Innholdsfortegnelse for 53.3 Fall 2020 i British Columbia History

Mokichi Kitagawa came to Canada in the wake of the unrest that swept Japan following the Russo-Japanese War. During the First World War he married Rise Kobayashi and together they made a new life in British Columbia. Their first agricultural success was hampered by hailstorms, and their second was seized by the government. Mokichi Kitagawa (1889–1979) was born in the village of Tsuchida in Shiga-ken Prefecture, Japan and came to Canada in 1907 when he was eighteen years old. He worked west of Revelstoke in sawmills at Three Valley Gap and Taft. His marriage to Rise Kobayashi (1885-1994) was registered in Japan on June 8th, 1917. Mokichi returned to Japan for a three-month visit in late 1917 and their wedding was celebrated on January 20, 1918. Rise joined him in…

My earliest years, I recall, passed in paradise.1 Southernmost Vancouver Island seemed then, as Governor James Douglas remarked almost a century before my birth there, “the perfect Eden.” We lived in natural contentment with all around us. And therein lay the traveller’s dilemma. Was there any reason to cross saltwater straits to roam farther afield? Why venture into unknown worlds? As a child you go where your parents take you. Because wartime gas-rationing prevented any private automobile use, my first such venture, with my father John, mother Dorothy, sister Sylvia, and our American Cocker Spaniel Bonnie, could not have occurred until 1947. I was then age seven approaching eight, a kid in short pants. Memories of the great conflict remained: blackout curtains in my bedroom, the urgent wails of curfew,…

Time itself seems to have ground to a halt. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people and organizations to take stock, and imagine a path forward. Over the last two years, “Time Travels” has highlighted the exceptional work of British Columbia Historical Federation (BCHF) members in the Slocan, Similkameen, Fraser Valley, and Vancouver Island. The column hopes to profile members in other regions of BC, but for now, I remain closer to home in Fort Langley. Kwantlen, Katzie, Matsqui, and Semiahmoo peoples have lived here for thousands of years. The Hudson’s Bay Company planted palisades for a fur trading post in 1827, and the Fort Langley area became the first pocket of Colonial settlement in the Lower Mainland. After the Fraser River gold rush ignited in 1858, the Colony of British…

The iron lung was developed to assist the breathing of patients with the severe form of poliomyelitis (polio) a contagious disease that causes flu-like symptoms, but can cause muscle paralysis, difficulty breathing, and sometimes death. According to the Canadian Public Health Association at cpha.ca, “An estimated 11,000 people in Canada were left paralyzed by polio between 1949 and 1954. The disease peaked in 1953 with nearly 9,000 cases and 500 deaths — the most serious national epidemic since the 1918 influenza pandemic.” The iron lung used vacuum pumps to create alternating high and low pressure within its chamber. These changes in pressure compressed the patient’s diaphragm, then allowed it to expand, mimicking the normal operation of the lungs. Mary Watt, was a student nurse in the spring of 1954: I…

I began the art of felting wool over a year ago, because I wanted to feel my hands slide over the soapy warm fibres. It was so satisfying that I wanted more: I wanted to learn more about fibres and how they held together when spun, sort of like a family and their stories. When I began my genealogical research for the history of my First Nations family a few years ago, I could never have imagined that it would lead me to explore the art of weaving wool — connecting back five generations and to an artform that is centuries old.1 The Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) is known for beautiful weavings of cedar, mountain goat wool, and sheep wool, and even hair from a small breed of woolly dog.2…

Like all archives, the City of Vancouver Archives recognizes the role of both digitization and public outreach in raising awareness of our holdings and increasing access. Over the past two years, through a tremendous run of fortuitous timing, we received resources that enabled us to digitize and describe 5,467 photographs, 1,936 posters, and 140 audio and video recordings from the BC Gay and Lesbian Archives, and connect the public with this treasured collection through a series of community engagement events. The BC Gay and Lesbian Archives (BCGLA) is a collection that was established in 1976 by Ron Dutton, an active, longtime member of the Vancouver LGBTQ2+ community who is also trained as a librarian. For over forty years, Dutton acquired and described records, photographs, periodicals, ephemera, and audiovisual materials of…

Clearbrook artist Manjit Singh Sandhu is obsessed with history, especially Fraser Valley history. He has painted over 300 paintings of Abbotsford history alone. His work began in the lead-up to the 100-year celebration of the Gur Sikh Temple in Abbotsford in 2011 as a tribute to the Trethewey family of Abbotsford and their century-old support of Sunder Singh Thandi and his dream of building a Sikh temple. Thandi was one of the early Sikh pioneers who came to Abbotsford at the turn of the century looking for work. He was followed by others, many of whom were ex-military men who had worked for the British in Commonwealth forces in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Many had fought on the side of Britain in the Boer War, the Siege of…

Laundry services grew to become a Chinese-dominant industry in British Columbia throughout the late 1800s to the 1960s as racism and discriminatory policies pushed Chinese immigrants into challenging niche industries.1 However, hand laundries also allowed Chinese immigrants to create a distinct social and economic identity, and gain a level of freedom, independence, and autonomy. Chinese immigrants were subject to social discrimination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as many White-Canadians feared the Chinese as a threat to stealing their jobs.2 As a result, regulations were created so that government departments, hospitals, and other professional industries could not hire Chinese workers.3 Chinese exclusion from labour became a fundamental goal for the labour leaders of Canada and in 1898, one of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada’s Platform of…

As the COVID crisis was emerging in mid-March, I was going about my daily life and I started to feel this deja-vu feeling as I watched the news and as life as we knew it started to shut down. First the travel ban, school shutdowns, business shutdowns, self-quarantine, and the amount of fear and uncertainty hanging in the air, and buried in everyone’s hearts. There was the shock of it all, how serious and deeply structural this was, and how life as we knew it was no longer, but then knowing that, I did not know what was going to come next. And the speed of all that was happening kept me in this spin. I was checking my phone frequently throughout the day to check the stats of the…

Before the 1970s, dairy cows on most BC dairy farms were housed in tie stall or stanchion barns for at least six months of the year. Cows were tied in the same stall where they were fed and milked twice a day. There stalls were cleaned and bedded with clean straw, usually before each milking. Only when the weather was dry and the grass pastures ready for grazing were the cows let out of the barn to graze and exercise. The reason for this type of housing was simply the inclement weather in BC in late fall, winter, and early spring. In the late 1960s, BC farmers began switching to loose or free stall housing with concrete alleyways. This allowed cows greater freedom of movement throughout the year. Cows walked…

Stories and experiences in British Columbia’s diverse history are explored through many types of digital media. This edition of “Past Forward” features two interactive experiences: a quiz about Residential School locations and stories from a historical Black community in Vancouver. Also, a blog dedicated to West Kootenay/Boundary history and a documentary on Senjiro Hayashi’s photography studio in Cumberland. These stories represent a range of historical experiences in our province. Do you live near a Residential School?  https://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/ beyond-94-residentialschool-map/?fbclid=IwAR3Vvq_5Na7GfR0i729BURVYFbsYC-4xA4jB7w2eEqIFhzTkV03_4hB2D2k The last Residential School in Canada was open until 1996. This online quiz, designed for non-Indigenous People, shows the former location of the Residential School closest to your hometown, whether it was open when you attended school, and how many were in operation in Canada at that time. An interactive map shows…