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Canadian Grad Student Locates Haiti’s Founding Document

Julia Gaffield, a Canadian graduate student at Duke University, found the original draft of Haiti’s founding document, which had been thought lost to posterity, at the British National Archives in London. The Haitian government only held copies of the document, which proclaims “we must live independent or die.” The immensely valuable historical document was possibly lost because of a filing error, as Gaffield found the document among Jamaican records from 1804.

“It’s a strange thing in the period of the earthquake we find the first document that made the state. People were searching for this for a very long time,” Patrick Tardieu, an archivist in Port-au-Prince, was quoted in an article in The New York Times about the find.

ARMA International International Policy Brief, April 2010

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