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Think of history as stories about the past,

but it's always about the future in my mind.

Satwinder: The worst thing we can do

is for our generations not to know where we've been.

Somewhere, someone is gonna want to know.

To see yourself in a place where history is captured

and told, it has such power.

Henry: Power and archives

are inextricable.

Who decides what gets kept?

Five years ago, the kind of thing that I'm saying publicly

in this documentary right now

could get you in a lot of trouble.

The provincial archives have the power of life and death

over events in BC history.

Magnus: We're supposed to be neutral.

That's not possible.

How can our own people, whether we're Indigenous,

Black, people of colour, how can we tell our own stories?

Why can't we tell our own stories?

Satwinder: We were absent

from so many places when actually we were there.

We were present.

Imogene: Nobody's saying it's your fault.

But one needs to learn these things

so you're not repeating the past.

Henry: What isn't archived?

What is unarchived? What is forgotten?

What is lost? What doesn't belong?

Magnus: When we don't

collect these things,

when we don't make these records accessible,

it doesn't get included in history.

Chung: I believe that all institutions,

colonial institutions, need to be on the way for a revolution.

The time of reckoning has come.

♪ Takin' a walk down to the bookstore ♪

♪ On a lonely, boring day for me ♪

♪ Can't wait to see my latest boyfriend ♪

♪ Under the covers waiting to be free ♪

♪ With thumbtacks and a pair of scissors ♪

♪ I'll sweat real hard 'til way past 3:00, yeah ♪

♪ Coverin' everything but the bedroom window ♪

♪ With pictures ♪

My name is Ron Dutton.

I manage the BC Gay and Lesbian Archives.

♪ Hot magazine ♪

♪ Not hard to dream ♪

♪ Where books are seen ♪

♪ I come real clean ♪

My strategy was to collect everything.

♪ Oh, baby, oh, whoa, I love him so ♪

I don't say, "Oh, that's a good story, I'll keep it,

and that one isn't so I won't."

I keep everything.

Wet t-shirt contests at Numbers Cabaret, trivia, you know,

and you think, "Who cares?

You know, in 50 years, is anyone gonna care?"

Well, yeah.

What I've found is that that has been a smart thing to do.

We all have presumptions, we all have assumptions,

we all have limitations to our knowledge.

None of us can ever yank ourselves

completely out of the historical moment

to be utterly neutral in what we collect.

This is the poster collection.

There's a remarkable difference between what posters looked like

in the 1970s and what they look like today.

So these are all poor people postering.

Simple, simple.

They didn't have a lot of money to spend.

I came to Vancouver in 1975, in my early 20s.

I had just come out of university

and three or four years of working at my first job

as a librarian.

I arrived in the big city for the first time ready to let go.

I wanted to get passionately involved with

the politics of the time.

The whole of the '70s and the late '60s

had been a hugely political time.

The women's movement is in full force.

The anti-war movement against the war in Vietnam

was explosive on campus.

The Black Rights movement in the United States

was very, very much in the forefront

of everybody's minds.

And then, beginning in 1970-71,

the initial movements of the Gay Liberation Front.

People were picketing and they were forming organizations,

they were publishing newspapers, they were writing manifestos.

There were probably eight or 10 gay rights organizations

at that moment happening in the city.

The Gay Rights Union, Gay Alliance for Equality,

Lesbian Mothers' Defense Fund.

At the same time, there is a massive bar scene going on.

So there is both the social and the political,

and they're working together in tandem.

Brilliant time to be young and gay.

♪ Everybody is a gay ♪

You were being suddenly, willingly out for the first time

in your life, and it was intoxicating.

So there was I in the middle of it all, but also with a sense

that we were on the cusp of something new,

that society was being pushed very hard

and was going to have to make changes

to the way that it regarded gays and lesbians

and that we were going to make that happen.

I began to get really concerned about that

because everybody was out there having a grand old time

and no one was doing the filing.

And everybody's busy, they have a demonstration

and then they move on to the next thing.

They're not thinking about writing it all down so that

this history we were making would actually have a record.

So I simply began to do that.

Every handout and brochure and newspaper article and poster

that came to hand, tossing it in a box with a date on it.

Very quickly, the box became four boxes and then eight boxes

and I realized some sort of structure needed to be imposed

on this material if it was going to be usable

by anyone at a future date.

So I began to do that.

Gay Tide is the newspaper

put out by the Gay Alliance Toward Equality,

Gale Force.

It's the newsletter of the Gay and Lesbian Educators of BC.

A competitor from the Gay Games.

A pennant from Team Berlin.

Here is a Dim Sum Dykes Bamboo Triangle,

which is a women's group of East Asian-Canadian women.

These incredible zines that are photocopies of material,

poetry, raving, they're often really obscene,

and they are always highly confrontational.

With community archives, it's the community stepping up

and filling a gap that the other archives

should have been doing.

Most government archives are over 100 years old.

Academic archives are usually at least 50 years old.

So because we have this really old legacy,

you're dealing with predecessors who were,

in almost all cases, racist, homophobic, transphobic,

ableist, really like, every kind of prejudice

that you can have.

So as a result, you're not seeing communities

that have been historically oppressed

represented in most archives.

Community archives do this tremendously valuable service

of starting those grassroots archives.

They're generally much smaller and more agile.

They create a nucleus that we hope will grow

and will last and preserve materials

that need to be preserved.

I've been going back to those old newspaper databases

now available at home and downloading material

that relates to our lives, those little flashes or glimpses

that try to tell you what it was like in 1940 or 1910 in BC.

Here is a man from New Westminster, 22 years old,

charged with a gross indecency and sentenced to two years

of hard labour and five strokes of the lash.

That was 1946.

The thing that scars and defines, in some odd way,

my generation and previous generations

is that I was a criminal until I was almost 30 years old.

I could have been arrested at any moment had it become

a public knowledge that I was a gay person.

The justice system viewed you as a criminal.

The religious industry regarded you as, at best, a sinner,

and more likely evil.

And the psychological industry

regarded you as being damaged or mentally ill.

The other estate, which is the press,

not only went along with it, but they became the agent

by which those three oppressed you.

Or they disappeared you so that you didn't exist

in the public eye.

And that was as damaging as anything, not to be seen.

I'm a trans person with disabilities.

I grew up my whole life never seeing people like me

in textbooks or in museums

or really in anything historical,

let alone, you know, mainstream media.

And it wasn't really until I started to learn my history

that I actually saw a future for myself at all.

That-- that's when my life changed,

is when I realized that it wasn't that

I was a freak that should die, but that I was a real person

and people like me have existed for millennia.

Um...

Yeah, I don't know what else to say.

Over here...

...are clipping files.

Mm-hmm.

This file goes back to 1924.

There are articles that would appear in the newspaper

about somebody who got arrested for cross-dressing.

The articles in that period of time

always talked about them as some kind of

depraved human being.

And yet, somebody who was so isolated to think that

they were the only person like them in the world

would see an article like that and would save it.

That's how lonely they were,

that something like that was worth cutting and saving.

Most trans people live the vast majority of their lives

having very little contact with other trans people.

Repeatedly, we hear from people that it's been really moving,

it's been really important to them to see and touch

these materials, and through them,

to connect with their predecessors.

Some people use the word "ancestors,"

occasionally somebody will call them trans-cestors.

But to be able to feel that connection

by putting your hands on these materials

that were in the hands of those people as well,

it is moving and it's important.

See this one, I find actually really interesting

'cause trans people have always had

obviously a very antagonistic relationship with the cops.

And you can see here,

it's talking about, you know, special ID cards.

This is actually, like, a relatively common practice.

Obviously, there's a lot of issues with carrying

that kind of ID card, but it provided people

with safety that they didn't have otherwise.

Um...

Producer: What is it like

to see these up close?

Like, emotional.

Like, it feels--

often, I feel that I have more of, like, a connection,

like a true, like, spiritual connection

with my trans ancestors than I do with, like,

my actual biological ancestors.

Like, I don't think I would feel the same way

looking at, like, my own family papers.

Aaron and the trans archives is actually, like,

why I went to grad school at all.

I was looking basically at what careers

are even available to us.

And I mean, obviously, things have changed

in the seven years since I came out,

but even seven years ago, it was pretty daunting to try

and find any kind of field that wasn't, like,

actively hostile to trans people.

Um...

And so when I was, you know, really trying to find anything,

trying to find, you know, any kind of information on,

you know, what trans people were doing, what kind of fields

they were working in and stuff, that's how I found out about,

you know, the trans archives and Aaron.

You know, I knew I needed to learn some kind of new skill,

and the fact that this place existed where, you know,

our history was actually prioritized, really,

was one of the impetuses for me to go to grad school

and study to be an archivist.

So, being here was obviously really emotional,

meeting Aaron, who has been a hero of mine,

was really emotional because it's kind of like

I've sort of finally come full circle from being just like

this kid in Toronto with, like, I don't know, nothing, I guess.

Dr. Devor: Community archives

are inherently unstable

'cause they're volunteer run and they don't have the funding.

The transgender archives

is part of the University of Victoria libraries.

University of Victoria is an institution.

We have all the resources the University of Victoria

is supporting us and that's considerable.

We try to have one foot in each world.

Many of the people that donated collections here

kept things that were lifelines for them at the time.

People were concerned that after their death, someone else

would come in, see what they had, and they would think,

"Well, nobody would care about this junk.

This is garbage," and throw it away.

And in fact, that did happen.

And so people started to put their collections here

because they felt like this is a safe place.

This place will be here 50 years from now,

100 years from now.

Community archives, there are some

who have lasted quite a few years.

You know, I hope that they continue to last a long time.

But there have been many over the years that have folded.

And there are those that exist, but every year it's,

we're not sure if we'll be able to continue to exist.

And so the collections are precarious.

What's going to happen to those collections?

Dr. Bains: For a South Asian Canadian

who is an immigrant to this country,

a fairly young immigrant to this country,

I never really understood what an archive was

until I started looking at the history

of South Asian Canadians in Canada, and especially in BC.

I started to find, you know, large gaps in our history,

whether it was through designed erasure,

or through omission, or just through neglect.

I found that there was large pieces of our history

that were either not included or had just been forgotten.

We were everywhere in BC. We were in small towns.

We were in big cities. We were in institutions.

We were working. We had children.

We went to hospitals. But we were seen nowhere.

But I'm an optimist, so I don't sit and wait

for someone else to do this work.

You know, we just start.

My name is Satwinder Bains,

and I'm the director of the South Asian Studies Institute

at the University of the Fraser Valley,

and I manage the South Asian Canadian Legacy Project.

I've been in Canada since 1975,

and I've been through many iterations of my own identity.

I came from India and I actually had rose-coloured glasses on,

and I thought Canada was ready

for this young, Brown, idealistic young person,

and Canada was a country of information,

and everybody was waiting with open arms at the airport.

It was a rude awakening that that was not the case.

I wanted society to see me as a holistic human,

as a person with gifts, as a person with values.

And I got pegged into a little square.

I was seen as either a Hindu or an East Indian,

terms I wasn't accustomed to.

My terms were also racial slurs that were thrown at me.

So I inured myself from some of that racism

that I faced as a young girl.

I had to find, inside me, a deep well of love, self-love,

so that the racism that I felt wouldn't affect me

to the point that I would harm myself.

So finding your role in society takes time.

To become a South Asian-Canadian,

where I believe my identity is important as a South Asian,

but I'm as Canadian as anybody else.

But my South Asian-ness also informs who I am.

And it is a beautiful information that I carry with me

that I don't want to give up.

We are over a hundred years in this country,

but it's a moment right now where people are reflecting back

and saying, wow, that was important.

Not just the Komagata Maru, not just the big events,

but the daily occurrences are important.

Opposition as minorities,

opposition as marginalized people,

opposition as settlers,

displacing First Nations peoples as well.

And this is all very new.

I felt that the South Asian-Canadian Project

would be that vehicle that would allow me

to record something.

Prior to this, it was an isolatory work.

I was doing it by myself.

But to include more people, to put the message out

to the community that we're coming.

You know, we want to listen to your stories.

That legacy part is really critical.

And unfortunately, for us,

we haven't had that legacy for a long time.

That's amazing that she has old names.

Magnus: Yeah.

When we don't collect these things,

when we don't make these records accessible,

it doesn't get included in history.

I worked for two LGBT community archives before coming to SASI,

and that's really what fueled my passion,

but also my ethic when it comes to archives.

And so I was really excited to work on

the South Asian-Canadian digital archive

because it was an opportunity for me

to do the kind of work that I entered the field to do,

which was to make sure that marginalized people's histories

aren't, you know, erased.

Dr. Bains: Simple lifetime stories

of our everyday existence proved to us as Canadians

that we built this country as well.

Even as settlers, we came in, we lived in small communities,

and we built homes, and we belonged.

Those simple, everyday, normal stories are not afforded to us.

Any photographs you see are caught through a lens of very

industrious people working at the mill or working somewhere.

We are already 50 years behind.

Kathryn: Mayo Singh, and I believe,

it was 35 shareholders bought this land in Paldi

on Vancouver Island and established Mayo Siding,

which was a mill, and it was very, very successful.

But what made Paldi different

was that Mayo Singh was South Asian.

Many, many of the workers that were originally drawn to Paldi

were also South Asian because at that time,

it was impossible or almost impossible

for them to work anywhere else.

But then other communities were drawn as well.

Megnus: It was an intercultural community.

You had a lot of South Asian immigrants who moved there

to work for Mayo, and a large population of

Chinese-Canadian immigrants and Japanese-Canadian immigrants,

and then, you know,

white European-Canadian immigrants as well,

all living and working and growing up together

in this town.

And if you look at, especially like the school photos,

that's very, very evident.

There are other camps with multicultural enclaves,

but there was something special about Paldi

that I haven't heard anywhere else.

And it was just this spirit of love that existed always there.

Paldi is a very, very unique community.

I personally don't know of anything comparable

or any town comparable in the country.

When we set out, I really, really wanted to make sure

that we had some kind of documentation of Paldi,

but I didn't know if anything existed.

The Cowichan Valley Museum and Archives

did have the Joan Mayo fawn, the Mayo Singh family fawn.

That fawn is, for the most part,

all of the research material that Joan Mayo gathered.

So some of the records in there are her own,

but then there's also a lot of collected material from,

you know, community members or people in Paldi that,

you know, gave her photos or she took a photo of a photo.

So I drove out to Vancouver Island,

I picked up the boxes, and yeah, we've been digitizing

and we're just finishing up processing

and description right now.

Dr. Bains: Joan was both a historian

and a collector.

She married into a South Asian-Canadian family

and then she adopted that family as her own.

She was accepted by the community,

but there was a time, I'm sure, she must have felt like

she was just looking inwards from outside.

You know, it's one thing to take the photograph,

but then to have a system where they're collecting it,

which I would love for Joan to tell us,

you know, why she did that.

My name is Joan Mayo, and I married the oldest son

of Mayo Singh in 1953.

No, sorry, 1951.

Producer: What does it mean to you

to know that the South Asian Legacy Project is digitizing

all of the photos and the videos?

I just think it's a wonderful thing.

And it just shows how close we all were, still are.

Even though most of them moved away since the mill closed,

we're still all very close.

It's like family. It's one big family.

Dr. Bains: That type of archive

is missing for us.

We don't have a complete history of a town.

We have snippets.

And while people are trying to stitch it together,

you know, the evidence is missing.

I know that the archive is just being digitized,

but I think beyond the digitization,

is the storytelling.

We are lucky that we can take Paldi,

one small geographic city

in the big province of British Columbia,

and say, within that city, is the lived experiences

of South Asian-Canadians that you can tease apart

at so many levels, and find beneath it,

all kinds of community living.

That, to me, is the beauty of Paldi.

The gift of Paldi, the gift of the person

who collected those photographs, who kept them,

who put behind them the dates and the names of the people.

To us, that gift is-- it's-- you cannot put a value to it.

♪ Take three, take off, and take me ♪

♪ To a place, to the people across the sea ♪

Dr. Bains: While Paldi's history

is really known for the male,

the archive tells a different story.

The archive tells a story of men and women involved in play,

and labour, and home, and tradition,

and events, and marriages, and births, and deaths.

How school kids went together and the mums

got to talk to each other and learn each other's food.

And there was conversation going on even if they didn't

understand each other.

And it became this microcosm of Canadian society.

♪ So let's go, let's go, let's go ♪

♪ Let's go home ♪

♪ Home is where we's be ♪

♪ Home is where you are ♪

♪ Home is where I belong ♪

♪ Home is what we make ♪

♪ Home is in your heart ♪

♪ Home is where, home is where we's be ♪

♪ Home is where you are ♪

♪ Home is what we make ♪

♪ Home is in your heart ♪

♪ Home is where I belong ♪

We came from India in June of 1967.

I was born in Paldi in India. Arrived in Paldi Airport here.

From Paldi to Paldi.

We lived here from 1950 to just before 1970.

I was born here in Paldi.

Born and raised in Paldi.

I was wonderful.

Unforgettable.

All the kids were together all day long.

We hung out as much as we could from morning till dark.

We had a nice little group hall, and we had community activities.

We were young.

Everybody knew everybody.

We didn't feel like we came from India and were new here.

It was just like we were part of one big family.

A lot of us are still very, very close, very good friends.

We played together, worked together,

cried together, laughed together.

This was our playground.

This is the temple that I got married in.

East Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Ukrainian, Scottish, English.

We thought this is how the world is.

Nobody's ever forgotten, I don't think,

what they experienced here.

Everybody wants that remembered.

So our children can see it, and our grandchildren

can see it, and their grandchildren.

I'd like people to realize that this little town was a legacy,

and that everybody should get a chance, like we did,

to grow up in a place like this.

♪ Home is where I belong ♪

♪ Home is you, my friend ♪

♪ Home is in the song you listening to, home ♪

So this one's really full.

Oh...

We have so many.

...beautiful.

I love this one,

but unfortunately, we have no idea who any

of these people are.

The men are.

Yeah.

These men look like

they're, you know, new immigrants to the country.

Yeah. Yeah.

They're turbans, and it

looks like after the war, because one of them

is wearing a uniform.

This is amazing.

Yeah, I love that one.

I think these are the only photos we have of these kids.

Oh, my goodness, this is Mahinder Doman.

Mahinder is quite famous now as a writer and an author.

"Playing in the backyard under the..."

-"Washing." - Washing.

Uh-huh.

Yeah. I like that one a lot, too.

Well, you know what, Magnus?

There are very rare photographs of men holding their babies.

Mm-hmm. Usually it's the women that

are holding the babies, but for women to be given

centre stage and he's in the back.

Mm-hmm.

- That's beautiful. - Yeah.

Beautiful.

And then this is a birthday party,

and that's Rajindi right there.

Oh, you can see that with the other lens.

I know. It's so easy to identify him.

Like, there's him again.

It's so obvious.

Look at that.

Yeah. I also, like, I want to put that one

in the carousel, too.

It's such a great photo.

It's so BC, too, right?

So BC with the logging.

- And the log is so large. - Yeah.

It's half of him.

Mm-hmm.

It's both emotional

and just a gift.

The overwhelming sense that this is a gift from the past.

This sense of discovery.

And I get emotional about it because we have so little.

It's all in our memories, it's gone with our

pioneers and our elders.

Those stories are gone, those images are gone.

But for someone to have saved all this and

then many years later, let's say 70 years later,

we're opening a file and we see these photographs.

We can say, "This happened.

There was a house and people did live here.

And this is what they did and here's the evidence."

You can keep talking about it, but until you see

something, ha.

It's overwhelming.

Victorious, you know they like travel to get the photos."

The worst thing we can do is for our generations not

to know where we've been.

You know, it's interesting when you don't see your

heritage reflected in either the curriculum

or in community stories or in monuments or

history as it is told.

You realize that your heritage and what you're

leaving behind hasn't been important to someone.

How did that happen?

How come we were absent?

I really want to question authorities and

people in power to say, "What gave you that kind

of immunity to erase us?"

Film Narrator: British Colombia, the most lovely country

that gined.

I am third-generation Canadian.

I am tied to Vancouver Island because my father

was born in Cumberland.

My grandfather, Lim Lip Poon, he was a head taxpayer

and he came in 1890.

When I teach, I talk about my name and how people make

judgments by how they know you.

So if I say Imogene Lim, they're more likely to think,

"Ah, maybe born in Canada."

But if I said my Chinese name, Lum Mo Jun,

they would immediately say I'm a foreigner.

And that's part of the larger issue

about being Asian in Canada, that being constantly identified

as being a perpetual foreigner.

Person: Five, two, three, four!

A shocking new survey shows just how prominent

anti-Asian racism is in our country.

One of the most difficult things for me,

in a place like Canada, is that exclusion was successful.

And people seem to be unwelcome latecomers.

But that's an acceptance of my story, the success of exclusion.

It's because of you Chinese people.

Says the unidentified woman in this video.

That normal Canada, the Canada that they are

disturbing, is a white Canada.

Get out of my face! I'm Canadian!

Scapegoating Asians, blaming Asians, that has had a long

enduring life in Canada.

For much of the history of Canada, what went

into an official archive, was really in the support

of state stories about Canada being this place

where some people belonged, and other people didn't belong.

Every record is about Chinese being a problem

and not belonging.

And we're going to document that again and again and again.

We had laws on the books for most of our history

that basically put the power of the state

behind white supremacy.

One of the most effective ways of thinking about history

is to think about silences.

What is not collected by those in power, what is left out,

makes it really difficult to tell stories because you're

encountering the missing.

On behalf of the people and government of Canada,

we offer a full apology to Chinese Canadians

for the head tax and express our deepest sorrow

for the subsequent exclusion of Chinese immigrants.

We can't just say, "Okay, we apologized.

We're all good now."

But still, you don't show up in the archives.

You can't unmake that.

You can't recover the past, but you can recover

a connection to the past.

The surveillance of the Chinese in a really perverse

way created archives.

Archives of exclusion.

So the Chinese who don't show up in other records,

and yet in police records, as they are being targeted

for breaking laws that were only applying to them.

We can actually get a fairly rich story of what

social life was like.

I get a little secret joy out of that.

It's sort of like, "Ah, you thought you were doing this,

but you're not as smart as you thought you were."

The process of silencing makes a lot of noise.

Now, once you try to look for the process of

erasure and silencing,

what you start to see is traces, the noise everywhere.

Classic painting of the photograph that everybody sees

of Cumberland's Chinatown.

So this would be the two main roadways,

and so you've got the fire hydrant,

and that's always, people's like,

"Oh! did you see the fire hydrant?"

So it's a marker point between the two roads,

the upper road, the lower road.

So think about, you know, like you're in this place

and they actually had houses all along here.

And when you look now, all the water is just right up here.

Chinatowns, they get erased, they get burned down,

populations move.

Oh, here's my uncle.

So like Nanaimo's, it burned.

Duncan's, it was redevelopment.

Cumberland also burned.

Part of me is like, wow, this is really beautiful.

But then you think, oh, you know,

this is where my, you know, family came from.

And I'm hearing the kids in the background.

I'm thinking they could be, could have been the kids

from my parents' generation, you know, like people playing

out and the sound of voices.

Because there's, you know, if it wasn't for that

background of the kids, it would be silent.

So there's something about the silence of the trees

and sort of the majesty of nature.

But this was a bustling location.

When you're doing this kind of research,

you're building on a number of clues.

So you're being the detective, right?

But there might be fire insurance maps.

There might be business directories.

And then you look at the landscape.

So you see how it's, like, a little bit raised up there?

So I'm thinking how they had a garden

sort of up on the hillside.

I'm thinking, you know, it's like there's

a bit of a plateauing up there, or a ledge-type piece.

Ethno-botany.

You've got the ethno, which is looking at the sort of cultural

use in the botany, which is the plants.

And it's a reminder of who was located here earlier,

that their presence is no longer present, so they've

been erased except for the plants that remain.

With the Chinese community, lots of times you see bamboo to

remind people of the homeland.

If you look at this, we're not talking like

just planted bamboo.

This bamboo has been around for some time.

And my suspicion, without going through land titles

to look at the record, is that somebody of

Chinese ancestry probably lived here.

For me, bamboo and watercress, because of the sort of poking

around that I've done here, is like,

"Oh, that's something to look for."

My friend who lives in Departure Bay,

she said, "You know, like once a year,

you know, this family comes, they fill a garbage bag of

whatever's in the ditch, and then they're gone."

But she says they do it every year,

so I go look in the ditch.

It's watercress.

Departure Bay was a area that had farming.

So even if there were not land owned by Chinese,

they would have been labour.

When you have just the tops, you could just do a quick stir fry

with garlic, very good.

Just with a...

Then season it with a little soy and sesame oil, it's perfect.

The Chinese presence is found throughout BC

and basically across Canada.

You can smell the mustiness of this.

So this says, "Place names of British Columbia."

So when you start looking at this list...

...it has names that might be recognizable to you,

but then there are those small places,

and you say, "Why is that important?"

You know, like, "Why is it in this book?"

They have things like "Athrim"

It's like, "I'm not even sure where Athrim is," right?

There are other places that clearly were

significant enough to be in this book and as a

reminder the book was printed in 1897 printed in Vancouver.

The fact that you have these places that were

identified in this book is telling.

Those places are not what people think of and

say they were Chinese or Chinatown there.

This is all about that erasure of

the significance of those small town places.

For some people, they think there's that

dichotomy, indigenous people, first peoples, and then

European settlers.

And they don't think of the non-European

settlers that were here early on as well.

If you avoid the evidence

that's right there, you get to say, nobody else was here.

Yes, indigenous peoples were here and then it was

us and there was no one else in between.

Yu: If you want to say something is important in the past, then

you will make your own archive.

You need your own archive.

objects and things that are significant.

Even if they are ephemeral or lost in time,

you can recover them by giving them meaning in the present.

Grace Wong: As people come in, the first thing they'll see

is actually this dragon head, which we think was

used as early as 1930.

Behind that dragon head would be a very long fabric

where people underneath it would be dancing.

Right at the very beginning, people would ask,

"Oh, so why does it have to be a Chinese Canadian museum?

Whatever you want to do, why can't it be

a part of something else?"

And I guess I would say that, first of all,

if people had recognized that it was important,

you know, other places, other institutions, other whatever,

I think it would have been done.

Having a dedicated institution means that those stories

are being told from the community's voice, from

the people's voices, not interpreted via several other

layers, that there's a real resonance to the community.

Countering racism, anti-Asian racism,

needs to start with broad education,

which is very much a role of museums.

The Chinese Canadian Museum specifically

related to Chinese Canadian history,

but the museum is not just for Chinese Canadians.

It needs to be a museum for everyone.

Do we have this at home?

Yu: The past is not a closed book.

It's almost truism that each generation makes their own past.

I find.

Yu: But we determine the meaning of the past right now.

Those who are leaving things in archives are those who have

an eye to how they will be understood when people in

the future look back upon them.

...passage.

What does this say?

This says Chinese Public School.

Yu: So to me that's what's so interesting about

archives, that's what's so interesting about

history because it's always about the future in my mind.

It's about what we project forward as how

we want to be remembered.

And what does this one say?

This says Chinese Benevolent Association.

What does this mean?

It means Chinese people come together and they work together.

It's a group of Chinese people that worked together.

And so let's remake the meaning of the past to fit

the future we want now.

This vault's about 11,000 square feet.

This quadrant is a mix of various kinds of special media,

including a lot of our photographic prints,

a lot of oversized prints.

We're the final home for any records

of permanent value from the city,

but we complement those records with records from

organizations and individuals, from families, and from

collectors like Ron.

Can you walk us through what it was like to decide

to put your archive in a government institution?

It was a wrenching, to be honest with you.

I have been thumping this tub for 30 years,

so there's a lot of people in the community who must be

wondering what Ron is thinking.

And that tub was this.

These are our stories.

We have to control the narrative.

We have to be the ones who decide what our lives mean.

Man: Looking through a series of old pics of drag queens,

the city hoped to help identify some of the many unknown faces

in a new gay and lesbian archive they've established.

Our history as a community, as a minority community,

has been heavily under-documented by historians.

Ron was quite famous in the community because

of his collection.

He was the person we would send researchers to

if they had any questions about the gay and lesbian

community in Vancouver.

We didn't have a lot of the LGBTQ2+ community documented.

Nothing is substantial or as far-ranging, as broad,

as the BCGLA collection.

So this is a lot of RON stuff of the BCGLA collection.

So all of this bay, that bay, some other bays, and this,

I believe, is mostly his subject files series.

Any subject under the sign, Ron will have a file for it.

As Ron got older, he started seriously thinking about

where the collection could go.

I had to give it up because I'm desperately elderly,

and I needed to begin to look further afield.

The gay and lesbian community had lots of reasons

to not trust the city.

So we were really honored when Ron approached

us as a potential home.

I'll take that one.

I shut down the main archive on December 31st, 2017, and we

arranged a day, and within a matter of two or three hours,

they stripped my apartment.

Complete, and it just all went out the door, and van load

after van load, because it was so huge.

I'd gotten so used to it that I'd forgotten how

very large it really was.

Within a year of it being moved over there, suddenly

a huge quantity of it was appearing on the internet.

Something I could never have done.

I'm eternally grateful to them.

They are my friends.

They are friends of our community.

My own thoughts about this process of archiving

were that while the politics was important

and the changes of law were important

and the changes in the social fabric mattered,

there was a larger story there, which is about people

and how they live, how they struggle through

their daily lives, how they managed in times

that were much more toxic than the world we

were in at that point.

And it hadn't ground them up.

I wanted to tell their story.

I wanted their struggle to be heard and

understood and honoured.

That became the real mission, to honour the voices that weren't

going to be heard otherwise.

The people in this building in the provincial archives have

the power of life and death over events in BC history.

Because it's in this building where books

and documents, originals are kept.

There's no other documents like them.

If they disappear, events in BC history disappear.

When I was a kid, there was a little local museum

in my neighbourhood.

And there was a letter framed on the wall that was written

by my great-grandmother, and she had won a prize,

a national award, for writing this letter.

To see it on the wall felt like there was a real connection

for me to that place and to this person

who had lived 100 years before me.

It sparked this love of history and curiosity

about the place where my family had lived for generations.

I am incredibly privileged.

I come from a white settler family

that moved to Vancouver Island on that side of

my family many generations ago and lived on stolen indigenous

land and yet I got to see myself represented in

this space and so many other people don't see

themselves represented.

The Royal BC Museum is pledging a major change after

the release of a report today that found racism and

discrimination was directed at staff inside the organization.

The board of the museum has met with the CEO and they've

come to agreement that Jack will depart later this month.

Racism and discrimination was found within the museum,

including a culture of fear and distrust in the workplace.

Management failed to properly handle those complaints

and a recognition the museum has outdated an

offensive exhibit stemming from its 135 year history,

telling BC's history through the lens of European colonizers.

These two reports show that we are not the museum we

wanted to be, and we're not the museum we should be.

I think everybody internally realizes that there needs

to be massive changes.

Things don't move quickly... but I think they need to.

I think we hit the perfect storm.

The perfect storm of wanting so much to do repatriation,

community relationships, changing the way we do,

except all these really positive, wonderful goals,

but not actually having the structure to do it.

It's very obvious to me that what we have is an organization

that was structured in colonial times,

and we see not just remnants of it, we see evidence of it.

We take it for granted.

It's taken for granted by a lot of people

that these structures will just somehow work themselves out.

They don't just work themselves out.

You have to actually look at the policies,

find out what is discriminatory in them,

because many of them don't mean to be discriminatory,

but they are.

And they need to be very carefully focused on

and consult with communities and change the way those

policies are written.

We have the ethical responsibility

to really understand how profound

the changes need to happen.

It's not just about adding things.

It's not just about tweaking a couple of things.

It's about real fundamental understanding of how to rebuild

something with a completely different framework.

I believe that all institutions, especially those who have

recognized that they are colonial institutions,

need to be on the way for a revolution.

How is it you are not accountable to

Canadian society, to British Columbia?

You know, where is the immunity in saying,

"This is how BC was built," without understanding that

so many of the groups of men and women gave their

lives to this country, fought in wars

for this country,

died on... building railway tracks and log booms,

and yet they're absent.

Absence was a very difficult thing to get around in my mind,

and I think absence has been the thing that motivates me.

I'm not angry, I'm just frustrated.

We did an intervention at the Royal BC Museum,

and I remember walking through, and we were given sticky notes

and pieces of paper where we could intervene

in terms of the historical trajectory

of how they had shown British Columbia, and to say,

"We were here, we were here, and we were also here,

but we're not reflected."

It's almost like our presence was nowhere to be seen.

I'm so proud of that intervention,

because previously I'd never really imagined

that my history could be present here.

I kind of assumed that the dominant narrative

was going to take over and I had to be relegated

to the margins again,

and didn't really question that positioning.

But the intervention really allowed me to understand

that I have a claim, and I can make that claim.

Yeah, that was so important

that people actually feel rightfully there, right?

Like, they need to feel that's their space and we need to do

so much more work to make that moment last longer

and do more things for the communities.

Yeah, we'd like some permanency.

You know, we don't want to be temporary Canadians.

We want to be permanent Canadians.

We want to have that sense of permanency

so that we're not asking for this over and over again.

I'm hoping this will transform this space.

Tzu-I: There has been a lot of different efforts

to add bits and pieces of previously marginalized stories,

or previously erased stories.

What we actually need to do is to...

ditch that binary model and really build a relationship

to invite the communities in, consult and work with people

who have different needs to share

and build that common vision for the future.

Victoria's Chinatown is a very important historic site

that is at risk.

A lot of different businesses, communities, and residents

are losing their footing in that space because of all the issues

with modern Chinatowns across the Americas:

the gentrification, the urban development,

and economic shifts.

When the Victoria Chinatown communities wanted something

done in their space, we wanted to really work with them

and see what their needs were.

Alan: We wanna show a new image of Victoria Chinatown,

which is, you know, the past and the present.

Tzu-I: We want to blend the historical

with the modern design.

The exhibit is called Peering into the Past

because we want to create those innovative small corners.

Alan: And this is the first project in collaboration

with the Royal BC Museum as well as Salient Group

and the Victoria Chinatown Museum Society.

And it's a storefront exhibit

which was curated by the Royal BC Museum.

So, our next venture will actually be an interim museum

where we could actually open the door

and people could go in and see exhibits.

It would be really good for us.

South Asian Canadian Museum is just starting out.

I would love to sit with you and the Vancouver people

and just shoot the breeze.

Let's talk to each other

and maybe build each other through solidarity.

I think institutions can help us develop some sort of ideas

that bring us all together, and I never thought of that

until now, that perhaps we need to talk more to each other

around one table, because up to this point

there's been both a provincial, federal, Canadian kind of view

about keeping people separate.

I would like to see more solidarity from all kinds

of community groups to come together to say,

"Our voices are greater if we are united."

I think let's record this as well, let's put this...

There is a systemic and system-wide failure, I believe,

in Canada, to really be inclusive.

The status quo is very entrenched

and embedded in our communities.

It has at its core a very supremacist idea.

It has at its core a place of privilege and power

that is unquestioned.

The status quo thinks that it has also clawed its way

to its position and it's gonna hang on.

We're not a society that's immune

from these kind of thoughts or intentional ideas,

and to pretend that we are is disingenuous.

Through colonization, the priority for history

has been a European-centric history.

We don't question why mainstream institutions

don't reflect our presence.

And when you make them uncomfortable,

when you do question them,

there's a lot of defensiveness.

Let's be honest, people don't like to shift and make change.

So, the more open we can be to the questions

that are posed to us, the better we will be as a society.

The status quo needs to shift

because the status quo is rotten.

Female Reporter: Most Canadians know Sir John A. Macdonald

as the country's first Prime Minister.

His government created the Indian Act and established

the residential school system, where thousands were abused

and generations of trauma followed.

In order to really commit to reconciliation,

we need to remove the statue of John A. Macdonald

from the front steps of City Hall.

Sandra: History, to me, means a connection to the past.

As a people, we always love telling stories.

We're very much storytellers.

That's just kind of how we share some of the history

and some of the knowledge that we have.

I was fortunate enough to have that connection

in a living form of my grandmother,

but not everybody does.

And so, sometimes knowing one's history is extremely difficult.

I kind of wanted to get back involved with my nation

and facilitate that connection.

My name is Sandra Marion and I'm the Director of Culture

and Heritage for Tahltan Central Government.

Chad: Tahltan Nation is a strong Indigenous people

up in northwest British Columbia.

We have about 4,000 members that we know of.

Close to 90% of our people now live outside the territory,

and it's really important to ensure

that our cultural information is accessible to them.

There's a huge connection between archives and land.

The archives tells the stories about our ancestors on the land;

their use and how they survived.

A huge part of our culture was survival.

We have so many different ecosystems within our territory

that each area had their own way of doing things

depending on the terrain and the weather.

And those stories that are recorded,

they're important so that we understand

how to use the land in different areas.

So, those stories need to be kept.

Need to be kept safe and preserved.

Tahltan Central Government started in 1974.

Early on, we had started the Culture and Heritage Department.

And one of the major tasks was to start building an archive

so that we could house that all in one place.

Sandra: A lot of documentation,

especially around exploration in our territory,

has accumulated over the years.

But nobody else outside the organization

could access those documents.

And we get all kinds of documents.

So, these books,

they're about different areas in the territory.

And so this was one of their resource books from 1982.

There's a picture of Treaty Creek.

This is a book the TTC had obtained to use in their study

for interviews about land claims.

There's a lot of audio.

Over time, there were multiple interviews

conducted with our elders.

During the fires of 2018, everybody realized,

you know, these documents are precious,

so we wanted to organize and preserve

to help support Tahltan identity

and kind of reinvigorate it.

We're taking resources and we're putting it back into the people

in the form of culture and language.

So, we typically get

a lot of different forms of media in here.

We get cassette tapes, with or without cases.

Recently, one of our members, she had found some footage

in her uncle's basement and brought it to me and said,

"Hey, I would like to donate this."

And this is where-- we have VHS, we have mini digital videos.

We didn't have time to go through it properly right away.

And probably three or four weeks ago,

our multimedia director sent me a clip, and it was 27 minutes

of my grandmother working on moose hide.

We've never videotaped her as a family,

and she passed in April 2020.

And so to have her working on moose hide is incredible.

Scrape with blade.

is what you call it.

Sandra: It was just...

I was blown away.

The VHS actually has no title on it,

so nobody knew what was on there

until we digitized it and pulled it up.

I was actually having a pretty rough morning,

and so when I seen that, I was like,

"Okay, Grandma, message received."

This is what we're trying to recreate

for our membership, is these moments.

If there's information out there

about your nation, about your family,

anything to do with your identity

as an Indigenous individual, you are supposed to

have unaltered access to that information.

And you're supposed to be able to bring it home.

Ursula: And with respect to what we want from the RBCM

and BC Archives, we need to go through formal channels.

Those formal channels haven't caught up

with existing legislation or changes to legislation

that have happened in the past couple of years.

Part of the materials at that institute

are First Nations cultural heritage and property.

Genevieve: One of the biggest concerns about working

in this field today is recognizing

that the work that we do causes real harm,

and trying to find a way to mitigate that

and to fix that.

To ensure that not only do we not make those mistakes

going forward, but to try and actually repair

what was done in the past.

I think it must just be down a couple bays.

We're not anywhere near there yet.

And a big part of it is engagement with communities

that have the knowledge, never assuming that we know

what's best or what the answer is.

So, this is the AJ Stone album.

Sandra: So, this is from 1890...

Genevieve: 1897.

Sandra: Yeah. To '98.

Genevieve: To '98.

Like, the near Spatsizi.

And so this is, like, a really perfect item

of what we would like to discuss of, you know,

bringing it home, given the individuals in these photos

and being able, like you said, to have the physical copy

and then discussing how to preserve it,

because it is from 1897.

Genevieve: Right.

Sandra: But then allowing our own people

to look at them and say,

"Hey, that's my family member. That's who that is."

Genevieve: Yeah.

Sandra: And properly putting names to photographs

that have been unnamed...

for over a century.

Genevieve: Exactly. Yeah.

Sandra: These photos are all online,

and our people have said, "You know, that's my family member.

I'm a descendant of that person in that photo."

But then you look in this album

and it's all numbers, and it's...

There's a level of, like, a feeling of dehumanizing...

Genevieve: Absolutely.

Sandra: ...the photos.

Because we have had access to them,

but to properly label them...

Genevieve: Yeah.

Sandra: ...and bring them home would be... amazing.

Genevieve: Yeah.

Ursula: Mm.

Sandra: This is Tahltan before the bridge.

There's markings in the...

the cliffs.

Ursula: Look at the hide.

She's right on it.

Sandra: Yeah, remember in the video with my grandma,

she put that bar out in the blankets

and climbed right up on it to...

Woman: Wow.

Sandra: ...to, like, scrape it.

She's scraping it.

Genevieve: And this is raised up above the ground?

Sandra: Yeah.

Genevieve: Wow.

Ursula: It's incredible.

Sandra: It looks so cold.

Ursula: Yeah.

Sandra: The amount of stories that would

come out of these photos from our people would be amazing.

Genevieve: Mm-hmm.

So, when we've been in conversation about, uh,

repatriating material from the archive,

our conversations have landed on

the shared stewardship model.

So, we haven't actually repatriated the items,

but this is new water for us.

This is something that we haven't done.

This is-- we're testing the waters,

but something we'd be eager to

enter into conversation with you about.

Sandra: So, for the Tahltan-specific archive,

it'll be a huge asset in the sense of,

you can come home and you can physically look at these photos

that involve your family and your territory.

We talk about incentivizing our members to wanna come home.

Having things like this would be huge,

'cause then they can come home and they can

look at their history and they can physically touch

tangible items of their own history.

And I think there's an underestimation

in the power of that.

Whereas now we have to come to Victoria,

and so being able to do that

while on your own territory, it's huge.

Love the accent of the blue in the middle.

Ursula: Yeah, me too.

Sandra: It's so gorgeous.

They belong at home.

They belong at home, and our...

our people need to see them and they need to...

work to... remember.

And it's just seeing pieces like this

to connect to those pieces of today and to know that,

even though this is here, it wasn't lost.

This artifact should come home, though.

This item from home should come home.

Male Reporter: Photographs of men and women whhelped...

Dan: An institutional archive is governed by a lot of

different protocols that come from a top-down view

of narratives that come from older European traditions,

they come from colonial traditions.

And not to say that all community archives

don't do that.

Collecting objects is, by nature,

a fairly colonial thing to do.

But the advantage of a community archive is,

it really is not beholden to those, necessarily.

It can be flexible.

Grunt Gallery is an artist-run centre in the Canadian model

here in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territories.

We have kept an archive of the programming history

of this space in one form or another since the beginning.

See, we don't keep artworks as in the physical work here.

A lot of times we're talking about

photo and video documentation.

Ursula: Hello.

Dan: Hi, there. Welcome to Grunt.

My name's Dan, I'm the archives manager here.

Very nice to meet both of you.

Glad to have you here.

Come on in, take a look.

So, this is the office, and as well as our archive.

The Grunt's been around since 1984,

so we have a pretty extensive archive

of all our programming over the years,

and exhibitions, performances, events, publications.

And the video I have to show to you today,

I can give you a little background.

There's a Mi'kmaq artist named Mike McDonald

who passed in 2006,

but his tapes are held by an artist-run centre called

Vtape in Toronto.

And so I took copies of them out here as a sort of backup

and to kind of connect some of his work

with his space that he spent a lot of time in.

I'll just bring up this video for you.

Man: You remember the first year

you come in the country, you know?

What year was that?

Woman: 1914.

Man: 1914.

Woman: In the spring and...

April we had to get a chisel.

Man: Is that right?

You know, I was born in 1908.

You were small.

I was small, yeah.

I remember, you know, just like dream there, you know.

Strange people come in the country, you know.

You kind of know the difference, you know, in the people there.

I could remember it just like dream, you know.

Sandra: He was one of the four or five men that started TCG;

Tahltan Central Government.

So, I'm going to ask the hard question: how do we get a copy?

'Cause I can tell you right now, there's two

very large families back home who would love this tape.

Dan: No doubt, no doubt.

Sandra: Absolutely love it.

I'm related to Eva through my grandfather.

Dan: Oh, wow.

Sandra: She was huge in re-recording our songs,

keeping the dancing going.

All the tape we have now for that time is all audio.

There's no visual at all.

So, this would be, like, the cherry on top.

Dan: A missing link, kind of, for that stuff.

Sandra: Yeah, 'cause I don't think

anybody even knows this exists.

Dan: Yeah, I think there's--

I mean, I think that's a great opportunity.

Like, our approach here is really just about

caring for artists' work and stewarding the material.

I'm not really into archival gatekeeping or any sort of--

where we're, like, possessing it.

And in this case, it's even a degree removed from that,

because we're essentially just holding a copy of it.

Sandra: Yeah.

Dan: I mean, I would want to honour the commitments

on Mike's family's behalf

and Vtape and the agreements that they've made.

But I think it's definitely a conversation

with them out there.

But the way I see it, there's--

Sandra: Do you have a direct contact

that you might be able to introduce us to?

Dan: Definitely, yeah.

Definitely.

Man: I met Frank when he was 19.

Sandra: I think it's really hard to think that we can watch this

and not walk away with a copy and just hope that we have one.

Dan: Yeah, like, I would feel comfortable giving you, like,

a copy of this if you have a drive, or I can--

we transfer it to you or whatever, like...

Sandra: We all know that song.

Before COVID, we had dances,

and they would always sing this song at a dance.

Ursula: Does it have a name?

Sandra: Ye Kade Jani.

Ursula: Kade Jani.

Man: Oh, my sweetheart.

Sandra: Wow.

That's...

Thank you so much.

Dan: Yeah, for sure.

Sandra: I always talk about timing

and how timing affects me in this job,

because it's always-- like, slaps me in the face

when things like this happen.

Like, you going over there and doing that work

and then bringing it back...

Dan: Mm.

Sandra: ...and then us meeting you,

and just how all of that lines up.

Like...

Dan: It's pretty amazing.

Sandra: The things that have to happen

in order to get to where you are in this moment.

Dan: We could have easily missed each other,

but that's not how it worked out.

Sandra: Or you could have easily missed the tape...

Dan: That's true.

Sandra: ...and pick something else. Like...

Dan: That's true.

Sandra: There's always these other forces

in the back that just...

I don't know.

I believe in it.

So.

Dan: I believe in it, too.

Sandra: Through this work, things keep coming to us.

I feel like there's this gravitational pull

in some sort of-- like the Force.

It's this concept of ghost dancing,

and that we will start to bring things back to our people

when our ancestors start coming back to us.

And so, having these tapes coming to us

rather than us going looking for it just signifies,

you know, you're in the right place at the right time

and you're doing the work that needs to be done.

Ron: You may not know it, but the moment you are in

has never happened before.

It is an incredible, fertile moment to be alive,

and we need to know what that feels like.

And you have to tell us.

There is definitely an understanding

that we're in a time of massive change.

The institutional understanding is catching up

to what people on the ground have been doing for years.

I feel really fortunate to be at this time,

but I also find the task very daunting.

It's only possible if we actually build a relationship,

build a trust to figure out

how we can reimagine our cultural spaces.

Imogene: Why does everybody have to go to the RBCM?

If you have a particular special item,

why do you have to see it there?

So, it should remain in the community.

Henry: It's a process that's gonna actually take

active remediation, because we value inclusion.

We think we should create a society where people belong.

Magnus: If we aren't actively collecting and preserving

those records, they disappear, they're gone.

And because we're only tackling this now in 2021,

in a lot of cases, we're too late.

Satwinder: I would say one word might explain

what I feel at this moment, is the word is "impatience."

I'm also very positive and an optimist

about where we're going.

We've just laid the foundation.

Lou-Ann: British Columbia and Canada

are a work in progress, as far as I'm concerned.

We didn't hit the end at any point.

I'm not even sure we're at the middle point yet.

And I think that hearing what real citizens have to say to us,

and taking that as our lead,

that's what's going to make the museum of the future.

That's what's going to change what these places are all about.

And I think that all citizens then

are gonna have an opportunity

to learn the real histories, all of it.

Not just somebody's narrow interpretation of it,

but all of it.