Fr tho there's something so fucking special about historical diaries & accounts of the inner feelings of someone who was alive 140+ years ago, and also a POC in the midst of a Colonial Shitfire™️ (i love where my work takes me):
Man who was looked at as hard/cold, was a Hot Topic™️ in the last decade bc of governing a colonial society while black & having a native wife/kids: writes the exact minute & day when his many children passed during the hard fort years of British Columbia (1800s). It has got me in the fucking feels IT IS SO SAD I CANNOT DESCRIBE IT, YOU ACTUALLY HAVE TO READ THE SCRIPT OF HIS HANDWRITING TO FEEL IT:
"Little boy": Not baptized, born 5th November, 1833. Died same day. It was Saturday.
"Ellen": died 24th November, 1834 at a few minutes past 8 in the morning. Friday.
Then the years ago by, the kids who make it grow up: he's now writing letters to his youngest, the golden child, saying how he still puts an apple on her nightstand to pretend she's home while overseas, how he walks under the apple tree in their front yard (the tree i ended up studying and smoking weed under lmao) and aches at her absence- how "mama cries for you to just come home" ITS ALL TOO MUCH😭
Fr FUCK all those people who petitioned for his statue to be removed & for this family history to be disregarded- our island was governed by a black man, with a Cree wife, in the fucking 1800s in a society full of British people who CONSTANTLY talked shit and they were like "yeah, not relevant"????????? i will forever be pissed
and fuck all those victorian assholes from the 1860s who talked shit about their "manners", their native language & who called the kids "half-breeds"