[♪♪]
[Henry Yu] We are in a place that was an Indigenous place
for thousands and thousands of years.
And then, very recently,
within the last two and a half centuries,
people began to arrive from other parts of the world.
That basic framing of the story is what we have to reckon with,
because as people arrived from other parts of the world,
some nasty things happened.
[Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra] When you look at posters
of the British Empire saying "Come to Canada,"
they're iconic images
of white women holding their children,
blazing in the Prairies.
That's the kind of immigrant British Columbia wanted
at the time.
It wasn't just "Anybody, come into British Columbia."
It was "We want a very specific immigrant."
[Naveen Girn] This idea
of what British Columbia wanted to be
has always been fraught with tension.
And people of colour had to fight
to be included into that story.
[Imogene Lim] They were the ones who fought for your rights,
and that is, for me,
one of the most significant things
about telling this story.
[♪♪]
[Shane Koyczan] You're looking at
what some people call British Columbia.
From every corner of our world, people have come to this place.
Some risked their lives to come here...
while others paid with them.
All of them in search of a common desire...
opportunity for a better life.
Opportunities, however, have little concern
for what's equal or fair,
and amidst the tempers and ego of man,
there's long been debate about who got here first,
who made the rules,
and who ran the rhythm of the way things would run.
Today, like the explorers who set sail
in hopes of discovery,
we, too, will peer through
the sextant that helped map our identity.
Tales to tell us why this place is the way it is
and reflections on how we became...
who we've become.
[Yu] The people who arrived here first
who were not Indigenous,
basically, British and Spanish explorers,
they were crossing the Pacific from Asia.
And so on board their ships were often Chinese,
Pacific Islanders, native Hawaiians.
They were catching rides
in exchange, often, for working as crew.
So at the first moment
that the British started to try to settle here
in British Columbia,
there were Chinese also here.
Now, that's not to say somehow that, you know,
Chinese are founding peoples for British Columbia.
No, they were all non-Indigenous peoples
coming from around the world onto Indigenous lands.
But they weren't recognized in British Columbia history
until quite recently,
and the people have become more aware.
Like many of the migrants who came to North America,
the Chinese who were leaving small rural villages,
this new world was seen as a land of opportunity.
[David Wong] There's so much poverty
and unrest in China
that Chinese came to North America
to seek their fortunes.
[Yu] And one of the iconic moments
was to get to the point where you could go back
to the village that you grew up in.
You'd come back literally with a chest full of things,
dressed up,
and start to give out gifts.
[Wong] The idea was not to let your family worry,
so the people over here would brag
or exaggerate their success stories.
And the whole North American continent
became known as Gold Mountain.
[Yu] And so generation after generation
came to British Columbia
because there were men who had come back for visits.
And it was clear that in Gold Mountain,
they had made it big.
So there's lots of young men dreaming.
"I want to be that guy."
And then the railroad was built.
[John Belshaw] As the railway's being built,
the contractors responsible for assembling the railway
recruit large numbers of workers from China.
And they arrive in huge numbers, in the tens of thousands,
and take on some of the hardest, most dangerous work
involved in building the railway.
[Yu] The largest reason why
is because you could transport large numbers of people,
by ship,
across the Pacific,
to the West Coast of North America
very efficiently.
[ship's horn blaring]
If you were leaving by ship from Europe
to get to the West Coast here,
you'd basically go around the world.
But the Chinese could come fairly easily.
So the reason why the Chinese built the railroad
is because until they built it,
you couldn't really get large numbers of labourers
from the Atlantic coast.
[Wong] The most difficult line for the CPR
was between what is now Vancouver
towards the Rocky Mountains.
The geography here is very treacherous.
You've got steep canyons, you've got mountains,
and you've got all these difficult passages.
And the Chinese were hired
because they were willing to undertake work
that was dangerous,
and they were regarded by the CPR as disposable.
And because the work was so dangerous,
there were a lot of accidents and fatalities.
And a lot of it
was because you're blasting through rock.
Remember, once you've blasted rock,
there's no supports,
no structural supports holding the walls up.
And these things would collapse.
[Yu] It's not as if you're a young man
in a rural village in China and go,
"I want to go risk my life
and get blown up by nitroglycerin,"
and "I want to die crushed by rocks
that were falling off a cliffside."
One of the things is you don't get recruited
with the real information of how deadly it is.
They had to remove large amounts of rocks
from the sides of cliffs and mountains
or for tunnels.
They had to do it through mountain passes.
Lots of Chinese workers died.
And it was because they had to build a railway
up the Fraser Canyon,
which is incredibly dangerous.
[Wong] There were safer routes to route the CPR,
but it was cheaper
for the Canadian Pacific Railroad
to lose the lives of the Chinese workers
along the construction
than it is for them to extend the railroad line
to go around the mountain.
There is a saying
that for every kilometre of CPR railroad,
there's six Chinese people who died.
We're talking about the thousands of individuals
who perished.
The cost of steel was more expensive
than the cost of human beings.
[Lim] The bulk of the lives that were lost
in building the track through the Fraser Canyon,
they were Chinese labourers.
People gave up their lives,
gave their labour,
so that Canada could be the Canada
that we know today.
[Wong] The workers who came here
were promised all sorts of wonderful things.
For example, there was an agreement
from the railroad companies
to send the remains of any persons who died,
accidentally or otherwise,
back to their homes in China.
That never happened.
What did happen
was that as the Chinese labourers
started to establish themselves,
they organized benevolent associations,
and if a person perished,
they would ship the bones back to their families in China.
But in terms of the actual obligation
from the government or from the CPR
to fulfill their promises,
that never happened.
When the railroad's finished,
they celebrate the completion of the CPR,
and, of course, none of the Chinese workers
were invited to the last spike at Craigellachie, B.C.
Once the railroad was completed,
all these families from Ontario, Quebec, and even from Europe
would now be jumping on the transcontinental railroad
heading towards B.C.
[Belshaw] By the time the CPR arrives,
we're seeing a massive transition
in population here.
From 1891 to 1911,
the population goes from about 100,000
to over 300,000 people.
That's a huge increase.
At the start of the period after Confederation,
the population is roughly a third, a third, a third.
A third Indigenous, a third white settler,
and a third Chinese.
By 1901, that's changed.
It's overwhelmingly a white settler community.
[Jean Barman] Britain is making a new dominion of Canada
out of colonies further east,
and adding British Columbia to this dominion
is really logical.
And so British Columbia was bribed with a railway.
And the railway transformed British Columbia totally.
For the first time,
you get the possibility for women, non-Indigenous women,
to turn up in British Columbia.
And you get a whole generation of entrepreneurs,
businessmen from central Canada who come west.
But suddenly, the families and people
who had already settled here
are replaced in good part
by settlers who arrive with the railway.
And for British Columbia,
the change is phenomenal
within a very short period of time.
[Belshaw] It's a transformative generation.
It really is one generation.
And it becomes the most Canadian place
in Canada
in the sense that there are people here
from all over Canada.
Every province is represented in British Columbia.
Outside of the Peace District and along the CPR line,
there's no land scheme in British Columbia.
There's no homesteading scheme, as there is in the Prairies.
And so the population really does grow
on the basis of the attractiveness of work,
and opportunity.
People are coming here to set up shops,
among other things.
They're coming here to be merchants in small towns
because every town is going to need a general store
or a baker or a butcher.
[Yu] One of the ways to understand Canadian history
in a new way
is that it wasn't empty trains going back the other way.
In fact, the trains
that were bringing European migrants and settlers
out westwards,
there was also Chinese riding the other way.
And for them, the opportunities went
all the way to the Maritime provinces.
[Belshaw] The white settlers were also coming here
in the hope of finding a job and holding a job
that's going to pay very high wages.
That was the attraction
of the resource extraction sector.
There are different ways to expropriate resources
from people,
and we're seeing a lot of them play out
in this period in time.
[Yu] The Chinese were in industries already
in the late 19th century,
but now you had people arriving on trains,
looking around,
and asserting that the Chinese are latecomers
and don't deserve to be here,
and they're all going to take away jobs
from white workers.
So there was very quickly the idea
that they were very useful, the Chinese,
for building the railway,
but now
we want to really disincentivize them coming,
so we're going to charge this head tax.
[Wong] The head tax was essentially an effort
by the government
to stop the flow of people coming from China to Canada.
And that came originally
as a small sum of $50 per person.
By 1904, the head tax was $500.
And that was perceived
as basically two years of one's salary.
[Wong] The amount of money collected from the head tax
was $24 million.
The CPR built the transcontinental railroad
for about $24 million.
The Chinese essentially funded the completion of the railroad,
and they paid for it
in more than just the collection of head taxes,
but also paid with it in lives.
The head tax was meant
to discourage Chinese from coming.
And yet almost 100,000 still came
during that period.
And it was because that, despite this penalty,
it was still worth it.
[Wong] Of course, the head tax,
that didn't stop the flow of people coming from China,
because people are leaving
because the situation in China was pretty bad.
And when the politicians here realized
that these Chinamen were still coming
over to Canada,
in 1923,
they decided to essentially stop the Chinese coming
by having the Chinese Immigration Act.
The Chinese Immigration Act essentially stated
that unless you are a certain class of people
coming from the identified nation of China,
students or businesspeople,
you were not allowed to migrate here.
[Lim] It's a way to maintain your whiteness.
If you're saying that Canada or B.C.
should be a white province or white Canada,
then you don't want people that are non-white
as citizens.
[Wong] The notion behind that
was that whoever's here in Canada
of Chinese ancestry
will die off,
and there'll be no more Chinese people
replenishing the population here.
[Lim] This is why the term "bachelor society"
is used.
It's not that the men truly were bachelors.
They had wives, families back in China.
They just couldn't bring them.
So here you were,
having all these men pining away for their families.
They couldn't have them.
[Wong] When I grew up,
there was a whole generation of elders,
and they were all single men.
I'd walk through Chinatown,
and they would come pat you on the head, you know,
pull your cheeks because, you know,
it was just such a novelty.
Same thing with seeing a Chinese woman.
My grandmother would tell me when she was younger,
she would walk down Chinatown,
and these men would be so enamoured
by seeing a Chinese woman
because they haven't seen a Chinese woman
in such a long time.
[Lim] Within 12 months of its enactment,
everyone had to be registered.
If you did not register within that 12 months,
you could be faced with a $500 fine
and/or imprisonment.
My grandfather passed away in 1924.
So imagine Grandma.
A widow.
In 1924.
Nine kids.
You may be born here,
but if you don't register,
you've got to pay that 500
and/or have 12 months of imprisonment.
If you're not able to work,
how are you going to get the $500?
We're talking about a patriarchal society.
Women are not outside,
out and about, working.
[Coll Thrush] There was a lot of debate
in the late 19th century
about labour and immigration,
and not just Asian immigration,
but also the immigration of people like Italians,
and Irish, and so on.
And it becomes a sort of a dialogue
between different ethnic groups
about who's included and who's not,
and, ultimately, who's included in whiteness.
[Belshaw] I always like to draw the distinction
between being a bigot and being a racist.
Being a bigot means you don't like something
that some other culture does,
but being a racist means
you're going to do something about it.
It means developing policies.
And they start to apply this white supremacist language
to policies.
[Thrush] The term "white supremacy" is scary
to a lot of people,
but I think it really is important
for us to think about how nations
like the U.S. and Canada
were built for some people to benefit from
more than others.
And sometimes the people
that actually built those nations
weren't able to benefit very much
from that building.
If you were an enslaved person,
if you were a Chinese railroad worker,
if you were an Indigenous person,
it was a vision of a white nation,
a largely white nation.
[Yu] Chinese could vote in the first elections,
but then that vote was taken away.
And that was one of the key elements
of building a political project
that would, you know, base laws around white supremacy.
[Belshaw] You read some of our histories,
and it'll tell you
that the Chinese community liked to huddle together
for safety and all this.
No, they were just told they couldn't buy property
outside of Chinatown.
"We're going to draw a line around you.
This is where you can buy property.
This is where you're allowed to reside."
And that's how Chinatowns are formed in this period.
They're ghettos that are invented
by the settler society
in the same way that reserves are created.
[Lim] Cumberland's Chinatown, if you go there,
it's actually in a swampy area.
People do not purposely live in swamps.
It's because that's where they could live.
And people seem to forget
that there were pieces of legislation
that restricted where people could live.
You could say it takes political work,
you know,
to become racist.
They had to convince a lot of people arriving
from all around the world.
"You're white, and you deserve more.
You deserve to be paid more.
You deserve to get land for free.
These other people, they're not white.
They don't deserve as much.
In fact, they don't deserve anything."
That is actually a radical notion
to try to implement
legally, so that it's part of every law,
morally, so that it seems right to people.
[Masako Fukawa] My paternal grandfather arrived
in 1895,
and there were a series
of anti-Japanese, anti-Asian policies and laws passed.
Because he could not vote,
he could not enter the professions.
He was barred from becoming a lawyer,
becoming a pharmacist,
becoming a civil servant,
because all those societies
required that you be on the voters list
in order to become a member.
It meant, then,
that you were relegated to being a labourer.
And so until 1949,
that's what they had to do.
They provided cheap labour
to people who took advantage of them.
[Lorene Oikawa] In 1906, a ship called the "Suian Maru"
left Sendai Miyagi Ken in Japan on August 31st,
and then didn't arrive till October 7th.
Because it was a large group,
it was very difficult during those days
to get paperwork.
So as you can imagine, they arrived without visas
and were promptly captured.
The Japanese consulate intervened
and brokered a deal
that would allow them not to be arrested
if they agreed to spend at least a year
working for the railroad,
which had a labour shortage at the time.
They had to purchase their own clothing,
their own food,
so, in fact, they were already in debt
for the supplies that they needed
and from their trip, too,
because there was a fine imposed on them.
It was like an indentured servitude.
[Sandhra] There was a league that was formed
called the Anti-Asiatic League.
And a lot of the rhetoric that you see around the posters
was around competition for labour,
competition for jobs.
Anybody who was "other" at the time,
so Chinese, Japanese, South Asians,
even Indigenous peoples,
were seen as competition.
[Yu] The anti-Chinese political organizing
that really dominated early B.C. history,
it began to be spread
onto other trans-Pacific migrant groups.
So what was anti-Chinese organizing
became anti-Asian organizing,
creating a generic exclusion
against all people from Asia.
[Sandhra] I think the crux of this
was really the anti-Asian riots that happened in 1907,
and it started in Bellingham,
so just across the border from us.
And that specifically targeted Sikh men only.
I think it was a hundred, maybe more than a hundred,
were physically driven out of the city
through violence and beatings.
They were trying to drive workers
who were in lumber mills in Bellingham out
and very explicitly to drive them out
back into Canada,
because many of those Punjabi Sikh workers
had come from what was Canada, across the border,
to work in Bellingham.
[Sandhra] There's this iconic picture
in the "Bellingham Herald"
of Sikh men sitting in a jail for their own protection.
The men who were working in the sawmill industries
were seen as a threat
to people who wanted jobs within that same industry.
And at that time,
the sawmill industry was the biggest industry
in all of British Columbia.
So when this happened along the Pacific Northwest,
soon, eventually, the message came to us
here in Vancouver,
or those here in Vancouver,
that a riot has happened.
And somehow, it must have riled up energies to say,
"We can do the same."
[Yu] And that was led by the kind of umbrella group
for a lot of labour unions.
And they organized a march and a parade and speeches.
The speakers,
some of them had come from as far as New Zealand
to foment against Asians
and the need to implement exclusion.
What began was speeches, a parade.
It turned into a violent riot.
[Sandhra] That riot was led
by the mayor of Vancouver at that time.
So it was actually a municipal-led anti-Asian riot,
pushing people out of their businesses,
wrecking businesses,
and not just South Asians, like I said.
All Asians.
[Oikawa] City hall at the time
was located at Hastings and Main,
where the Carnegie Community Centre is right now.
There was a huge crowd overflow
because there wasn't capacity in city hall.
And so if you can imagine that corner,
and just filled with people,
and a lot of people brought different banners
and placards,
stating that it was a white Canada.
The crowd then decided that they would go
to the area where the Japanese-Canadians lived.
This was a very violent mob.
They were yelling out horrific slurs.
They were using terms like "Kill the Japs."
People were actually fearing for their life,
the lives of their family, their wives, their children.
Unfortunately for the Chinese-Canadian community,
which was right next door to city hall,
the mob started going through and looting and rioting
through the Chinatown area first
before making their way to the Powell Street area.
[Wong] During the time
that they were busting up Chinatown,
the Japanese-Canadian community had time to organize,
and calling people from Steveston and Marpole
to come help defend the businesses of Japantown.
[Oikawa] Because they did get some notice,
the Japanese community armed themselves
with stones and rocks,
and they took them up to the rooftops.
They did arm themselves with bats,
and there were, I think, some few knives or swords.
And they barricaded the street.
[Yu] So there was actually less damage
in the Powell Street area.
There was damage,
and damage to businesses and homes
and things like that,
but there was less damage
because, literally,
the Japanese-Canadian residents were able to organize
and fight back,
and fight back effectively enough
to actually defend
over the several days of the riots.
[Oikawa] The mainstream newspapers
tended to focus on the actions
of the Japanese-Canadian community
to fight back,
but it was viewed as a negative
that the Japanese-Canadians were being vicious
and had swords.
There's one photograph that always stands out for me.
It's a photograph of the broken shop windows
of one of these shops.
On the far left side,
there is a Caucasian police officer.
In the centre, there's this Japanese woman.
And on the far side are these South Asian men.
And that picture is always so evocative
because it illustrates that the history of communities
never takes place in silos.
And so to tell one community's story
about one particular incident
by necessity
involves other communities as well.
They're always interrelated.
They're always involved in these stories.
[Belshaw] In 1907, after the race riots,
William Lyon Mackenzie King comes out to Vancouver.
He's a young, climbing, ambitious politician,
and he's standing on a street corner
at Carrall and Pender,
outside an opium den,
and thinks, "Yeah, I can probably do this.
I can take this on."
And he launches the war on drugs in 1907.
So Chinese people
who hadn't been criminals before,
because opium wasn't illegal,
are now criminals.
And that's a different kind of attack on race.
[Girn] There's a book in the City of Vancouver archives
that's this thick,
full of mug shots of people who have been arrested.
And that's where you find the visual history,
for the most part,
of people of colour,
of Chinese-Canadians and African-Americans,
and some South Asians, too,
arrested and put on trial
and sentenced to hard labour for stealing a purse,
or stealing a hat,
or writing a bogus cheque.
Some African-Americans, who are arrested
for playing a piano in a house of ill repute,
instead of being put in jail,
are asked to leave the country.
A lot of those stories exist there,
and also not just of the men, but of the women, too.
A lot of these marginalized people
show up in this book of mug shots.
You also see mug shots
of a lot of these people of colour,
but sometimes with no story attached.
Just that they were arrested.
And that's fascinating, too,
because it speaks to the silence of the archives.
It speaks to the silence of the history.
That story has been silenced, negated from the archive,
negated from the story of our country.
So how do we tell that story?
[Yu] One of the things, I think, that's important
about that moment in 1907
is what happened afterwards.
There was a commission that looked into
what caused the anti-Asian riot in Vancouver
that recommended to basically limit
all Asian migration.
[Sandhra] These conversations were taking place
in our federal House of Commons,
saying, "What are we going to do about these people?
What are we going to do to stop it?"
So it became an ensuing kind of rhetoric
of "Let's try to stop it while we can
so that more don't come."
The continuous journey legislation in 1907
was one of those attempts.
And what that legislation stated
was that if you are coming from India,
you had to come directly via ship.
You couldn't stop in between.
And because there's no direct passage
from India to Canada
at that time period,
it's an indirect way of saying,
"No Indians can come to Canada."
The tricky thing
was India was part of the British Empire.
Punjabi Sikh troops who fought for Britain,
who fought in the regiments
that helped put down the Boer rebellion
in South Africa,
who fought with the British all around the world...
they were British subjects.
They were, in their minds, part of this Empire.
[Girn] Larger context...
People of the Empire
are supposed to have the equal rights of citizenship.
So a South Asian is supposed to be able to travel to England,
and the English person
is supposed to be able to travel to India.
So I think it's this ironic moment
of "We are not wanted here,
but we will take you as our soldiers to fight."
Punjabi Sikhs very quickly saw what an insult this was,
and tested it.
[Sandhra] A man named Gurdit Singh,
who was a Malaysian businessman,
decided he was going to challenge
that 1908 continuous journey legislation,
and he said,
"I'm going to show the British Empire
that we are not dogs."
And that challenge was to say,
"I am going to charter my own ship,
bring men into Canada,
and abide
by the continuous journey legislation."
And so that's exactly what he did.
He sold the tickets.
He got 376 passengers in total to come aboard the ship,
the "Komagata Maru".
And they made the three-month-long journey.
The moment that the ship left Hong Kong,
British spies who lived here were saying
that there's hordes of these men coming.
[Girn] This narrative of being flooded
by the hordes of Asia
is a consistent one
throughout the history
of that early part of British Columbia.
It's sometimes called "The Yellow Peril".
And all of a sudden,
there's a narrative that emerges
that was percolating for some time,
which is "These South Asians are coming to steal our jobs."
And this idea of scarcity.
There's only finite resources in B.C.
There's only finite things people can have here.
There's not enough for everybody.
We have to shut the doors.
We have to keep people out.
[Sandhra] So there was this rhetoric
that was taking place within the media
in those exact three months.
So it's like one month left.
They're coming, they're almost here.
So the hyperbole,
or the kind of overdramatization of "They're here,"
led to that moment in 1914
when the ship arrived and they were detained.
They were detained by the provincial government,
which was supported by the federal government.
They were detained,
and they were denied for three months
access to water, access to food.
[Girn] People would take pleasure boats
from the harbour out towards the ship
and gawk at the passengers in the middle of summer
and hurl racial slurs at them.
It was a major spectacle.
[Sandhra] While they were stopped
in Vancouver,
the community pooled together here in British Columbia,
and they called themselves "The Shore Committee".
And they hold this big rally
at the Dominion Hall in Vancouver,
where they raise close to $60,000
for the legal fund
of the "Komagata Maru" passengers.
When you think
about how much people are being paid
on an hourly basis,
to raise $60,000 is an immense amount of money.
[Sandhra] They raised, as a community, that much money
so they could bring food onto the ship
and so they could hire the lawyer
to advocate for them.
For three months, this went on.
One of the major moments that happens
during this episode
is something that's called
the, quote, "Battle of Burrard Inlet".
Canadian immigration officials go to the "Komagata Maru"
in the middle of the night
and try to force it to leave.
Now, here's the problem.
The "Komagata Maru" is a huge ocean liner,
and the ships
that the Canadian immigration officials have
are small little tugboat-sized boats.
So during the Battle of Burrard Inlet,
the "Komagata Maru" passengers
rain down these bricks and stones
on these immigration officials
who are trying to disrupt them in the middle of the night.
And they have to retreat.
And the government response was "This can't happen.
We have to get this boat out of our harbour."
So the Canadian naval ship from Esquimalt
was dispatched to Burrard Inlet
to make sure that the "Komagata Maru" left.
It was said
that if the "Komagata Maru" did not leave
on the appointed date,
it would be blown out of the water.
It'd be sunk.
And so the choice there wasn't much for the passengers.
There are crowds of people lining the water
who are there to see a spectacle,
who are, some of them,
hoping to see the ship blown up and sunk.
The "Komagata Maru" takes up anchor
and is escorted out of the harbour that day.
[Sandhra] Eventually, I think only 20 passengers
were allowed to come into Vancouver
because they had proof that they had already been here.
The rest were all sent back to Calcutta,
where British soldiers were waiting
with guns pointed at them.
[Girn] No one says how, but a gun is fired.
And in the melee that happens afterwards,
a couple dozen of the "Komagata Maru" passengers
are killed.
And the media portrayal of the shooting
is seen in a positive light
as a positive end
to the "Komagata Maru" story.
[Sandhra] This was a real catalyst moment
for South Asians,
because to them, it was such a slap in the face,
such a dishonouring of who they are
and how they served.
So it's not just the rhetoric of the boat.
It's the rhetoric of what that boat symbolized
and what it symbolized
in terms of who is the undesirable
in this country.
It was legislated racism.
It was institutional racism.
But despite all that, communities thrived.
So I think those original roots
is why our community presence to this very day is so strong,
and so influential, and so significant.
The community feels like this is their home,
there is comfort here,
there is peace here as well.
[Fukawa] In 1908, right after the Vancouver riot,
the British and the Japanese government
negotiated ways
in which to limit
the number of male immigrants to Canada,
but there was no limit placed on women,
and so the young men
who did not have the means to go back to Japan
to actually meet the bride
would send photos of themselves,
and then there would be this photo exchange.
[Oikawa] A picture bride was a system
where basically a matchmaker would send pictures
of potential brides,
so pictures of women in Japan
who'd be willing to meet an appropriate man
and get married,
come to Canada.
Unfortunately, some of the women were duped.
But apparently, some men would send a picture
that either wasn't themselves, a handsome young man,
or a younger photo of themselves.
[Fukawa] And then when they arrived,
they see someone who is a lot older
and perhaps even in rags.
So it was sad for some,
but I think many of the marriages
were quite successful.
I don't think we give them enough credit
for helping in the development of B.C.
[Oikawa] There were many Japanese-Canadian families,
like my own,
who came from Japan in the 1800s.
They settled in British Columbia.
They raised their families.
These were thriving communities.
There were shops, and hotels, and boarding houses,
and restaurants, and department stores.
So everyone's living their normal lives,
working...
going to school...
playing.
Then Pearl Harbor was bombed.
Canada declared war.
And then there was the announcement
that Japanese-Canadians are considered enemy aliens.
Japanese nationals are considered dangerous,
are being interned at once.
[Fukawa] Japan attacked Pearl Harbor
on December 7th.
By December 8th,
all fishing boats owned by Japanese-Canadians
were called into port.
They brought the boats down to be impounded.
1,137 boats owned by Japanese-Canadians
that were impounded, confiscated, and sold off.
They didn't realize that they would be sold off,
but that's what happened.
[Oikawa] Everything was taken from them.
Fishing boats, farms, businesses, vehicles,
personal property.
And then the actual internment.
It's the forcible uprooting of 22,000 Japanese-Canadians
from the West Coast.
[Fukawa] I didn't know anything about my family history
until I was at UBC as a student.
And I came across an article describing the internment.
I went home and I said to my parents,
"Why didn't you tell us about this?"
And they said,
"Well, we didn't want the children
to grow up bitter
about events that they had no control over."
And so my reaction is,
"Why didn't you do something," right?
And my father said, "I did.
I went to the wharf in Steveston
and tried to get on my boat to go out fishing.
And I was stopped
because the sailor who was on guard
pointed the rifle at my chest."
I was 18 months old.
My brother was six months old.
[Oikawa] They were given 24 hours' notice.
They were told they were going to be moved out.
They didn't know exactly where or for how long.
[Fukawa] They would be given a specific day and time
to be at the train station
and how much baggage they could bring.
If you did not turn up at the designated time,
they would come looking for you.
[Oikawa] They were shipped to Vancouver,
then they went to Hastings Park.
Many of us know Hastings Park as the PNE.
Those grounds were taken over by the federal government,
and Japanese-Canadian families were shipped there.
Once they got there, families were separated.
Men were housed in one building,
and then the women, the moms with little children,
or the older women, the grandmothers,
were housed in the livestock barns.
[Fukawa] What would hit them
as soon as they walked into the livestock building,
of course, would be the smell.
[Oikawa] So that's where my mom's side of the family
were sent.
[Fukawa] They were put into cattle stalls,
where they would try to hang up whatever they brought...
blankets, a sheet,
to create some privacy for themselves.
[Oikawa] Their facilities was a trough,
and there was a board.
And I talked to my uncle about it.
And he said that, um,
you basically pull down your pants,
put your bum over the board,
and you did your business,
but everyone would see it
as it's going through this trough.
My mom said that for breakfast,
we had to go to some sort of mess hall,
I guess,
so you had to line up.
On the other side of the fence,
she would see people.
I guess there was a streetcar during those days,
or there was people, she'd say, that would look at them.
And she said she felt like she was in a zoo,
that people were looking at them as if they were animals.
[Fukawa] Some of them stayed there for months
before they were relocated to the Interior.
The government called it "evacuation centres," right,
as though it was an emergency,
and it was to help the people.
[Oikawa] They sanitized it.
That's the thing we need to guard against,
even in 2019,
is euphemisms
and the way sometimes things are presented.
Most people wouldn't have known even the conditions.
They just knew people were moved out.
That's the other importance of knowing the stories,
is so that people really understand the trauma.
[Fukawa] There were 10 internment camps.
Some were refurbished ghost towns,
like Greenwood.
Then there were other hastily-built shack towns
with rows and rows and rows of tar-paper homes.
There weren't any barbed wires or sentries,
but they had RCMP posts that you had to report to.
My father was at road camp, or lumber camp.
And my mother, and my brother and I,
and my maternal grandparents,
went to Greenwood.
That's where they sent the women, children,
and the elderly.
She said, "We never knew
if we would ever see each other again."
So that was the sense of helplessness
that I felt
when they told me that.
My other relatives were just scattered
all over B.C., Alberta, and Manitoba,
and some even went to Ontario.
[Lim] They were part of that un-free labour.
Their labour was used.
They didn't get compensated.
They lived in conditions that were not humane.
[Fukawa] 1945 came.
Japan has surrendered.
They thought,
"Oh, finally, we can go back to the coast."
[Oikawa] Japanese-Canadians
actually didn't have their freedom
till four years after.
The War Measures Act was extended
to keep them in those camps.
My grandfather on my father's side
actually died during internment,
so he never did see his freedom.
My parents tended to shield us.
They wanted us to have happy memories
of our childhood.
There was silence about what happened.
[Oikawa] It was very common
that Japanese-Canadian families didn't talk about the story.
Nobody talked about it.
And so that's the danger.
We don't know that history.
But if you did know the history,
then maybe when people hear some of that rhetoric,
they would think and say,
"Didn't that happen before?
Wasn't it wrong
when we treated people like that?"
And not repeat it, or at least speak out.
Very few people spoke out in 1942.
My uncle mentioned that it was very harsh times
when they were in the Interior.
And before they were able to start a garden,
they didn't have access to fresh vegetables.
He said that he does remember
the kindness of the Doukhobor community,
that they would come
and they would bring fresh vegetables and that.
He mentions that quite a lot.
[Fukawa] Because they grew fresh vegetables
and the Japanese diet included a lot of vegetables,
the Doukhobors would take vegetables to sell
to the Japanese-Canadians who were interned.
And they sold us the vegetables cheaper
than what we could get in the internment camps.
So yes, there's a lot of good feelings
between the Doukhobors and the Japanese.
Probably because there was a lot of sympathy
for the Japanese-Canadians
and how they were being treated.
The Doukhobors were persecuted in Russia,
and so they came to Canada to escape persecution.
And here the Japanese-Canadians were being treated as enemies.
[Andrew Scott] The Doukhobors
are the largest group of utopian people
to come to B.C.
and set up what we call "intentional communities".
They were a Christian sect
that felt that priests weren't necessary,
the church wasn't necessary,
even the Bible wasn't necessary.
This attitude didn't make them very popular
with the established church, of course,
because they were basically saying
that it was unnecessary.
And they got sort of booted around Western Russia
for several hundred years
and basically mistreated quite badly.
So in 1908, 6,000 of them moved to B.C.
and bought
several thousand hectares of agricultural land
in the West Kootenays,
around Grand Forks,
and in the Slocan and Kootenay River Valleys.
They wouldn't be conscripted to fight in wars.
They wouldn't send their children to school.
They were opposed to anything that had to do with militarism.
And they were opposed
to the government telling them what to do.
They just wanted to be left alone
to do their own thing.
So they weren't very popular with the government, either.
But I think we should differentiate
between the Doukhobors,
who were members of the basic church,
and the Sons of Freedom,
who were a group of Doukhobors
that were kind of like the community conscience.
If they felt that the community was becoming too worldly
or materialistic,
they would object to that.
They would have marches and protests,
and they found that public nudity
was an incredibly dynamite way of getting some attention.
I think they were kind of surprised
that the people reacted so strongly.
So whenever there was a problem,
they would have these nude marches.
Of course, the newspapers just loved this stuff.
They couldn't get enough of it.
At one point, in the '30s and '40s,
when the government started putting pressure
on the Doukhobors to conform,
they became more active.
And in the '30s,
the government arrested 600 of the Sons of Freedom
and imprisoned them on an island just off Swartz Bay,
Piers Island,
for a three-year period.
They took all their kids and institutionalized them.
But that kind of activity
actually just encouraged the Sons of Freedom
to step up their agenda.
There were bombings.
[bomb exploding]
They bombed power lines and trains.
They started setting fire to houses.
People were killed.
They basically terrorized the people of B.C.
in the 1950s and '60s.
Eventually, the government arrested
about 600 of the Freedomites who were involved with arson.
They built a special fireproof prison
for them at Agassiz.
Hundreds of Doukhobors camped outside that prison
for years and years.
And then they kind of just disappeared.
It all just went away.
They sort of gave up their non-conformist behaviour.
Except for a very small number of people,
they just started living like everyone else lived.
[Don Gayton] The Doukhobors also participated
in Vietnam War protest marches,
and then the Quaker community was of a like mind.
They were an earlier generation,
but they still formed part of that kind of nucleus
of countercultural, if you will,
in Nelson and the Slocan Valley.
They were real soulmates with the draft dodgers.
Where I live, in Summerland,
I have two neighbours that are draft dodgers.
One of them came as a 16-year-old,
and his mother said,
"My sons are not going to Vietnam."
So she unilaterally took these two boys,
who were not even draft age yet,
and moved to Canada.
The other neighbour was actually in the military
and went AWOL,
and went across the border in the trunk of somebody's car.
[Corky Evans] In the 1960s,
all the contradictions that are the United States
kind of came to the head,
and the illusions dropped away.
[drill sergeant] Attention!
[Evans] At the time, there was a draft
that meant that the government
could conscript young men to fight.
And I decided that I was...
I wanted to be a conscientious objector.
There was a huge protest at an induction center
in Oakland, California.
There was thousands and thousands of people there,
and probably a thousand cops.
And there was a black woman.
She was carrying grocery bags in her arms
and didn't really see that she was walking
straight in front of all these very angry cops.
She stepped in front of them,
and they took their clubs,
and they smashed this woman into the plate-glass window,
and...
she bounced off, and the groceries spilled out.
And they picked her up
and kept on beating this woman down the street.
I kind of was swept along,
like in the vortex of this violence.
I kept stepping closer,
but I was impotent to take action.
And she collapsed.
And they stepped over her.
And then I ran.
My wife and I just thought...
we can't raise kids here.
And we decided that we had to leave.
So we packed up a pickup truck
and drove to Canada.
[Rex Weyler] I was in San Francisco,
and on the way up,
it was kind of like a modern version
of the Underground Railway.
There were military resistance support groups
in Portland, Seattle, and in Vancouver.
So it just made sense to come north to Vancouver.
[Evans] Some really good people in Vancouver
who were helping the anti-war movement
taught us how to answer the questions
and go through the process.
[Campbell] Draft dodgers were allowed to come to Canada.
It wasn't illegal to dodge the draft,
because there was no draft.
We didn't even get any questions about our draft resistance.
[Evans] And so the interview lasted for hours,
and then finally they said, "You can live here."
That was a wonderful thing.
[Campbell] I think the story of war resisters
tells us the way
that people thought about Canada.
Canada was seen as a safe space.
Of course, Canada wasn't entirely a safe space.
Once they got here,
they discovered there was racism.
There was inequality.
Even Gallup polls of the time will tell you
that most Canadians,
although they support the right of people
not to go to war,
are still concerned
about accepting too many American immigrants
to Canada.
[Evans] There was mixed feelings.
There were some people who said, "Welcome, I agree."
And there were other people
who thought war resisters, they shouldn't be here.
[Campbell] Vancouver also had a mayor at that time,
Mayor Campbell,
who was anti-hippie and anti-war resisters.
He didn't like the influx of Americans
and the influx of war resisters.
[Tom Campbell] They are parasites
on the community.
If they were in their homeland, they'd be in jail.
Now, if we were in trouble,
if they wouldn't fight for their mother country,
what do you think they'd do for their adoptive country?
Nothing, which is exactly what they're doing now.
Nothing.
[Evans] But...
I felt... hugely lucky,
probably like generations of immigrants to Canada.
Like...
This country let me in,
and now my job is...
to try to...
be a...
value to this country.
[Weyler] In a month, we had a place to live.
In fact, our first home was in Kitsilano.
I didn't know it at the time,
but 50,000 draft resisters came to Canada.
That's a huge exodus.
It's the largest political exodus
in the history of the United States.
About 20,000 of those draft resisters
came to the West Coast.
They were people with skills.
So it did have a huge impact on British Columbia
and Canadian culture and politics.
[Campbell] There is a huge intersection of activism
in British Columbia at the time,
and you see the rise of the women's movement,
the women's liberation movement,
the environmental movement,
the war resistance movement.
[Gayton] Really, what the draft dodgers did
is they connected with existing movements
and just gave it a bit more of a push.
It isn't like they started something brand-new.
But they helped give energy and impetus
to movements that are already there.
[Campbell] They start communes.
They are part of the "back to the land" movement
that becomes increasingly popular
in the 1970s in Vancouver.
They also move to Castlegar, Nelson, in particular.
It's quite famous
for the number of war resisters who end up in the region.
[Evans] Geography defines a part of who we are.
This is the place
where the Government of Canada
decided to put most of the Japanese people
that they took out of the Sunshine Coast
and Vancouver.
This is the territory
that the Doukhobor people chose to come to
when they were essentially made unwelcome
in Saskatchewan.
Folks who were pacifist
tended to come to the West Kootenays.
I represented this region in the legislature for 14 years,
and, at one point...
there was a ship of immigrants
that I think was aiming for the United States
and got lost,
and dumped a bunch of folks
in the forests outside Port Alberni.
On Monday morning,
when the legislature was sitting,
it was all in the newspaper,
here's all these people,
and they're, you know, you should lock these people up
or send them back to where they came from.
They have no right to be here.
The government is sort of prevaricating
and saying, "Well, we're going to interview 'em
and find out who they are."
And then Opposition's going, "No, no, they jumped the queue.
They're breaking all the rules."
And finally it pissed me off, and I got up.
I said, "Okay, here's the drill, you guys.
I was 21 years old,
and I snuck into this country and said I was on vacation.
My family jumped the queue.
Here's what I would like to suggest
to the Opposition.
You want to throw the people out of Canada
who just came for a better life...
and maybe broke some rules?
Okay, I volunteer.
Start with me,
and if you won't, then leave these people alone."
And that... I'm happy.
The debate ended.
Like, they weren't going to do it.
And I don't...
know that that was so much respect for me
as maybe they were thinking,
like, oh, well, what about my grandpa,
or even my mom, or like...
I...
I don't think I was the only one.
[Koyczan] The ship Corky describes
was one of four vessels.
They spent two months crossing an unruly sea
with a cargo of 600 migrants.
They sought to escape toward opportunity.
And it is the seeking that led so many to this place,
Nootka Sound,
the very place where Captain Cook landed
in 1778.
And the same place where new battles unfolded
in the 20th century.
[♪♪]