ABSTRACT
This chapter exposes the rhetoric of Canadian colonial innocence through which the Underground Railroad (1834–65) has been memorialized to position enslaved African Americans as asylum-seeking refugees and to erase the prior two hundred years of Canadian Slavery (1600s to 1834). With a focus on enslaved mobility through the analysis of Canadian fugitive slave advertisements (which also demonstrate an unacknowledged north-to-south exodus), it challenges the common use of the term refugee which has been exploited to celebrate Canada as a multicultural, color-blind state.
