The GBHS hosted a performance of Leslie McCurdy’s one-woman play “Things My Foresisters
Saw” on June 29, 2019. In this play we met four women of African Descent who affected change in Canada:
Marie-Joseph Angelique, an enslaved woman who was said to have burned down “half” of
Montreal from whom we have the first narrative of enslavement in North America; Rose
Fortune, the first “policewoman” in North America who helped “freedom seekers” settle in
Annapolis Royal Nova Scotia; Mary-Ann Shadd, the first North American woman to publish and
edit a newspaper, amongst other things; and Viola Desmond who refused to give up a seat to
segregation well before the celebrated Rosa Parks and is face of the Canadian $10 bill.
