During 2010, I had the privilege
of being involved with a unique process organized by the City of Vancouver.
Recognizing that in Vancouver, we stood at a historic juncture in which new
immigrant communities have transformed the populations of our city, we began a
conversation that we hoped would allow for the creation of a common future
together for immigrant and aboriginal communities. Moving forward meant
creating a new vision of Canada that recognized a history of injustices to both
aboriginal peoples and non-white immigrants. This terrible history--wrought by
white supremacist policies of land dispossession, residential schooling,
immigrant exclusion, and racial discrimination in voting, housing, and
employment—needed to be acknowledged and its legacies made widely known before
a more optimistic future could be envisioned together. We hoped that if this
process could be started in Vancouver, that it also might inspire other cities
and regions of Canada to undergo a similar process of dialogue that would help
lay the groundwork for a transformation of our society.
As one of three Co-Chairs, along with Councillor
Wade Grant of the Musqueam Nation and Susan Tatoosh, Executive Director of
Vancouver’s Urban Aboriginal Friendship Centre, the Steering Committee was a
diverse group of representatives from Vancouver’s local First Nations of
Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh, from urban aboriginal organizations, immigrant
settlement organizations, and neighborhood houses, and academics from local
universities. The Steering Committee was formed to help advise city social
planners Baldwin Wong and Karen Fong in helping plan and implement a series of
dialogue circles involving members of local First Nations, urban aboriginal,
and immigrant communities.
The Steering Committee recognized that many new arrivals in Canada received
very little information about the history of aboriginal peoples, and in
particular of the devastating effects of government policies such as
residential schooling, and therefore through no intention of their own were
often left only with stereotypes and the negative images of popular culture as
the basis for their knowledge about aboriginal peoples.
What could be generated, we wondered, if we could
organize a dialogue process in which small groups mixing engaged and thoughtful
participants from aboriginal and immigrant communities could speak and listen
to each other in a safe and secure environment? How could we help begin to
address the gaps of knowledge that existed, so that as our society continues to
be changed by new arrivals, they can work together with First Nations and
aboriginal peoples on building better communities through a process of shared
understanding rather than ignorance and misapprehension? Could we produce
together from these dialogues a story of who we are, and where we are, and who
we aspire to be?
Who am I? Where am I? What is an immigrant? Who was here first?
My name in English is Henry Yu.
My Cantonese name is 余全毅 , and I was born in Vancouver in the year of
Canada’s Centenniel. My maternal grandfather, Yeung Sing Yew, and his brothers
and their father before them, came to British Columbia from Zhongshan county in
Guangdong province in China. My parents, Yu Shing Chit and Yeung Kon Yee, came
to Canada three years before I was born, joining a community of family and kin
who had been crossing the Pacific back and forth for over 150 years. This is my
story, my history, and I tell it this way to acknowledge that although I was
born here, my family comes from somewhere else, and like all the migrants whose
families came to Vancouver from somewhere else, we have made our home on the
unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples. During the Dialogues
Project, urban aboriginal participants invariably acknowledged, during their
stories of “who they were,” a story at the same time about the First Nations or
Métis communities somewhere else in B.C. or Canada or the United States from
which they or their families came. This story about “where they were from” was
at the same time an important acknowledgment about where they were now, that
they now lived on someone else’s territory as a guest.
It seems like such a simple
thing, to acknowledge that my family comes from somewhere else, and that except
for the First Nations who were here before migrants arrived in the 18th
and 19th centuries from across the Atlantic and Pacific, we are all
late arrivals. But in Vancouver, in British Columbia, and in Canada in general,
stories of arrival and claims about belonging are fraught with violence.
Oftentimes the violence has been physical—involving the removal and abuse of
bodies—but the violence has also been a very effective narrative violence, a
mythic story of dispossession and possession that renders damage by distorting
and celebrating the stories of some people, while silencing and erasing the
stories of others.
I was born here, but when I was
growing up, the history I learned in school was a collection of stories I could
not recognize. “Our” story, I was told, was of people who came from across the
water far away, who rode a train across a vast land and built a place called
Canada. Some of those people had English names, and some of them had French
names. But somehow my grandfather and greatgrandfather and people with names
like mine were missing. I remember just once, hearing that the Chinese had
helped build the railroad upon which the Canadians rode, but then they
disappeared into silence for the rest of the story. What were they doing the
rest of the time?
In the third grade, my teacher
asked us to build models of either the traditional long houses or the ocean
canoes of the Coast Salish peoples. Since I was eight years old and forbidden
at home to use a sharp knife, my older brother helped me carve a canoe out of
balsa wood, based upon a picture we found in a library book. I was so proud of
my little carving, and after the class celebrated our achievements, I kept the
canoe on my desk at home all the way into high school. Seeing it reminded me of
the lesson that day in school, about how native peoples had lived here before
the arrival of Europeans. It was the last time in school that I remember being
asked to think about the aboriginal people in whose land we lived. What were
they doing the rest of the time?
The rest of the time.
It is this silent erasure of time
that tells another set of histories. Stories ignored or kept in the narrow
margins in the sidebars of textbooks. Stories erased from our common past. It
is not that the story of my grandfather and others like him was untold. He told
it to those within the family, or to his friends, in fragments and snippets.
Some of those stories involved interactions and relationships between Chinese
and aboriginal peoples. There was a world only glimpsed by the rest of us, a
world in which the railroad that my greatgrandfather and his relatives helped
build ran through indigenous communities all the way up the Fraser Canyon, and
even as the Chinese finished laying the tracks in 1885 and were immediately
asked to pay an onerous Head Tax in order to keep coming, they kept coming.
They kept coming by the boatload in the tens of thousands year after year,
working in mines, and in logging camps, and in canneries, and in grocery
stores, and the farms that grew the produce for those stores, and as cooks and
laundry men, and café and store owners in every small town in B.C. and across
the Prairies all the way to Halifax.
Even as those migrants whose
families had come from Europe rode the train westwards and arrived to see
aboriginal people and Chinese everywhere already, those young Chinese men like
my great grandfather walked and rode the train in the other direction, often
marrying into local aboriginal communities and creating a very different world
than the one I had learned about in textbooks about “westward” expansion and
settlement. When that mixed and unique world was steadily eroded and ended by
the ethnic cleansing of aboriginal peoples through reservations and residential
schooling, and by anti-Asian immigration legislation and exclusion, the traces
of memory remained within many aboriginal communities of Chinese men who were
fathers and grandfathers, and kindly local restaurant and store owners in small
towns who welcomed rather than turned away all customers no matter their race.
But they are only glimpses and fragments, traces of a real, lived history
targetted for eradication and erased from a collective memory framed narrowly
as a white settler history of the Canadian nation. We supposedly have two
“Founding Peoples” of Canada—the English and the French. But when Canadian
Confederation was invented, there were many other people already here, and the
colony of British Columbia was just as much in existence as what would become
Ontario and Quebec. And the presence already of Chinese, as well as Native
Hawaiians and other Pacific migrants in B.C., along with the complex indigenous
societies along the coast and in the interior, could not simply be erased.
Stories long ignored or forgotten can be told and retold, filling the silences
created by erasure.
During the opening launch
reception for the Dialogues Project, a short snippet of a documentary made by
the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of B.C. entitled “Cedar and Bamboo” was
shown. The film, produced by CCHSBC Board members Jennifer Lau and Karin Lee,
and directed by Diana Leung and Kamala Todd (who is also one of the City of
Vancouver’s Dialogues Circle Project Team), focused on the stories of four
people of mixed Chinese-aboriginal ancestry. The film makers had a powerful
vision of the impact that recovering these forgotten and ignored histories
could make. By providing a historical context for considering the long history
of engagements between aboriginal peoples and immigrants who were otherwise
unwelcome, the film created an important moment of mutual recognition through a
shared past. Musqueam Councillor Wade Grant, one of the three Co-Chairs of the
Steering Committee for the Dialogues Project, spoke movingly about growing up
aware of his own mixed ancestry, and of his pride over seeing the story of his
own father, Howard Grant, featured in the film. The family history of the
Grants themselves perhaps exemplified the promise of opening up a dialogue
about histories still too uncommonly told, and the challenge of what kind of
shared future still awaits us.
So much of our common past is
left out of what is supposed to be our common history, so that we are left with
an array of uncommon stories that do not add up. One of the triumphs of a white
supremacist colonial history of Canada was the mythical alchemy that made it
possible for everyone who arrived from Europe to become a “Canadian,” and for
all those who were non-white to remain a “visible minority,” forever arriving
late, or a “native” forever destined to disappear. During the early 20th
century, when anti-Asian politics ruled British Columbia, the slogan used was
“White Canada Forever,” a phrase that meant those who were considered “white”
owned not only the future, but also the past. The moment a migrant stepped off
the boat in Halifax from Glasgow, even before he climbed aboard the train that
might take him all the way to Vancouver, he was already a “Canadian.” His
“accent” would not undermine his claims to belong in the way that speaking
English with an “Oriental” accent would, and still does. Despite the fact that
migrants from across the Pacific arrived at the same time on Coast Salish land
as those migrants from across the Atlantic, white supremacy built a sense of
belonging around “whiteness.” Non-English speaking “white” migrants could gain
the status of full belonging in Canada by speaking English and converting
themselves to Anglophone dominance. Those who were considered non-white were
not accorded the same privileges and possibilities.
Say the word “immigrant” and who
do you imagine? To those aboriginal peoples whose ancestors welcomed the first
trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific migrants to these shores, everyone is a
migrant to their homeland. If we are to all make a home together here, there
can be no reconciliation with the inequities of our past until this simple
truth is recognized. But the demographic reality of our present and future must
also be taken into account. There is a “New Canada” being made in the last four
decades since immigration reform removed racial barriers to non-white
migration. The top 10 places of birth for immigrants who arrived in Canada
between 2001 and 2006 included only two Europeans countries. The United
Kingdom, which was the dominant #1 sending nation for the first century of
Canadian history, was on the list at #9, sending just over 25,000 new
immigrants. In contrast, 6 of the top 10 countries were in Asia, and the top 4
on the list alone—the Peoples Republic of China, India, the Philippines, and
Pakistan, accounted for 2/3 of all new migrants to Canada in that period, with
the PRC sending over 155,000, India over 129,000, the Philippines over 77,000,
and Pakistan over 57,000.
In 2006, 83.9% of all new
immigrants to Canada came from regions outside of Europe, and the very moniker
“visible minority” to designate “non-white” Canadians had become a questionable
description, in particular to describe Canada’s urban populations. Over 96% of
Canada’s “visible minorities” live in metropolitan regions. Two main groups—
South Asians and self-identified ethnic Chinese—accounted for 1/2 of all
visible minorities in Canada, with each accounting for roughly 1/4 of the
total. Other migrants from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia
are remaking our society. Ethnic Chinese and South Asians account for 8% of
Canada’s total population, but because they have settled overwhelmingly in
either the metropolitan regions of Toronto or Vancouver, they have transformed
those cities. Between 1980 and 2001, for instance, the largerst proportion of
new migrants to Canada were ethnic Chinese who came from various locations in
Southeast Asia (including Hong Kong), along with migrants born in the Peoples
Republic of China. These various ethnic Chinese migrants went overwhelmingly
(87%) to the five largest cities in Canada, with 41% going to Toronto and 31%
to Vancouver alone.
What is clear is that
trans-Pacific migration from Asia, as well as “visible minority” migrants in
general from outside Europe, have transformed Canada in the last 25 years.
Vancouver in particular has become a city in which the term “visible minority”
makes no sense. In 2006, 4 out of 10 Vancouverites had been born outside
Canada, and 5 out of 10 were of Asian ancestry. Richmond and Burnaby, suburbs
of metropolitan Vancouver, were 65% and 55% visible minority, and 50% of
Richmond’s population is ethnic Chinese--in Vancouver, Canada’s third largest
city, the “visible minority” is “white.”
If the “New Canada” can be
understood by looking at the changed face of Vancouver in the present, so too
can the future be seen in the largely non-white faces of our youth. Visible
minorities in Canada are literally the face of tomorrow—their median age in
2006 was 33, versus an average age of 39 for the population as a whole. The
fast growing non-white population of our younger generations also includes
First Nations and aboriginal youth, who represent one of the fastest growing segments
of Canada’s young. The future of Canada can be seen in our changing
demographics, but are we ready to meet the challenges of this new world?
The Dialogues Project was meant
to engage in a sharing of our pasts—who we are and where we are from—but also
to create a shared understanding about who we aspire to be in the future. Nine
locations were chosen as sites for dialogue, with a mix of participants
selected from volunteers and those identified and invited by the Steering
Committee as having valuable insigts to contribute to the conversations. We
strove to include both elders and youth of aboriginal and immigrant backgrounds
in as many of the groups as possible, recognizing that wisdom and life
experience blended with the fresh curiousity of the young was an important
element of bridging many of the generational gaps that exist in both aboriginal
and immigrant communities. Each of the groups met three times and was guided in
its discussions by one of a set of trained facilitators, led by Eric Wong, and
a group of volunteer youth leaders played a prominent role with the intention
of having them also lead an outreach process to broaden the process to other
youth. A closing dialogue circle involving all of the groups together was held
at the Vancouver Public Library, with the Mayor of Vancouver Gregor Robertson
and several City Councilors in attendance, as well as Her Honourable Adrienne
Clarkson; the former Governor General of Canada and her husband John Saul had
taken a keen interest in the Dialogues Project, with the intention of exploring
how similar dialogues might take place in other sites across Canada.
After the dialogue circles ended,
a series of site visits were organized. The Steering Committee believed that
these were crucial for creating a sense of familiarity and welcome among the
participants. Urban environments so easily become segregated spaces, and like
welcoming a neighbor into one’s own home, a mutual process of visitation and
hospitality was seen as an organic outgrowth of the sharing of stories within
the dialogue circles. At the conclusion of the Dialogues Project, some of the
most interesting insights and moments will be made available in both a written
and video form. Although all conversations from the circles themselves were
private and kept anonymous in order to create and maintain a safe and secure
atmosphere for dialogue, follow up intereviews and a summation of many of the
issues brought up during the dialogues will become a valuable document that we
hope will become the basis for further discussion and educational outreach, in
particular for addressing the dearth of information about First Nations and
aboriginal issues and history currently provided to new immigrants to Canada.
Even as we break the silences and
speak the truth about many of the terrible things that have been done in our
past, we are left with the task of trying to understand what we have in common,
what we can take from our broken past, upon which we can build a shared future.
Do we need a shared past in order to have a common future? I became a historian
in a quest to answer this basic question, and the Dialogues Project for me is
an important part of a collective, collaborative project for those sets of
people whose stories have often been silenced or ignored, so that they could
speak and hear each other’s stories. We hoped that each of us in listening
would be able to know ourselves and each other a bit better, and to generate a
dialogue that created a mutual understanding of our differences as well as what
we shared in common.
We remain so far away from
creating together a new shared future. The settlement of land claims and treaty
negotiations, and a much needed reconciliation process will be long and hard.
But perhaps through one story at a time about who we are and where we are from,
we can begin to build in a collaborative manner a new shared history, one that
recognizes the painful aspects of our past, and perhaps even provides a common
understanding of who we are and where we are.
