Indie’s 3am thoughts

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The Ology of an Apology

Canada is a beautiful place. People come here travelling or immigrating all the time, because generally it’s a cool place to be, and it always has been. Since Canada has existed, people have travelled far to get here, and stay here, but 100 years ago, that was a bigger deal than can be today, because of racism and white supremacy. This past project and this blog post will touch on all of that specifically focusing on British Columbia.

Canadian memorials

How can we create a public memory of past wrongs so that they are remembered and not repeated today? That was the driving question for this project. Over the course of this project we focused on three main groups and/or events that were the most impactful on bc’s history, and we looked at the memorials for these events, because our project wasn’t only on the events it was also on the apologies, now that Canada is less blatantly racist. At the end we created our own ideas for how the memory of these events could be shared and looked back on. 

The three main events we looked at were; The Komagata Maru incident, Anti- Chinese immigration, and The Japanese internment of WWII. Below I’ve gone through each briefly and shown how they were memorialized.

The Komagata Maru is actually something I’ve already made a blog post on here. But if you don’t feel like reading that I can summarize it here instead. The Komagata Maru was a ship carrying South Asians to Canada in the early 1900s. However because there was lots of racism going around, Canada didn’t want them, even though we as a part of Britain were supposed to let them in, the government made up a law, so that they could reject the ship and its passengers entry upon arrival. The ship arrived in Vancouver and it and the passengers sat in the bay for a couple of months (way to long), and it had already been travelling for a few months. The passengers were on that boat for so long without food or water, stuck there, as an attraction to the people in B.C at the time. We do in fact have a memorial on this tragedy and you can view it here.

Anti Chinese immigration is probably the longest lasting “event” that we learned about because it started when Canada was colonized and it ended in the 1900s. Chinese people have been in Canada since it was discovered, but the bigger part of immigration happened around the gold rush, where they were promised a better life, and then they ended working on the railroad, where it’s said that one Chinese person died per kilometre. Since China wasn’t a British colony or anything like that Canada didn’t even have to come up with a law to keep them out they just said you can’t come in. This kind of thing lasted until the 1920s or so and after that Chinese people still faced a ton of racism just being here.

There is a memorial for the head-tax which was a big part of trying to keep Chinese people out that you can look at here.

The last main event we looked at happened in world war 2 when we were at war with Japan, and because we saw Japan as an enemy, Canada turned on the Japanese Canadians, lots of which who had never even been to Japan, rounded them up and either sent them to Japan or to an internment camp where they stayed in poor conditions separated from their families for months. There is a Memorial Center for one of the camps here.

A part of this project that was quite exciting was the field studies, we went to many places to see the history and to see how it impacts the present. The trips enhanced our understanding so far and they were quite fun too. Here are some cool pictures I took on them. And here is the links to some of the places we went: Punjabi market, Komagata maru museum, china town, Nikkei centre.

Before I talk about the teamwork and the exhibition, I have to mention the name of this project and that side of it. The name as you saw in the title was ology of apology (the study of apologies). So whilst we were learning about the history, we were also learning about the reconciliation and mainly the governments ways of apologizing and changing. So part of the reason we visited a whole bunch of places was to grasp how the government apologies were taken and how they intertwine with the events.

Government apologizing for Japanese internment 1988

After we did a deep dive into all of the history and facts, we got put into teams, and assigned one of these three events to create a memorial for. We got together and planned out all sorts of things like the design, the location (theoretically), the message, and all of the specifics. My team was made up of myself, and 2 other teammates Amy and Randy. Our assigned event was the Anti Chinese immigration timeline, and we worked really hard to come up with a really interesting memorial that told a story. 

Our memorial was in the style of traditional Chinese paper cutting, and we made a storyline using images in the paper. We cut out a timeline of all of the events that happened and we had a light to shine through the paper and cast the shadow of the image. This memorial design took lots of teamwork and I think my team and I did very well, especially since our design was done as quick as possible to make it in time for the exhibition.

The exhibition was our chance to showcase this project to an audience and really finish off this project. We built a scaled model of our memorial, and we presented it to members of the community. We stood at a table for a few hours and told everybody exactly what it would be like to have this memorial in real life, and it ended up being heaps of fun. Each event had 2 teams making memorial ideas for them, and as the people went around they could vote on which one they thought was interesting. Our team was quite good on presenting and selling our idea, so we won! At the end when I talked to the rest of the groups, I realized that there was a question that came up quite often from the really invested people, which was; Will this happen in real life?

Our memorial in action

I think the short answer to that question is no. But I also think that nothing is impossible, in this case it’s not unimaginable either. As a student it would be very difficult to pitch a memorial to a council, get it approved, and think about everything that would come with a memorial, especially regarding engineering and all that, but I think that this project was a great opportunity to just sit and think about that, because even if something like that wouldn’t be possible today as grade tens, who knows about in a few years? But that’s besides the point, the whole point of thinking about the next step, is thinking about your projects in a real way, so they’re not just an art project that you’ll forget about in a few months.

Just a quick footnote to put in, there is a great documentary type series here, about bc’s untold history, it’s completely free and I suggest you check it out! It’s very interesting.

In conclusion I think that this was a really interesting project, probably my favourite one so far, and I think that learning about this side of history and it’s importance was a great experience overall.

Thanks for reading! Comment!

 

indiras • January 10, 2022


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