Notice Board

The University of Lethbridge proudly celebrates Black History Month 2026 under the theme Shaping our Community: Celebrating Black Resiliency and Solidarity.  

Our kickoff keynote will feature a presentation by Dr. Karina Vernon, University of Toronto Scarborough, hosted by the Centre for Feminist Research and the Accessibility, Belonging and Community (ABC) Office.  

In her talk From Alberta to Africa: Unearthing Black Cowboy’s Hidden Archive of Song, Vernon will piece together the story of the Black cowboys of western Canadian 19th century by following the traces of memory preserved in cowboy songs. This alternate archive of songs turns our understandings of the cowboy figure upside down.  

Despite what Hollywood westerns would have us believe, many of the cowboys working on the ranching operations of Texas and Alberta were Black. They contributed their knowledge and musical aesthetics to the repertoire of cowboy songs, which we can hear today. Audiences will have a chance to learn about the surprising origin of cowboy music, their hidden connection to Alberta and hear how songs are a vehicle for remembering the fascinating but forgotten global history of the cowboy. 

We will be taking a campus group photo before the presentation at 1:15 p.m. so please wear your Black History Month T-shirt if you have one. There is a networking reception immediately following the Q&A.  

About the Speaker 
Karina Vernon is an Associate Professor and Chair of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, archives, critical pedagogy and Black-Indigenous relations. She is the editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (WLUP 2020) and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is in revisions. With Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo), she co-edited Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation (forthcoming McGill-Queens 2026), which offers a Black Canadian theory of reception and relation. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. 

Her current research draws from musicology, agrarian studies, and ecological and genomic science to theorize the musical ecology of the prairies created by Black voyageurs, cowboys, singers, and musicians. She reads seeds and songs as “alternative archives” that preserve the histories of cultural and genetic exchange between the Canadian prairies, the southern United States, the Caribbean and 16th century Senegambia.