"Peggy, Not Having His Permission to Absent Herself from His Service": Enslaved Families and Black Women's Defiance in Upper Canada.

The article focuses on the life and resistance of Peggy, an enslaved Black woman in Upper Canada (now Ontario), highlighting the unique challenges faced by enslaved people in northern "slave minority" contexts. Drawing from archival fragments such as fugitive slave advertisements, enslaver correspondence, architectural blueprints, and settlement geography, it reconstructs Peggy's acts of defiance, family preservation, and negotiation of power within the institution of slavery under Peter Russell, a government official and enslaver. The study emphasizes the difficulties in recovering enslaved women's resistance from biased archives and theorizes how Peggy and her family asserted personhood, maintained kinship ties, and created sustaining foodways despite legal and social constraints, including the gradual abolition law of 1793. It also situates Peggy's story within broader northern slavery historiography, underscoring the importance of interdisciplinary methods and critical speculation to fill archival gaps and honor the lived experiences of enslaved Black women in Canada.