SYDNEY, N.S. — Cape Breton's Black Cross Nurses had an important impact on African-Caribbean communities 100 years ago.
But that history is in danger of being lost to the sands of time because there is so little material documentation or community elders alive with memories of them.
"It's tragic. Because with the loss of every community elder, regardless of the community, you lose a library," said Dr. Claudine Bonner, associate professor of history at Acadia University.
"I've been trying to chase the Black Cross Nurses down for four years or more. (If historians can't document them) then they're lost to history … they'll just be a tiny line in the telling, saying we know they existed."
Through Bonner's research into the migration of Afro-Caribbean people to Cape Breton from 1900-1930, which focused on the steel industry, Bonner interviewed African-Caribbean elders in Whitney Pier. Bonner spoke with one woman about the Black Cross Nurses, Beryl Braithwaite, who has since died.
"She was having trouble remembering specific names. But what she told me was that these women mostly did work around, it sounded similar to the work of a cross between a doula and a midwife," said Bonner.
"So they were there for childbirth but they were also there to support new mothers immediately after. They were there for people who were ill, but most of the work we talked about was around maternal health."
It's not only the history of Cape Breton's Black Cross Nurses that's in danger of being lost. The orders that existed across Nova Scotia and Canada are all close to historical extinction, which Bonner said has negative impacts on what future generations learn about the time.
"It limits our understanding in some ways of exclusion because part of the reason the Black Cross Nurses existed was because Black women were not allowed to become nurses in the province until I believe the 1940s," she said.
"So prior to that, the way these women were trained and the way these communities were served by trained nurses was through women being in the Black Cross Nurse order."
Pandemic start
An auxiliary group of the UNIA (United Negro Improvement Association), the Black Cross Nurses first began in American chapters around the time of the Spanish flu pandemic.
The first UNIA chapters started in Cape Breton in 1918 (Glace Bay) and 1919 (Whitney Pier) but it is unknown when the Black Cross Nurses locally formed or disbanded.
A way for women to join the fraternal UNIA organization, the Black Cross Nurses provided public health duties like disease prevention and hygiene education. They also visited people who were ill or injured at home and did homecare visits to new mothers, helping with housework and childcare.
While Black women could attend nursing school in the United States since the 1870s, in Canada they couldn't. Being a Black Cross Nurse in Canada meant being able to be trained by St. John's Ambulance, which meant they could provide better health care to the community. It is arguably the first chapter in the history of Black nurses in the province.
A chapter that couldn't have started at a better time because after the Spanish flu pandemic, caused by an H1N1 virus, the Second World War began. The war ended in 1945, the same year the first Black nurse was hired to work in Nova Scotia and three years before the first two Black people graduated from a Canadian nursing school.
"We have a skewed understanding that care was provided by white women for everyone, which was not the case," Bonner said.
"For the community (the Black Cross Nurses) were very important because they provided entire communities with care that I think in some spaces there was on access to. Because depending on hospitals, for example, some hospitals would not care for Black patients."
Historical representation matters
The UNIA Hall in Glace Bay, one of the last remaining in the world, indicated in a Facebook message they had no documentation or photos of the Black Cross Nurses. Neither did the Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University nor the Nova Scotia Archives.
The archives do have recorded interviews with four Black nurses, done in 1992 and 1995, as part of a larger study on nursing done by Dr. Barbara Anne Keddy. However, they weren't available in digital form or transcription at this time.
Bonner said there is one photo she found through her research where the Glace Bay chapter of the Black Cross order is in the background behind the UNIA marching band.
The UNIA band was lined up on Laurier Street in Glace Bay in 1921. Behind them are the Black Cross Nurses, their white uniforms glaring in the colourless photo.
But their faces and the Black Cross Nurses logo, a red circular background with a black cross and a green circle in the centre, aren't recognizable. It's like a reminder of how their place in history is fading while that of white nurses at the time isn't.
Bonner said seeing the Black Cross Nurses in history books is as important as seeing Black nurses working in health care and other professional settings today because "representation matters."
"It allows children to dream, right? This whole idea of never seeing people who look like you doing the kinds of jobs that, you know, our society attaches some level of prestige or pride to," she explained.
"If you never see people who look like you doing those jobs you can't dream. It's as simple as that."
Nicole Sullivan is an immigration/diversity and education reporter for the Cape Breton Post. Follow her on Twitter @CBPostNSullivan.