Black Historical past Month is wrapping up quickly however there’s no finish to the gems being unearthed as a part of the Jasper Place Group Historical past Mission in west Edmonton.
“It speaks to my being, it speaks to my group and folks desirous to see themselves within the historical past of Canada,” says Donna Coombs-Montrose, who has all the time had an curiosity in historical past.
She and different group contributors are a part of a venture that’s amassing tales from the group and sharing oral histories, movies and pictures on a public web site.
The work began in 2020 with funding from the Metropolis of Edmonton and the Alberta authorities.
The web site options dozens of tales from the varied combine of individuals from totally different cultural backgrounds who’ve made Jasper Place their house. Theme pages spotlight the Black, Ukrainian, Filipino, South Asian, Jewish and First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities.
Jasper Place was a city earlier than residents voted in favour of amalgamation with Edmonton in 1964. The group contains a number of neighbourhoods close to Stony Plain Street between 149th Avenue and a hundred and seventieth Avenue.
Initially from the Caribbean, Coombs-Montrose moved to Canada within the Sixties to pursue her dream of finding out library sciences.
Her February calendar is all the time dotted with talking engagements at native faculties for Black Historical past Month, the place she showcases tales of Black folks in Jasper Place.
The Jasper Place historical past venture tells the tales of individuals like Shirley Romany, a hairdresser who moved to the world within the Sixties and supported different native Black-owned companies, and Eritrea-born Goitom “Tom” Fessahye.
Fessahye got here to Edmonton as a refugee from Sudan within the Nineteen Eighties and operated a coin laundry on Stony Plain Street for greater than 20 years.
A historic Alberta cemetery is being reclaimed to honour the Black pioneers who’re buried there
The location additionally touches on the story of CFL soccer star and educator Johnny Brilliant, who moved to Alberta from the US and lived within the Meadowlark Park neighbourhood from 1962 till he died in 1983.
“There’s something particular about Jasper Place that pulls Black folks from totally different components of the world to reside right here and by no means go away,” Coombs-Montrose says.
Colette Lebeuf, lead researcher and content material co-ordinator with the venture, works alongside Don Bouzek of Floor Zero Productions to create the movies and submit them to the positioning.
“Each time we glance into a chunk of historical past, or somebody’s story, we uncover many different layers that we would wish to discover,” says Lebeuf.
Lebeuf says they’re now planning for the venture’s subsequent part, which can discover the world’s Chinese language and Lebanese historical past.
“Jasper Place has been a quiet group that hasn’t obtained lots of consideration,” Lebeuf says.
Kathryn Ivany, metropolis archivist with the Metropolis of Edmonton, says there may be a lot to understand in regards to the Jasper Place venture.
“Most of our conventional historical past of town has been written completely from a colonial, completely from a white, middle-class background,” Ivany says.
“Involving the group in telling their very own tales might be the simplest means of gathering these different views that aren’t normally represented.”
