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COMMENTARY: Echoes from The Bog: Illuminating P.E.I.’s Black history

When I walked through the Bog on a recent tour with the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation this summer, I felt something shift, a deeper connection to the land I call home. The ground beneath my feet was once a marsh, a pond, a neighbourhood. It held water and it held people. Black families lived here, worked here, raised children here, and built community in a place that has been largely erased from public memory.

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The water is gone now, filled in long ago. But the stories are rising again.

I write this knowing that The Bog sits on Epekwitk, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, and I honour their enduring relationship with this Land.

For several years, I have called Prince Edward Island home. During this time, I have learned that belonging is not only where you live. It is also about knowing who came before you. As a Black person on this Island, I have often searched for that sense of continuity.

A history that begins earlier than many Islanders know

When I went on the Bog tour this summer with the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation, it offered exactly that. I left the tour feeling both grounded in the history beneath my feet and unsettled by how little of it is publicly known. It reminded me that Black presence here is not new. It is deep, layered, and rooted in centuries of lived experience.

Many Islanders still believe Black communities arrived recently. The Bog tells a different story. Black residents were here in the late 1700s, including enslaved people brought by colonial governors. Families like the Sheppards, the Martins and others, lived and worked on this land. The Sheppards have descendants who are still here today, carrying forward part of this history.

The history behind P.E.I.’s community, The Bog

COMMENTARY: A lost chapter of Black history on Prince Edward Island

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