June Chow
This post is a sequel to The right to remember the past: Opening Chinese immigration records in Canada’s national archives published on March 27, 2025. It is adapted from a presentation made on June 11, 2025 at the Association of Canadian Archivists conference held at Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario) to an audience that included Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Leslie Weir.
In an earlier blogpost, I shared a firsthand account of how my community worked with its national archives to open racist government records needed to understand and confront the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. Over and above the law’s ban on Chinese immigration was its mandatory registration of every Chinese person residing in Canada within twelve months of the Act coming into force. ‘C.I. 44’ forms document this tried-and-true tactic of a state’s criminalization of law-abiding residents through round-up strategies, a modern-day version of which is playing out under the directive of President Trump through U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A century after the Chinese Exclusion Act introduced its requirement for mass registration, the records created in this hostile context are being used to pursue collective healing, grounded in the personal, painful work of recovering ancestors who lived through the shame and regret of exclusion in silence. Any sum of the Chinese head tax pales in comparison to the price paid by those like my great-grandfather who endured a lifetime of separation from his wife and children.
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