“Here - Moncton.”

“No, where are you really from?”

This series of questions bothered me my entire life until I once snapped and said, “I was born on the second floor of the Moncton hospital, but if you’re trying to ask why I’m Black, my dad is from Senegal.” It is questions like this, the constant judging and scrutiny that Black and other racialized people face, that led Dr. Mary McCarthy, her son Thandiwe McCarthy and photographer Gary Weekes to collaborate on the book Still Here: Preserving Our History.

The book is divided into two sections. The first has an extensive historical timeline of New Brunswick done by Dr. McCarthy, going from 1783 to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2022. The second portion highlights 15 Black legacy families who still have roots in New Brunswick. The families were photographed at gatherings by Weekes, and the entire book has Thandiwe’s poetry interspersed throughout. 

Dr. McCarthy shares that while the book was not intended to be an academic text, it may have inadvertently become one. “What we've been told by academics is that this is priceless for anyone to realize how many poignant steps have been made in the assimilation of our communities into the wider New Brunswick population.” 

This work shows that from 1783, to present day, Black people have and always will be part of New Brunswick’s history. “We included a timeline of New Brunswick to prove to the people that didn't think Black people were in New Brunswick for over 50 years, that we've been here for centuries," Thandiwe shares. “Back in 1783, a ship went from the port of New York City all the way up to Saint John, New Brunswick filled with families that were free. [Those people] came here to become merchants and settle in Saint John. We have the ship records. It's one of the first things printed in the book. The next page is the first map of New Brunswick, which has the Negro settlements all dotted around it.”

Dr. McCarthy originally reached out to 45 families, but a final 15 chose to participate in the book. She was given a team at Goose Lane Publishing and each family had a representative to keep communications smooth. As she connected with each family, she learned so much about them and New Brunswick. “It was phenomenal,” Dr. McCarthy tells us. Someone would say, ‘Well, I'm a Palmer, and my grandfather was a Smith.’ Then someone else would say, ‘Well, I'm a Smith, and he's married to a Palmer.’ I was making connections, and I helped some families connect with each other. It was really powerful.”

One important rule the entire team had was to avoid speaking outside of, above, or separate from the Black community. “This [project] is honestly just us sharing our hearts on what we feel about Black New Brunswick heritage,” Thandiwe shares. Dr McCarthy adds, “We wanted to reverse the erasure. This is just our echo from the ancestors on what we thought would help illuminate that erasure.” That carried through to the approach for the project’s photography. Instead of making them dress up, Weekes asked them to do whatever they would during a normal family gathering so that the photos were an accurate representation of Blackness in New Brunswick in 2026. 

It was also purposeful to make Black history an artful, hardcover, coffee table book. Still Here is approachable, accessible, and beautiful while recounting Black history through letters, birth certificates, party invitations. 

For Dr. McCarthy, the preservation of history in Still Here and combatting the erasure was both paramount and personal. “When you walk into a room, you're always the only [Black] one,” Dr. McCarthy shares. “Your educators are always blue-eyed. So it has always been important to have a Black child living in an Afrocentric home. It was a way of embracing each other, loving each other and loving our culture.” 

Thandiwe adds that the book is part of preserving a tradition of oral history as well. “We're at a state of oral history extinction if our elders right now don't pass on their stories. Our elders remember their grandparents, and they have basically the entire history of Black Canada in their mind right now. If we don't sit down with our grandparents and our grandmothers and ask them, ‘How was school? Do you remember where your siblings used to work?’ and get that education, we will lose 90% of Black Canadian history. We cannot wait for academics to come in with their recorders, sit at the tables and give a number to all of our aunts and uncles, write it down, and then put these [stories] in a Google Drive away where the community can't get it.”

Still Here did more than preserve history and produce an important book. Coordinating the family photo shoots brought people back together. One family expected 8 to 10 relatives for the shoot and a potluck. Thirty-five showed up, including a respected elder who had long distanced herself from the family. This past February, some grandchildren spoke about their ancestors and the book in their Black History Month classes, proof that the pride has trickled down to the next generation.

Thandiwe hopes every family views themselves as archivists and historians and use the tools of art to share Black narratives widely. “We all have phones that have recorders,” Thandiwe says. “We all know people who like to write songs, who like to do poetry. If someone in your family does hip hop… I need you to talk to your grandparents, get whatever they say, and turn that into art. Whatever that story means to you, put it out into the world. Because as a community, as a national community, we're gonna lose over half of our identity if we don't capture all of the blessings, all of the successes, all of the joys, all of the businesses, the organizations, the community gatherings, the nonprofits that our ancestors have been doing here for centuries. Then we'll forget and think we have to keep starting over.” 

The team hopes New Brunswick will someday follow Nova Scotia's lead, honouring the province's historic Black sites and preserving them.

The book has become a catalyst. It sparked a launch event, a companion exhibit at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery featuring archival documents and items belonging to Black ancestors, and a four-day Emancipation Day festival honouring the legacy families. Like the book, the festival will connect Black families and celebrate Black culture in all its forms. It's a reminder that Black people have always been part of the fabric of New Brunswick.