provoking thoughts about the presence of our past

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

A UBC Student at Last...





Dr. Henry Sugiyama Finally Admitted to the University of British Columbia (news stories from the Globe and Mail, the Province, and the Ubyssey)



At 87, Henry Sugiyama is finally going to arrive on the campus of the University of British Columbia the way he had hoped to as a teenager. As a student.
In 1942, when Dr. Sugiyama was 15, he and his family were among the 21,000 Japanese-Canadians who were removed from B.C.’s coastal areas under the cover of Canada’s War Measures Act. After relocating to Kamloops, the star student continued high school, and his teachers encouraged him to write entrance exams to UBC. He won a scholarship, but UBC rejected his application. The war was over, but Japanese-Canadians had been presented with a choice: move away from the coast or go to Japan. The teen could not live on or near the UBC campus. The only university that would take him was the University of Manitoba, where he earned a medical degree.
“I was lucky in a way. UBC did not have a medical program at the time. If I had gone there, I would not have become a doctor,” Dr. Sugiyama said.
On Tuesday, Dr. Sugiyama will attend the first class in a new program in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration studies. Its opening completes the promises the university made to recognize its role in the province’s internment policy, first awarding honorary degrees to 76 students who did not finish their diplomas as a result of the removals, and vowing to preserve and teach the history of that time.
The program is not a form of atonement, although with courses such as Chinese Migration, it memorializes the experiences of those who Canada has at times shunned. Instead, it will try to teach students that choices are always available: to speak against exclusion or to abet it.
“It’s not about just remembering the past. It’s not about, ‘You should feel guilty, you should feel bad.’ That is actually a bankrupt form of historical thinking in my mind,” said Henry Yu, a history professor at UBC who was a member of the committee that organized the granting of the honorary degrees. “We are trying to have our students look around and say, ‘Who am I? Am I Ellis Morrow or am I Gordon Shrum?’”
Prof. Morrow was one of the few people on campus in the 1940s who spoke against the removals, helping his students finish degrees by correspondence. Mr. Shrum was a senior university administrator who played a part in the decision to go further than the government’s removal order and strip students in Canadian Officer Training Corps of their designation.
“We can’t tell right now which way you should act, but what you can do is think about the past and not just dismiss and say everyone was racist and now we’re not any more,” Dr. Yu said. “What work do we need to do, in maybe the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the way we deal with First Nations? What is a temporary foreign worker, how are we treating Filipino nannies? What is it to be a just society?”
Dr. Sugiyama said the experience of removal affected his whole life. His father eventually rebuilt parts of his business, working in the fishing industry as an exporter. After finishing medical school, Dr. Sugiyama moved to Toronto and worked in the city’s Cabbagetown area at a time when its name was still identified with illness, overcrowding and poverty.
“At the time, it was a slum area, I wanted to give back,” he said.
Some things about the choices adults made he will never understand. Why his teachers in Kamloops, for example, raised his hopes. “I don’t know why they encouraged me to write the exams. They did not do anything to help me after.”
His daughter was awarded the Order of Canada for her achievements as a lawyer and for civic engagement, so the country has changed, Dr. Sugiyama said, even as he believes some groups are still disadvantaged, particularly aboriginal students.
The director of the new UBC program, Chris Lee, says students enrolling have only to look on campus to understand the program’s continuing relevance. Students who are struggling with English, for example, are still stigmatized. “Like many Canadian universities, our students have family histories that have migration in them. This program is a way of recognizing that our students lead global lives.”
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Former ‘enemy of the state,’ Dr. Henry Sugiyama is first student of UBC's new Asian Canadian studies program

Dr. Henry Sugiyama poses with his daughter Constance, and wife Joanne.

Dr. Henry Sugiyama, 69 years after being denied entry at UBC because although Canadian he was of Japanese descent, has become the first student admitted in the university’s new program in Asian Canadian studies.
He went on to become a doctor, run a successful practice in Toronto and raise a family. The 87-year-old is now retired.
In high school in Kamloops, where the family had moved after being forced off the West Coast in 1942, Sugiyama earned an entrance scholarship to UBC.
It was 1945 and the war had just ended, but Japanese Canadians were to be considered “enemy aliens” until 1949.
UBC rejected him, as did the universities of Saskatchewan and Alberta. The University of Manitoba accepted him into medicine, despite the huge number of war veterans returning who had been granted free education benefits.
“The Second World War ended that summer and I was no longer an ‘enemy of the state,’” Sugiyama said. “There was no real reason why UBC couldn’t take me.
“To this day, I cannot fail to admire the courage of the admission committee of the U of M for accepting an ‘enemy alien’ when so many other Canadian universities found it so easy to simply refuse.”
His father and mother arrived in Vancouver in 1912 and built up a handful of businesses.
In 1942, the family — along with more than 21,000 Japanese Canadians forced out of their homes on the West Coast by the federal War Measures Act — was uprooted to Kamloops.
“My father, who was a successful businessman, had all his properties confiscated,” Sugiyama said, “including his home, cameras, radios, automobiles, his fleet of six large fishing boats and three companies dealing with the fishing industry.”
Sugiyama was a 14-year-old Grade 9 student at Templeton Junior High at the time and had fulfilled all the requirements to earn the school’s highest award, the Silver T, but the school claimed he had been expelled and never gave it to him.
After writing two letters to the school, however, in 2013 he received a small banner to take the place of the Silver T and a copy of a commencement speech by the principal, Aaron Davis, acknowledging the “shameful act” committed by Templeton in 1942.
Sugiyama received the letter on Dec. 7 last year, 72 years to the day after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
His father, he said, “never gave up his love for this country and never gave up hope that his family would succeed and make a better country.”
As if to reaffirm that sentiment, Sugiyama’s daughter Constance, a lawyer, was in 2013 appointed a member of the Order of Canada for her contributions to the Japanese Canadian community.
From enemy alien to Canada’s highest civilian honour in one lifetime: Sugiyama said he knows his late father would be proud.
© Copyright (c) The Province



87-year-old Henry Sugiyama accepted to UBC 69 years after he applied

By: September 19, 2014, 4:36pm PDT
Henry Sugiyama with his wife and daughter. Photo from UBC.
Henry Sugiyama with his wife and daughter. Photo UBC.
Like thousands of other students, Henry Sugiyama received an offer of admission from UBC this year. The difference is, Sugiyama is an 87-year-old doctor from Toronto, and has been waiting 69 years for his offer.
Sugiyama was a high school student in Vancouver at the time of Pearl Harbour, and was one of tens of thousands of Japanese-Canadians who were forced to leave the coast of B.C. for the interior — in Sugiyama’s case, Kamloops. After attending high school in Kamloops for the remainder of his degree, Sugiyama was encouraged to apply for an entrance scholarship (in addition to regular admission) at UBC — despite it being within the ‘protected zone’ (in which, generally, people of Japanese origin were forbidden to reside.) He wrote the exam and performed at a level that should have earned him the award. Like many universities at the time, however, UBC had discriminatory policies against Japanese students. This, in combination with federal policies which maintained the forced relocation of Japanese-Canadians even after the end of the war, led to Sugiyama being rejected by UBC.Sugiyama was accepted by the University of Manitoba, one of relatively few institutions that did not reject people of Japanese background outright. He graduated with a medical degree in 1952 and practiced in Toronto. Now retired, Sugiyama has received his long awaited — and deserved — acceptance letter from UBC. He’s the first person to be admitted to UBC’s new minor program, “Asian Canadian and Asian migrations studies,” which is part of a movement by UBC to acknowledge and honour the Japanese-Canadians whose studies were impeded, cut short or prevented by discriminatory policies in the 1940s. Sugiyama will be travelling to the UBC campus on September 23 for a symbolic first day of class.
This action by UBC is part of a broad reconciliation policy that has been ongoing for years, both within the university and throughout Canada as a whole. Though these attempts at making amends have come far too late for some, and are too little recompense for others, it is good that UBC is making efforts to recognize the injustices that were suffered by many students (and applicants) for crimes that they did not commit.
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Thursday, May 15, 2014

A Historic Day - B.C.'s Apology

I had the rare privilege of witnessing the historic apology from the floor of the B.C. Legislature

Today was a historic day. 
But what does that mean?

Was it historic because it was one of those days that will be looked back upon in the years ahead, quoted and written in history books? "May 15, 2014--the day the Legislature of British Columbia formally apologized for the long history of anti-Chinese legislation passed in its chamber." Perhaps.

Was it historic because of the rare feeling that permeated the Legislature Assembly as the Question period ended, and the bickering chamber--normally so full of mocking voices, derisive hooting, and sophomoric sarcasm--transformed into the sombre sincerity of bipartisan agreement? Rare as that fleeting feeling of solidarity was, the magic surrealism of collegial comradery rising above partisan politics was notable not for the rarity of that feeling itself, but memorable for the noble purpose for which it was invoked.







CTV news clip 1 clip 2

This was a historic day because it is history in the making. Not historic for itself, but for how it presented a pause in how we live our daily lives, a moment to reflect as British Columbians upon who we are, and where we are, and perhaps most importantly, when we are.

When are we? Such an odd question. But just as in television shows where a person with amnesia cannot remember their own past, and therefore does not know who they are, the question of "when" we are is another way of thinking about "who" we are. When you do not know your own past, you do not know who you are. Your sense of identity now, in a particular moment, is the product of having a sense of when you are within a larger, longer story. Memories of childhood and growing up, of family and friends, of loves gained and lost, of loved ones here and gone--these are the stuff of your past, and the memories of which you are made.

 Who we are. When we are. They are two sides of the same coin, both bought dearly through days upon months, years upon years of memories both happy and sad. Without these memories, you would not know who you are. Without a sense of when you are--when this moment sits amidst a longer story full of memory and meaning--you will not know who you are.

Today was an important moment in changing the story of who we are in British Columbia. It was a special moment, when the BC Legislature finally dealt with its own long history of anti-Chinese racism and discrimination--laws and policies sanctioned and legislated within the very same chamber where the Premier of British Columbia today formally apologized. We British Columbians, through the MLAs who politically represent us, formally acknowledged a past that has been for so long ignored when we teach and learn the history of British Columbia. It is a past that many of our elders remember all too well, and for those who suffered the pain and indignities of racial discrimination, this day is a recognition that their story is an integral part of our common history. Not an aberration or anomaly, as if a few mistakes were made here and there, but a systematic and enduring feature of the political, social, and economic life of this province and its government.

The Legislative Assembly of British Columbia today acknowledged that what they did over years and decades of implementing the policies of a "White Man's Province" (to use former Premier Richard McBride's words), was wrong. Wrong now, from the perspective of a multicultural society that has rejected racism, but also wrong then in the sense that it should not have been that way. White supremacy was lawful policy, legally entrenching racism against Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians, South Asian Canadians, and First Nations peoples who are indigenous to these lands, indeed all those who were considered "non-white." One of the primary reasons why such policies could be made into law was that non-whites were not allowed to vote, and so racist legislation never had to take into account whether those who were its victims might vote the legislators out of office. Anti-Chinese politics and white supremacy were tools used to help organize political coalitions and fuelled political campaigns during elections.

This is our history. And today, a moment occurred when we all acknowledged that this history is all of ours together. Not just the particular story of Chinese Canadians, as if the only interesting thing about the Chinese in British Columbia was that they were the victims of racism, but a part of all of our common history, so that today we acknowledged that the experiences of Chinese Canadians and the story of racism and exclusion is the story of all of us in British Columbia, and that the days are now over when we can ignore the stories of what happened to those of Chinese descent, as if their story is somehow not our story.

When are we?  I hope that today we stand at a moment in our collective history when we can no longer say that Chinese Canadian history is only the history of those who are themselves of Chinese descent, or that each of our histories belong only to our own particular communities. Chinese Canadian history is all of ours. It is our shared history--its sadness and bitterness as much as its struggles and triumphs.

Today we did not overcome our dark history. That was, and continues to be, a long process more often than not resulting from the everyday struggles of ordinary people trying to endure and overcome injustice, each in their own way contributing to making a more just and fair society. People like my grandfather, who worked almost his entire life as a cook on the Princess Patricia, one of the first Alaskan cruise ships sailing out of Vancouver. He paid the Head Tax when he came to Canada as a young teenager, and lived and worked the rest of his life in Canada, much of it being treated as a second class citizen. He is no longer alive today to enjoy this moment of atonement and redemption. But it is his day, and that of countless others like him who quietly toiled amidst the cold dark of difficult days. Today we consecrate the sacrifices they made, and the suffering they endured, so that we all could live in a better world. Today was a day to recognize old wrongs, but also to acknowledge that it was often the victims of injustice who stood up and forced others to recognize the inequity of enjoying privileges unfairly denied to others. Today we remember again that there is no justice for all, if there is only justice for some.

When are we? Today is a day for us to give thanks. To bow our heads and remember those who remained hopeful. Those who even amidst the darkest days, hoped beyond hope that someday there would be light again. They endured and persevered--on all our behalf. And even if they themselves never had the chance to see the sun arise at last, today we remember them for their struggles and for their belief in a just world where a wrong is a wrong, no matter how much time passes, and that it is never too late to finally make things right.


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Thursday, March 20, 2014

Saying Sorry


Opinion: How does a province say sorry? 

By Henry Yu, Special to the Vancouver Sun March 20, 2014

Opinion: How does a province say sorry?
Dr. Henry Yu is a historian and associate professor of history and principal of St. John’s College at UBC.

Over the last past two months, the government of British Columbia has been holding consultations on the wording of an apology for the anti-Chinese provincial legislation that marked much of the first half of B.C. history.

The process opens a broader discussion about how a society can reckon with the darker moments of its past. How do you say sorry for something that happened decades ago, before many of today’s British Columbians were born or even arrived in Canada?

I was born in Vancouver in 1967, the 100th anniversary of Canadian confederation. My grandfather came to Canada in 1923, just before Chinese immigration was cut off for the next 45 years, and he paid the $500 Chinese head tax, the equivalent of several years of a worker’s salary at the time. My great-grandfather before him also paid the head tax when he came in the 19th century to help build B.C. Now I teach history at UBC, and my classes are full of Chinese Canadians and other Asian Canadian students who would have been the targets for legalized racial discrimination even 50 years ago. Many of them come from families who only entered Canada after racial barriers to non-white immigration were removed in 1968.

Why should we say sorry when so few of the original actors are alive today? Unlike a personal apology, a government apology is an acknowledgment of collective responsibility and the long-term effects created by government policies. When you buy a share in a company, and that company’s product proves to be defective, you cannot say your share price should not go down because you bought your shares after the defective product was sold. You now have a shared stake in the company, and have a collective responsibility and liability for whatever happened beforehand, even if you were not personally involved.

Like a personal apology, however, there must be a substance in saying sorry. If my child breaks your child’s toy on the playground, it is not enough that my child just says sorry. Even if sincere, an apology is only symbolic and potentially empty unless there is some attempt to remedy the harm. If I cannot help fix the toy my child broke, I could at least try to replace the toy or try to cover the loss in some other way.

One of the harms of anti-Chinese legislation decades ago has been in the shaping of our collective history around the history of some people but not others, so we do not even acknowledge or remember the long-term presence or legacy of people such as my grandfather and great-grandfather.

Although an apology could and should have taken place decades ago, it is still better late than never. Over the past two years, I have been involved at UBC in a broad campus effort to recognize Japanese Canadian students who had been forcibly removed from UBC in 1942, most of whom were never able to complete their degrees.

A singularly amazing retired schoolteacher, Mary Kitagawa, had written a letter in 2008 to the president of UBC, asking whether these 76 students could receive honorary degrees in recognition of what they had lost when they were taken away from their studies by legislated racism. Kitagawa never abandoned her quest for justice, and finally after four long years, UBC committed to try to make right an old wrong (watch a film clip of the event here). Even though only 11 of the students, now in their late 80s and 90s, could receive their degrees in person — the vast majority having died in the ensuing 70 years — the ceremony was moving and important precisely because this degree of justice was better late than never.

The Senate of UBC unanimously voted recently for the new Asian Canadian and Asian Migration studies program, fulfilling a pledge made in 2011 to create a permanent educational program so the history of anti-Asian racism that led to the forced removal of Japanese Canadians in 1942 would not be forgotten. The lessons learned at UBC from this process, and ones that the province might observe, is that an institution can effectively acknowledge the wrongs of the past, and that saying sorry should be more than just words.

As a province, just what are we apologizing for, and to whom are we apologizing? Anti-Chinese legislation in B.C. was persistent, broad in effect, and in place for the majority of our past. Provincial legislation enacted in 1871, soon after confederation, took the vote away from almost all those deemed non-white. Laws passed by the province in the ensuing decades restricted where Chinese and other Asian Canadians could work, whether they could own land or receive government contracts, even whether they could become professionals. Many provincial professional associations, for instance, deliberately excluded from membership those who could not vote in provincial elections, and because anti-Asian laws prevented Chinese and most other Asians from voting until 1947, they could not become doctors or lawyers or engineers in B.C. for the first half of our history.

A substantive apology needs to address the following:

1) Public education (K-12, university, museums, and mass media) about how our history was shaped by co-ordinated legislated racism and discrimination against not only Chinese Canadians and other Asian Canadians, but also first nations and aboriginal peoples, and the need to mitigate the damage and continuing legacies of policies such as the reserve system and aboriginal residential schooling.

2) Acknowledge the broader heritage of British Columbia through recognition of historical sites that are meaningful to those communities who have been left for so long out of our collective history. For instance, all along the Fraser River are astounding archaeological sites left by Chinese Canadian miners who built elaborate stone works. Last summer, a group of British Columbians aged 8-82 went on a river raft expedition to see these sites. (watch "Gold Mountain River") Yet our Heritage Protection Act does not legally protect these sites even though they date to the Gold Rush. The provincial government should change the date for qualifying for heritage status from 1840 to a later date that recognizes the importance of saving our shared heritage for future generations, as well as for the tourism that remains our No. 1 industry.

3) Create a permanent endowment in honour of those who suffered, worked through, and eventually overturned the legislated racism in B.C., with a goal of providing resources for public education and a long term re-imagining of our history and future. We often forget that those who were excluded and treated unfairly have done the most to create the more just and fair British Columbia that we now enjoy.

How should we all pay for this endowed fund? Although the federal government enacted the discriminatory Chinese head tax in 1885, the provincial government received about 40 per cent of the revenue gathered. This was not a trivial amount before the introduction of the income tax. The $23 million in total revenue Canada and B.C. split would be worth $1.5 billion today. Many of our bridges, hospitals, roads, and other provincial infrastructure were financed by a tax only the Chinese were forced to pay. Even if we only gave back a symbolic one per cent of the value of the head tax, that would still create a $15-million endowment to help remedy the damage done.

We need to re-think how we understand and teach our history, so it is accurate and recognizes both the long history of white supremacy that shaped our development as well as the continuous presence of the non-white peoples who have been here both before and throughout our province’s history. We still live with many of the legacies of that history, including the reserve system and residential schooling for first nations and aboriginal peoples on whose ancestral territory the province was built.

This revision of our common history and future cannot be limited to K-12 education. Public education through museums, mass media, and material aimed at new immigrants must also take place. We cannot build a common future for this society, especially considering the changing demographics of our classrooms and our neighbourhoods, unless we have a common history that reflects all of the histories of the peoples — including dark moments of discrimination and racism — who were in British Columbia together.

When the B.C. government makes its planned apology, there needs to be substance to go with the words. The apology is not primarily to people such as my grandfather and great-grandfather; they are no longer alive to hear or accept it. The apology is for all British Columbians to acknowledge and share in the collective responsibility we have for our shared history, and for all of us to work together for a shared future.

Dr. Henry Yu is a historian and associate professor of history and principal of St. John’s College at UBC. He served as the project lead for Chinese Canadian Stories at UBC, and the Initiative for Student Teaching and Research in Chinese Canadian Studies at UBC. He also co-chaired the city of Vancouver Dialogues between First Nations, Urban Aboriginal, and Immigrant Communities project.
              
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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Thursday, March 13, 2014

Sharing Our Stories: Vancouver Dialogues Project



In 2010, a groundbreaking cross-cultural project was launched. The Vancouver Dialogues Project created many ways for Aboriginal and immigrant communities to gather together in dialogue and cultural sharing. Set amidst the stunning landscape of Vancouver Coast Salish traditional territory, Sharing our Stories captures the personal reflections of some very thoughtful project participants, including Aboriginal elders and leaders Larry Grant, Leah George-Wilson and Marjorie White, as well as public figures John Ralston Saul and former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson. The video celebrates the achievement of the project, while showcasing some of the diverse events and collaborations that took place. It is an inspiring tool for those wishing to engage in cross-cultural work and dialogue.
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Saturday, February 1, 2014

Teaching Chinese Canadian History


CBC Our Vancouver, February 1, 2014, with Gloria Macarenko
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Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Bilingualism isn't a sign of Community Decay

OpEd in the Province "Racism in Paradise" Series, Oct. 7, 2013

http://www.theprovince.com/news/racism/Guest+column+Bilingualism+sign+community+decay/9007315/story.html

Guest column: Bilingualism isn’t a sign of community decay

Resentment over multiculturalism seems to fester just under the surface

BY HENRY YU, SPECIAL TO THE PROVINCE OCTOBER 7, 2013
Guest column: Bilingualism isn’t a sign of community decay

Professor Henry Yu.

Photograph by: Arlen Redekop , PROVINCE

While riding the 99B bus last year when it was filled to standing room only, I overheard a man say to his companion that he hated how people spoke Chinese to each other. He said it with a visceral anger that caught my attention. I noticed that he was staring at a group of young people across the aisle who were conversing in Cantonese.
I wondered what so infuriated this man. Were they saying something that had offended him? I listened for several minutes but they were just joking about a mutual friend. I realized that what angered the man was not what they were saying -- it was that he could not understand what they were saying. The man, in the meantime, was now telling his companion how Vancouver had gone “downhill.”
I spent the rest of my cross-city journey listening to this pair of conversations -- one a lighthearted discussion among friends, and the other a running social commentary about everything wrong with our society.
Who are we in this city? Is that crowded bus a microcosm of us? On the one hand a city full of young people speaking Chinese, Punjabi, Filipino, English, and dozens of other languages; on the other a seething mass of not-so-quiet resentment?
I was born in Vancouver and I have seen many profound changes here in my life. I also study these changes as a historian. As with many devoted Vancouverites, I wonder about our future together. But I see it through a different lens. For me, the question of who we are is tied to where we are, and when we are.
Where are we? We live in a place that is the product of a long series of continual engagements between trans-Atlantic migrants, trans-Pacific migrants, and indigenous peoples. Our neighbourhoods contain a diversity of origins but also other important aspects of what makes for a rich and vibrant society.
Richmond, a city that to many seems monolithically Chinese, in fact contains a diversity of ethnic Chinese from a wide spectrum of backgrounds. Some speak Cantonese and others speak Mandarin, languages as different from each other when spoken as Italian from French.
When are we? For the first half of our civic history, we were a city of many origins speaking many languages. These included Cantonese, Japanese, Punjabi, and English, but also many Coast Salish and First Nations languages.
We are again a city full of many origins and multiple languages. The challenge is how we deal with what happened in between. We are still recovering from a dark period when non-whites could not vote, were legally excluded from most good jobs, and could not live in many neighbourhoods.
Residential schooling systematically split aboriginal youth from their families in order to strip them of their language and culture.
On the whole, we have repudiated many of the laws and moral values that shaped that period. But there are still many legacies that remain and which cannot be wished away just by saying we have changed.
One of those legacies is the odd belief that it is better that we all speak only English for the benefit of those who can only speak English, rather than allowing those who can speak both English and other languages to be respected and even rewarded for being able to speak many languages. English is extremely useful as a lingua franca, a language used in common by many people who can also speak other languages. That is fundamentally different than saying we should all speak only English all the time.
In this city, almost all those under the age of 25 who can speak Chinese can also speak English. They have the wonderful ability to speak multiple languages.
Those Cantonese-speaking youngsters on the bus likely use English most of the time at school and work. Why be angry at them for being able to also carry on a conversation in another language?
Earlier this year, a proposal was made to Richmond City Council that would require all businesses to have English-language signs. We should celebrate the council’s rejection of that idea. For too long, anti-Asian laws existed in Vancouver and British Columbia that targeted Chinese and other Asians. The memory of that legacy is still raw.
Is there a challenge for non-Chinese customers in a Chinese restaurant that has only Chinese menus and signs? If those who cannot speak Chinese want to eat at some of the best Chinese restaurants in the world, my suggestion is to make a friend at work, or in your neighbourhood, or at your church, who can speak both English and Chinese.
To thank them for translating, host a meal in return. Rather than trying to pass laws, cross the aisle and create a social bond that will make a more civil society that talks and eats together.
Dr. Henry Yu is a professor of history at UBC and was the Co-Chair of the City of Vancouver’s “Dialogues between First Nations, Urban Aboriginal, and Immigrant Communities” Project.
© Copyright (c) The Province
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Monday, October 7, 2013

White Canada Forever?


A shameful history

UBC historian Henry Yu believes the province's history of race-based policies is best described with a simple, shocking word: apartheid.

By The Province October 7, 2013
 
 

UBC historian Henry Yu believes the province's history of race-based policies is best described with a simple, shocking word: apartheid.
"We don't like to think of ourselves as a white supremacist society, but we were," said the founding member of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of B.C. "We cleared people who were here first, we disenfranchised people. At the time, this was a white minority rule. Just go back and look at what they said at the time: 'White Canada Forever.' Doesn't that sound like South Africa?" It is a deeply uncomfortable question, but one British Columbians must confront if we are to truly grasp the way our past has shaped us, and to move past prejudices.
To Yu, the crucial difference between South Africa and ourselves is apartheid here
- in the form of laws banning ethnic groups from voting and immigrating - was dismantled without violence. "We are a more just society because people in that nightmare fought for their rights," Yu said. "But we're still dealing with these legacies."
B.C.'s deeply racist and exclusionary history spans many years and races. It includes our treatment of First Nations in the reserve system and residential schools, the Chinese head tax and Exclusion Act, discrimination against Indian passengers on the Komagata Maru and the Japanese internment. It has left a legacy of division in our society.
Take ethnic enclaves. The 1981 census counted six areas in Canada with 30 per cent ethnic residents. Today, there are over 260 ethnic enclaves in Canada.
Enclaves can be traced to British settlers who went west to avoid the French in the east and Eastern Europeans in the Prairies.
"You could have a land title in the British Properties that said you could not sell the land to nonwhites. They could play out this colonial vision in a way that wasn't possible in the rest of Canada," said Alden E. Habacon, UBC's director of intercultural understanding.
Without knowledge of history, he says, stereotypes about why cultures cluster together persist.
"White anxiety" that Indo-Canadians cluster in Surrey could be addressed by learning Indo-Canadians could buy land more easily in Surrey, which lacked the racist property restrictions of Vancouver. Where immigrants settled in desirable locations, we evicted them, like the selling off of Japanese properties along Kits Beach.
"We are living with the result of this history," said Habacon, a Filipino-Canadian.
"But we have so erased their memory. Ignorance of history is one of the most powerful colonial tools."
Barney Williams Jr. knows all about ignorance. A member of Tlaoquiaht First Nation, Williams was sent to a residential school at age five, where he was beaten for speaking his language, and abused by a priest. The schools left a generation with posttraumatic stress.
"We've had generations of violence, suicide, drug abuse, alcohol and dysfunctional families." Thousands of First Nations children were taught "we are a lazy good-for-nothing people. That is not true. We have a lot of successful First Nations, but nobody talks about them."
Williams is a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Residential Schools Survivor Committee. When he talks to students, he's found few non-native youth have even heard of this dark chapter.
Miko Hoffman of Burnaby's Nikkei National Museum laments that, for interned Japanese-Canadians, the legacy of racism was a hollowing out of their core.
"We had a geographic community, and that all disappeared," Hoffman said of the diaspora from Japan Town and Steveston.
"We lost the centre, the heart. We're still struggling to rebuild."
Blacks in B.C. also lost their centre when Hogan's Alley was razed in the 1970s to make way for the Georgia Viaduct. But blacks are often omitted from tallies of B.C.'s racist legacy.
One reason, said B.C. Black History Awareness Society president Mavis DeGirolamo, is they suffered more individual than legal discrimination. Blacks retained the right to vote, could join city council and buy land.
However, it didn't protect them from prejudice and segregation in public spaces like pools and theatres.
"We need oral histories to point to the day-to-day discrimination," said DeGirolamo.
Surrey Art Gallery curator and cultural historian Naveen Girn has made a career of telling day-to-day stories of cultural communities.
His research on Indo-Canadian history has revealed lost tales of intercultural integration: a Chinese photographer famed for Indo-Canadian portraits, a Hindu paper
printed on a Chinatown press.
Girn believes prejudices - like the view B.C.'s non-white ethnicities should assimilate in language, culture or dress - linger because of a poor grasp of how formative they are to our society.
"People say, 'When in Rome, do as the Romans," said Girn, whose parents hail from Fiji.
"But we are the Romans." Yu believes its time to stop blaming people for ethnic clustering or clinging to customs. To move forward, we need to see diversity as an asset.
"We are an incredibly vibrant society," Yu said, "but for most of B.C.'s history, diversity is something we tried to suppress."
Habacon's story points a way forward. Despite his grandparents' pleas to marry "his own kind," Habacon's wife is Chinese and they have a son with dual heritage. How can B.C. become as intercultural? "With intent," Habacon said.
"We've been winging it. Putting a bunch of different people together and thinking they'll work it out. It takes so much work and fostering to get to that."
And, added Habacon, it takes re-engaging with our racist past.
"The absence of knowledge is what reinforces racism," he said. "We can't get there without the history."
eoconnor@theprovince.com twitter.com/elaine_oconnor
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