Author Carol F. Lee explores the writings of her mother Mary Quan Lee, with a focus on her experiences in the 1930s and her sense of dual Canadian and Chinese identity in the 1940s. Lee notes that her mother’s identity was shaped in large part by openings and closings in opportunities and the structural realities of exclusion in Canada.
To launch the exhibit More Than a Face, part of the new Active History on Display initiative, we invited Fung Ling Feimo, one of the storytellers, to set the stage: More Than A Face opens at activehistory.ca! It is a collection of soundscapes, visuals, written and spoken word, offering stories told through our individual voices. We have storytellers from… Read more »
Laura Madokoro I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Chat GPT when it first started making news headlines earlier this year. I was therefore intrigued when the Active History Collective decided to experiment a little by asking it to comment on our areas of expertise. I jumped right in with a quick question. In hindsight though, I completely underestimated… Read more »
Shezan Muhammedi This year mark’s the fiftieth anniversary year of the Ugandan Asian refugee resettlement in Canada. It was the first major resettlement of a non-European refugee community in Canada during the post-war period, following the official de-racialization of Canadian immigration policy in 1962. My mom and her family are part of the nearly 8,000 Ugandan Asian refugees who… Read more »
By Timothy J. Stanley Until its 1947 repeal, the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, effectively barred Chinese people from immigrating to Canada and required all Chinese, including the Canadian-born, to register with the government. Failure to register made them liable to fines, imprisonment and deportation. The Chinese are the only group to which… Read more »
By Henry Yu On July 1, the “Paper Trail” exhibit curated by Catherine Clement detailing the impacts of the legal Chinese exclusion of Chinese from Canada in 1923, will open at the new Chinese Canadian Museum located in Vancouver Chinatown. Having spent the last seven years of my life helping in some capacity or another to envision, consult, plan and… Read more »
By Kaleigh Bradley “Where does the body end and ‘non-human nature’ begin? When we recognize that human bodies are directly affected by their environments, we are forced to acknowledge that humans are not simply agents of environmental change, but objects of that change” – Linda Nash, Inescpable Ecologies Last week I was surprised to hear about the toxic leak of… Read more »
By Phil Gold For Estonians, the twentieth century was a tug-of-war between political independence and social freedoms and repressive subjugation under the Soviet boot. Lynda Mannik’s book, Photography, Memory and Refugee Identity: The Voyage of The SS Walnut, 1948 provides a fascinating snapshot of one moment in that tumultuous history: the journey of the 347 Estonian refugees from Communism who… Read more »
