British Columbia History 53.1 Spring 2020

Internments Hello Andrea, Happy New Year! You have provided a fascinating story in your editorial in the Winter 2019 edition of British Columbia History. It appears that the story of aliens in the First World War is a real “Who’s-Who” regarding German, Austrian and Ukrainian inhabitants in Canada at the time. I attach a press report from 1980 regarding the history of internees at South Fort George during the First World War, and their relocation to Vernon. It appears little is recorded regarding German internment during those War years. [read page 25 of the February 19, 1980 Prince George Citizen online at http://pgnewspapers. pgpl.ca/ You mention the internment of Japanese during the Second World War. I recall numerous Japanese students arriving at our High School during the Second World War.…

We are hearing a lot of discussion in the history world about the concept of “public history.” Public history describes the many and diverse ways in which history is put to work in the world — it is history as it applies to current, real-world issues. You can see this idea of public history imbedded in British Columbia’s new curriculum through its inclusion of historical thinking concepts: establishing historical significance, using primary source evidence, identifying continuity and change, analyzing cause and consequence, taking historical perspectives, and understanding the ethical dimension of historical interpretations. We are proud of British Columbia History magazine and its roots in public history, and we are working to collaborate with teachers and librarians to get it into BC’s classrooms through the EBSCO Publishing database. Behind the…

Jacqueline Pearce of Burnaby, BC is a grant recipient of the 2019 BCHF Centennial Legacy Fund in the amount of $4,300 for her Japanese-Canadian internment camp haiku translation project. The goal of this project is to translate at least 300 of over 600 haiku poems contained in two unpublished documents written in Tashme internment camp as well as to translate a small selection of haiku from other camps. There are few published records of haiku written in internment camps, and the project aims to compile the scattered information and examples into a single collection, so that this very unique part of Canadian literature and history can gain wider recognition. It took almost three hours to drive to Sunshine Valley from Fort Langley. It is about 22 kilometres past Hope on…

While haiku are very short and simple, they can be difficult to translate. The Japanese is often intentionally ambiguous, with no pronouns included and no clear indication of whether a subject or object is singular or plural. Each haiku can be interpreted in several different ways. In addition, a single kanji (Japanese character) may have more than one meaning, and some kanji used in the 1940s and earlier are no longer in use today. Sometimes, metaphors and references have been lost to time, or do not translate well. In other cases, the original poem’s rhythm and sound-play can be difficult to convey in English. Keeping these considerations in mind, we have created a rough direct English translation of each Tashme haiku, followed by a more polished English haiku version (for…

Archaeological research has led to the discovery of a unique Japanese-Canadian (or Nikkei) settlement in the forests of the Seymour Valley in southwest British Columbia. What makes the settlement unique is that after its initial use as a logging camp for a few years around 1920, the settlement continued to be occupied by a group of Japanese-Canadian people until their internment in 1942. The settlement has evidently been long forgotten, brought to light only when some archaeology students and I began investigating it more than fifteen years ago. As an archaeologist looking for an area to teach university students archaeological fieldwork techniques, I first examined the site in 2003 and have subsequently directed excavations there for close to thirty weeks, including six weeks in 2019. The settlement is now known…

When people ask where I grew up, I say, “Cora Brown Subdivision, on Sea Island.” To which they reply, “Where is Sea Island?” Sea Island is an island at the mouth of the Fraser River, and is now the home of the Vancouver International Airport and McArthur Glen Shopping Centre. But back in 1946, the Cora Brown Subdivision, with its one-acre plots, became the homes of many of the returning veterans of the Second World War, under the Veterans’ Land Act. My father was one of these soldiers. It was a small community of fifty homes located at the north end of the Island. Many of the homes were cookie-cutter — identical, two-bedroom, 74 square metres (800 square foot) houses, each with a small living room, a kitchen, bathroom, and…