Based in Grand Pre, Nova Scotia, her work explores the lives and experiences of people of African descent.
[1] Hamilton grew up in Beechville, a community founded by the Black Refugees from the War of 1812, located west of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Throughout her life she has served as a volunteer on many boards and committees including the advisory board for Dalhousie University's Transition Year Program (TYP) and its B&M (Indigenous Black and Mik’Maq) Law School Program both of which serve First Nations and African Canadian students.
[1] She has held memberships with the Second Racial Equity Advisory Committee to the Canada Council, the Content Advisory Committee (CAC) to the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC) and the Writer's Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS).
[1] In her work she draws on Pierre Nora’s concept of ‘sites of memory’, where meaning is invested in people, locations and events.
While she reveals pains that have elapsed over many generations and raises awareness of discrimination that still exists today, her films maintain a positive tone.
For example, in her documentary, The Little Black Schoolhouse, composer Joe Sealy’s upbeat jazz score conducts the mood, inducing a sense of compassion and hope rather than pity or despair.
They have to see it as a place that’s been built by many different peoples, especially Black Nova Scotians – a community that has been successfully made invisible by systemic racism for 300 years.”[1] Her works function to tackle historical amnesia and shed light upon the persistent “colour line,"[11] a term used to illustrate the violent fissure between races made through centuries of colonialism.
Scholars who have written about her work include Brianne Howard and Sarah Smith; Shana McGuire and Darrell Varga; and Sharon Morgan Beckford.
Of her work Morgan Beckford writes: “Hamilton's cultural intervention into multicultural discourses unearths a paradox at the nexus of culture and democracy and social justice: while cultural and artistic intervention proves that multiculturalism enables inclusion of diversity, it paradoxically reveals the limits of multiculturalism in facilitating the conversion of that success into the kind of justice that enables social mobility of all groups, specifically blacks.”[12] October 17-December 1, 2013.
“Searching for Portia White,” in Rain/Drizzle/Fog: Film and Television in Atlantic Canada, Edited by Darrell Varga (NSCAD), University of Calgary Press, fall 2008.
“Visualizing History and Memory in the African Nova Scotian Community,” in Multiple Lenses: Voices from the Diaspora Located in Canada, Edited by David Devine (Dalhousie University), 2007, Halifax.
“A Daughter’s Journey,” Canadian Woman Studies /les cahiers de la femme, Volume 23, Number 2, Winter 2004.
Poetry appears in: Her films have been broadcast on CBC, TVO, the Knowledge Channel and throughout schools and universities across the country.