On this day, 10 May 1654, an enslaved African man named Olivier Le Jeune was buried in what is now Québec, Canada. He had been the first recorded enslaved African brought to New France. Prior to that point, all of the enslaved people in the colony were Native Americans, primarily of the Pawnee Nation, who were known as panis.
Le Jeune was abducted from Madagascar or Guinea, aged around six, and sold in New France by British slave traders. He was forced to work as a house servant, and it was recorded that in 1638 he was once chained up for a 24-hour period as a punishment for allegedly “slandering” a well-known French explorer, Nicolas Marsolet, with Le Jeune supposedly signing a confession with an “X”.
Over the coming decades the number of enslaved Africans grew, and continued after the British conquest of New France in 1760, until eventually a majority of enslaved people in the region were of African descent.
While the horrors of chattel slavery in the United States are today relatively well known, the history of the institution in Canada, with its brutal subjugation of Black and First Nations peoples, is much less so.
Pictured: Illustration of Olivier Le Jeune by Wang Qijun.
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