Innholdsfortegnelse for 52.1 | Spring 2019 i British Columbia History

What does it mean to be franchised, to be disenfranchised, and to have the legal right to vote in British Columbia? For forty years (from 1907–1947), South Asian Canadians were denied the basic right to vote in any political sphere in Canada. They were not alone in this discrimination: They were not alone in this discrimination: Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians, Indigenous peoples were also denied the right to federal, provincial, and municipal votes. The first South Asian men who arrived at the shores of British Columbia in 1903 were an enterprising group of individuals. They had left colonial India in search of greater opportunity and decent wages to support themselves and their families back home. When they first arrived on British Columbia’s West Coast, for the most part they found…

To honour the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War on November 11, 2018, Library and Archives Canada commemorated this moment in history through the completion of a five-year digitization project bringing online the service files of 622,290 soldiers, nurses and chaplains who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces (CEF). This significant project saw the digitization of over 33 million pages, now available to the public through the new Personnel Records of the First World War database.1 This database allows families, genealogists and historians—professional and armchair alike—the ability to search for family and community members, bringing alive the untold stories of these brave men and women. Researchers can begin on the LAC homepage (http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca ). Select the Search the Collection tab and then the Military Heritage option…

Frank “Shorty” Weber came to my attention just before Christmas 2018, as other “bush bachelors” came to my parents’ door when I was growing up in the Peace River Country. In this case, rather than spending a couple of nights on the couch and enjoying some home cooking, Frank arrived as the interviewee of a 1940 British Columbia Penitentiary Newcomers Questions form. I love such “orphaned documents” for the challenge of discovering who the subjects are, their origins, and how they lived and contributed to their communities. In British Columbia it is rare to find such records, and this one lavishly describes Frank’s physical appearance (“Full plate upper, Tattoo L wrist hands across sea, Tattoo L Forearm Heart & Dagger, Scar L cheek, Large mole back neck”) and moral habits…

On May 18, 1954, I was granted the “Title and Degree of Bachelor of Laws as with all the rights, privileges, and honours so with all the duties thereto appertaining.” Those marvellous words have been removed from present-day degrees. No longer “granted,” they are “conferred” without mention of privileges and duties. This change has stripped from the law degree the essence of being a lawyer. Having stumbled without distinction through the gauntlet of examinations, I found myself facing one more year of education before I was permitted to be a lawyer. I had to find a practising member of the Law Society of British Columbia who would accept me as his articled clerk. After one year of instruction I would present myself to a committee of two or three old…

In March 1942, the federal government authorized the internment of 22,000 Japanese Canadians 100 miles east of the west coast “exclusion zone.” At the same time, they seized all properties owned by Japanese Canadians, including the Japanese Hall and Japanese Language School on Alexander Street in Vancouver. In these early months of the internment, federal authorities promised Japanese Canadians that their properties would be held in trust and returned to them. These promises were made formally and in law. However, this promised stewardship and return was not to be the case. The seized Japanese Language School was founded in 1906 by early Japanese immigrants to Canada who settled in the Powell Street neighbourhood. The original schoolhouse was built on 439 Alexander Street, just up the street from Hastings Mill on…

This is a monumental work—and for many people it’s impossible to conceive of how it would have come together. Can you tell us a bit about your process of research and writing? This was a book that took a long time, in some sense, for both of us it is a life-long work of love, kinship, and dedication to the ancestors that taught us. Ron: It literally goes back to the time, some 65 or more years ago, when I tslexemwílc as I explained it in the prefaced Ron’s Story of our book. It goes back to my remembrances of childhood in Skeetchestn and Tk’emlúps (Kamloops), being raised by my great-grandparents, Sulyen and Edward Eneas who were both born in underground pithouses in the late 1870s, and being fortunate to…

In April 2016, after 42 years as a judge, I retired as the longest serving judge in British Columbia history and the last pre-Charter of Rights judge on the superior court to retire. Hence, I was given the nickname “Judicial Dinosaur.” After the Trans Continental Canadian Pacific Railway was completed at Port Moody in 1885 with predominantly Chinese labourers from Guongdong Province, these workers became displaced and unemployed sojourners. They constituted about ten percent of the total population in BC. To discourage more Chinese from entering Canada, a head tax was imposed initially at 50 dollars and then increased over the years to 500 dollars by 1900. Still, the Chinese came until 1923 when the Federal Chinese Immigration Act was enacted that closed off any further Chinese immigration to Canada…

There’s something grand about the entranceway to the Chilliwack Museum, originally constructed as City Hall in 1912. A bronze statue of piper James Richardson, the Victoria Cross hero killed at the Somme, stands at the foot of a curved staircase that sweeps up to a portico and curved balcony. (A treasured perch for today’s wedding photos.) The classical Beaux-Arts exterior is chalky white, making the Canadian flag flying above all the more striking. When it opened, Chilliwack City Hall boasted council chambers, administration offices, police facilities, a courtroom, and a jail cell. Ron Denman, the museum’s interim executive director, has been connected with this building for more than thirty years and is proud of Chilliwack’s only National Historic Site. “It was designed by the famous Vancouver architect Thomas Hooper and…