Of Canadian And American History Poem by Gayathri Seetharam

Of Canadian and American history
-Gayathri B. Seetharam
The mention of a year in print caught my eye
In the international edition of The Sunday New York Times,
In the form of a promise of another issue
And I did not know the fact that it was the year that slavery began in America;

The year is 1619 and it is before the forming of the new world
And Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776
Saying that all men are created equal
Was himself a land owner with slaves on his property;

Wikipedia says that he had a sexual relationship with a female slave
And it strikes me as odd that a man with such a profound concept of right and wrong
Did not see that slavery was wrong
And digressing for a thought here,
I shall say that a form of slavery existed in India also;

But as American history has established itself,
Slavery is a key aspect for it defines the foundation of equality
As the Civil Rights Bill
Which emerged hard fought for;

Canada, my chosen home, as my French Canadian friend, Marisse Muralidhar,
Had said proudly, did not have slavery as an aspect of its social set-up,
However, if I were to, as an immigrant, be asked the question as to what defines
Canada as a nation of people
I would say it is the English-French battles
Fought for control of land in the Quebec province
And the Seven Years War gave control to the English in bicultural Canada;

I found the related excerpts on the internet:
The first 19 or so Africans to reach the English colonies arrived in Point Comfort, Virginia, near Jamestown, in 1619, brought by English privateers who had seized them from a captured Portuguese slave ship. Slaves were usually baptized in Africa before embarking.
AND
In 1758, the tide turned when the British captured Louisbourg, followed by Québec City in 1759 and Montréal in 1760. With the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France formally ceded Canada to the British. The Seven Years' War therefore laid the bicultural foundations of modern Canada.

In both Canada and America, the two separate historical facts
Have caused strife and conflict amongst the people
And before the Civil Rights Bill, there was the Civil War fought by Pres. Abraham Lincoln
In America and this turned the tide to rise once again in the favour of the blacks after the Civil Rights Movement;

In Canada, history took a negative turn in 1995 when the province of Quebec
Fought to free themselves from English Canada
By voting in the referendum
And it was the immigrant vote that held the cohesive force of the nation
For the French Canadians were fighting a separatist movement
That would have torn the nation apart
For a divided Canada albeit an English Canada
Loses the wealth of its foundation.