jean Baptiste Perrault described \u201can old negro named Bonga carrying a load of wet linen\u201d injured after walking into the path of an escaping murderer. At six-year old Rosalie\u2019s baptism in 1786, her parents were described as \u201ca negro \u2026 and \u2026 Negress living with monsieur Robertson, Captain, commandant\u201d.
 
In 1787, after leaving his command, Robertson \u201creleased\u201d several slaves, including the Bongas, at Mackinac and others in Montreal. The Bongas purchased a house which they transformed into the first regional inn or tavern. In 1794 the couple married and had four children, Etienne (d.1804), Pierre (1777-1831), Rosalie (1782-1834) and Charlotte (1786-1830). Their youngest daughter Charlotte (b. 1786) was baptized on May 4th<\/sup>, 1794. Jean Bonga died the next year (Jan. 20, 1795). Marie Jeanne appears to have returned to Montreal where the family became part of the free Afro-Montreal community.
 
Etienne, employed as a voyageur, died in Montreal in 1804. Rosalie married John Pruyn, a labourer, in 1806, and a child\u2019s funeral in 1808 identified Charlotte as the wife of Jean Baptiste L\u2019Africain, a carpenter. The Bonga sisters may have formed a Montreal support system for their brother Pierre and his children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pierre Bonga: Into the West (ca. 1775 – 1831)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

by Sherry Farrell Racette<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born before his parents\u2019 arrival at Michilimackinac, Pierre Bonga began working in the fur trade as a young man, documented with John Sayer\u2019s company at Fond du Lac in 1795, and Alexander Henry the Younger from 1800-1806. Departing from Grand Portage on Lake Superior with the Red River Brigade, Bonga was with Henry in the first canoe, but unlike other men was not assigned a role beyond \u201cmy servant\u201d and \u201cnegro\u201d suggesting he was a personal servant, rather than an engag\u00e9 <\/em>of the North West Company. The brigade traveled to Lake Winnipeg to the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers before establishing a fort near present-day Pembina, North Dakota. Bonga married an Anishiinaabe woman of the Pillager band, and in March 1802, Henry wrote: \u201cPierre\u2019s wife was delivered of a daughter \u2013 the first fruit at this fort and a very black one\u201d. Bonga was given increasing responsibility, placed in charge in 1803 during Henry\u2019s absence. In 1806, Bonga was with a brigade sent to \u201cKamanistiquia\u201d (Fort William) on Lake Superior. Between 1813-1815 he worked as a \u201cmiddleman\u201d on brigades shuttling between Montreal and Fort William, before having the job of interpreter added to his voyageur duties. In 1815, he filed a last will and testament with a Montreal notary prior to his departure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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John Herbert Caddy, Old Fort William and the Hudson\u2019s Bay trading post at the mouth of the Kaministikwia River, c. 1853. Library and Archives Canada, C020770.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Bonga\u2019s physical presence and strength were assets during a period of intense, and increasingly violent competition between rival companies. During a trial seeking damages from North West Company partners for destroying a trader\u2019s camp at Grand Portage in 1802, a \u201cnegro\u201d working for Archibald Norman McLeod was among the party, described as tearing and burning \u201ca tent to bits\u201d. In 1803 Henry described an XY Company competitor threatening to kill Bonga, writing with satisfaction that the antagonist \u201cdid not escape without a sound beating\u201d. In 1816, Bonga was sent from Fort William to seize a packet of documents from couriers dispatched to Montreal by the Earl of Selkirk. He had become a soldier in the fur trade wars.
 
Bonga placed his children under the care of the North West Company partners who employed him. They appear in the St. Gabriel Street Presbyterian Church records among the dozens of fur trade children brought to Montreal to be baptized and educated:  Etienne Bongo, aged seven (1810), Blanche, aged nine and George, aged seven (1811) were described as children of \u201cPierre Bongo, in the service of the North West Company, by a woman of the Indian Country\u201d. Their sponsors were Angus Shaw and Archibald Norman McLeod. An older son, 14-year old Jean Baptiste, was engaged as an apprentice to McLeod in 1812. Father and son may have worked together at Fort William, perhaps the \u201ctwo negroes\u201d observed by Ross Cox among the ethnically diverse crowd in 1817.
 
After the merger of the North West and Hudson\u2019s Bay companies in 1821, men like Pierre Bonga were made redundant, although HBC Governor George Simpson described him as a member of a large 1822 expedition sent to explore the South Saskatchewan and Bow River region where the Blackfoot and Gros Ventre found his appearance fascinating. Bonga returned to Fond-du-Lac, where he spent the remainder of his career working for the American Fur Company, living comfortably among the Anishiinaabek with his wife and children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Primary Sources:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n