“I acknowledge that I live and work on the traditional and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples… and that I have my own part in this story, as the descendent of a slave-holding family in the United States”…
Thus I began my land acknowledgment statement at the beginning of the recent Research Ethics Board meeting at BC Cancer Agency.
Unpacking the history of this statement has been a long, somewhat painful, and sad journey. I was inspired to link my past ancestry of colonial-settler-slaveholders to the present, as a direct link to the terrors committed on these North American lands.
My family name, “Cowan”, comes from the Scottish “Colquhoun”, which apparently was a name associated with the Scottish Lowlands. The Ulster Scots, as they came to be known, were a people originally from Lowland Scotland, who were settlers initially in Ireland – where they became part of what is now known as the “Ulster Plantation” – a planned process of colonisation during the British Conquest of Ireland in the 16th century. These same individuals, known in the United States as the “Scotch Irish” came to be among the first colonizers of North America, displacing the Indigenous people. Thus began the long story of domination and oppression which my family was a part of – first in Ireland, and later in North America.
The earliest evidence I can find indicates that a “John Cowan” was born in 1763 in Russell, Virginia, USA. This region of Virginia is in the Appalachian mountains, near what is called the Cumberland Gap. His son, William G Cowan, moved to Kentucky, where he established a farm. His son, John Gilmore Cowan, moved to New Point, in Holt County, Missouri, in the 1850-1860s. They lived on a large plot of land and had a cattle farm. Apparently, they also were slaveholders. There remains a “Cowan Cemetery” near New Point, a relic of this time.
We don’t know what happened to the formerly enslaved Black people. I can only imagine they left in the coming decades with the end of Reconstruction and Jim Crow institutionalizing racism in the United States.
On January 12, 1931, in Maryville, Missouri, 31 miles from New Point – less than 100 years ago – a mob of 2,000 white men, women, and children seized a Black man named Raymond Gunn, put him on the roof of a local schoolhouse, and burned him alive, under suspicion of having murdered a White woman.
https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/jan/12
We don’t know the truth who killed the White woman, and it doesn’t matter – no justice was served that day. We do know that the Black population dwindled in the years following.
I don’t know what happened to the formerly enslaved Black peoples that were held by my ancestors. I do know that the trauma of chattel slavery has affected my family. My grandfather, John Cowan, was a bully and a racist. His father, an Ivan Lynn Cowan, left his mother at a young age and moved to New Mexico, where he apparently stayed unmarried and evidently estranged from his nuclear family. There were unsubstantiated rumours that he was gay.
“As a descendent of a slave holding family, I bear the burden of my ancestors. I am here to acknowledge this, and to bring to light the role that my family played in perpetuating a system of terrorism and injustice. I can only hope we can learn from this as a society; I know I have gained much from studying this as an individual, and to how I can be part of the solution as we move on”.
My voice quaked as I spoke this. It was entirely unscripted. But I had thought about it for months. Years, perhaps. I just had never had the opportunity to say anything in a forum like this. Perhaps being outside the US gave me some license to be sincere and honest that I felt uncomfortable with in the past. But now I’m here, and I’m posting this on my site for all to read.