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Pearleen Oliver: Canada's Black Crusader for Civil Rights
Whale Tails & Other Stories of the Outer Bay of Fundy
TOGO to the Rescue!
Written in the style of her brave and direct voice, readers can almost feel as though they are sitting with Pearleen Oliver as they turn the pages of a new book written in tribute to her life.
“Essentially what we have is Pearleen Oliver speaking to us in her own words,” said Ronald Caplan, publisher of Breton Books.
Caplan spent two years poring over transcripts and long interviews Oliver gave to historians and edited them into: Pearleen Oliver: Canada’s Black Crusader for Civil Rights. The book weaves together six decades of Oliver’s inspiring work championing Nova Scotia’s Black community. Born in Guysborough County, Oliver died in 2008. She was 91.
“So, when I hear the kids today talking about racism, I just think, they don’t even know. They weren’t born, and they don’t even know what it was like. They can go into any hotel they want to go into, eat in any restaurant, live on any street they want to live. We couldn’t do that, so we had a real battle to fight.
“In my day you just lived in a certain ghetto. You were restrained,” she says in the book.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Oliver became an effective public speaker, bringing the message of racial injustice to government, churches, educators, and youth groups. While raising five sons, she worked with her husband, Rev. Dr. William P. Oliver, to improve life for African Nova Scotians. Along the way, she helped found several organizations, including the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.
When a young woman appeared on her doorstep crying after being turned away from nursing school because she wrote “Negro” as her racial origin, Oliver challenged the system and earned Black women the right to become nurses. When her son Bill came home from elementary school in 1944 with a copy of Little Black Sambo, Oliver told him the popular children’s book was degrading and insulting to Black people. She fought to have it removed from public schools and replaced with true stories of Black Canadians’ contributions.
After Viola Desmond challenged racial segregation when she refused to leave a whites-only area of the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow in 1946, Oliver helped with her legal fight and was in the courtroom as a spokesperson for Desmond’s appeal.
“Viola did not want the trouble, but Bill (her husband) and I could not let go,” Oliver says in the book. “As we often reminded one another, ‘We were crusaders. We were born for this.’”
Last month, 100 copies of Pearleen Oliver: Canada’s Black Crusader for Civil Rights were donated to students at J.L. Ilsley High School in Halifax. Caplan hopes the book will reach more students across the province.
All royalties for the book are being donated by Oliver’s family to a Pearleen Oliver memorial fund of the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia.
Filled with colourful illustrations and photos of whales, sharks, turtles and salmon, Whale Tails & Other Stories of the Outer Bay of Fundy aims to help young observers identify marine species and to provide them with an educational and inspiring look at life in the Bay of Fundy.
The new online descriptive atlas is a compilation of stories and animal facts, bringing together traditional Mi’kmaq knowledge, science, and the experiences of people who rely on the bay for their livelihood.
“The Bay of Fundy is a unique ecosystem and full of food for all living creatures. It sustains the food chain from the smallest living organism to the most massive whale. This bay is not only an excellent resource for all creatures, but it is also a place where Mi’kmaq came from; the bay is a sacred place for the Mi’kmaw people as it holds everything they need to sustain life,” according to the atlas.
“The Mi’kmaq of the Outer Bay of Fundy region historically moved with the seasons. Summers would be spent at bays and inlets fishing and hunting marine mammals, moving inland to hunt through the winter. Ceremonies were performed to give thanks to species for the sacrifice of their lives to feed the Mi’kmaw.”
Lobster, or “jakej” in Mi’kmaw, were buried in the mud, and frost would keep the meat cold so if hunting was poor during the winter, there would still be food, according to the atlas.
Developed through a partnership between Sustainable Oceans Applied Research and the Mi’kmaw Conservation Group, the atlas was funded by the Offshore Energy Research Association. It is available for free online: oera.ca/research/whale-tails-other-stories.
Togo to the rescue!
Mother-daughter, author-illustrator team, Laura King and Hannah Aubrecht published their first children’s picture book, drawing on family stories from the Halifax Explosion. ‘TOGO’ to the Rescue!... A Halifax Explosion Story (New World Publishing) tells the heroic tale of how a horse, who delivered groceries in Halifax with its owner, Uncle Arthur, worked together to save a young boy trapped in the rubble following the devastation that hit the city on Dec. 6, 1917.
Gaspereau Press has printed 80 beautifully-bound copies of Alexander MacLeod’s short story, Lagomorph. Originally published in Granta literary magazine, the story was a winner of the 100th O. Henry Prize in 2019. Past prize winners include Flannery O’Conner, Alice Munro, and William Faulkner.
Told from the perspective of a father who brought home a rabbit for a family pet, Lagomorph explores the significance the little animal takes on for the narrator as the family’s dynamic shifts and fractures.
Donna Kane’s Orrery (Harbour Publishing) is a poetry collection inspired by Pioneer 10, an American space probe launched in 1972 to study Jupiter’s moons. When the probe was retired in 2003, NASA stopped sending signals to it, and it was left to wander alone through space. Kane, who lives in B.C. but spends much of her time in Halifax, uses the probe and its endless travels to examine consciousness, transformation and materiality.
Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award
The best book of poetry written by a Nova Scotia writer will now receive an award in honour of poet Maxine Tynes.
The Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award will be presented during the Atlantic Book Awards virtual gala on May 13, the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia announced. One $500 prize will be given out every two years.
A poet, teacher, and descendant of Black Loyalists, Tynes, who died in 2011, drew on her family’s rich heritage in her writing. All four of her poetry books were published by Pottersfield Press.
“We are constantly looking for who we are,” Tynes wrote in Borrowed Beauty. “So many signals have been lost historically and culturally along the way.”