Above: Window displays (photographs of Sikh sawmill workers, North Pacific Lumber Co., Barnet, BC, 190-; Chinese millhands, Royal City Planning Mill, Vancouver, BC, 190-; Japanese millhands, Wood & English Limited, Englewood, BC, 1926; Below: Door window (photograph of Chinese Railway workers, Glenogle, BC,1924); overlays of the Chinese words for ‘rage’ 怒 and ‘solidarity’ 團結
Commissioned by Seize the Means Video Co-Op and VALU Projects, these street-level window displays — at the Lim Sai Hor Kow Mok Benevolent Association building in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown — documents a fragment of the history of Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian labourers who organized and struck against racist and substandard working conditions in the early 1900s locally and provincially.
The main windows feature newspaper clippings from 1907-1927 that chronicled acts of resistance and solidarity set against a backdrop of rare posed group photographs of racialized mill and lumber workers, while the smaller door panel shows Chinese railway workers in BC during that same era. These visuals are paired with words from and cited by Dr. Winnie Ng, a respected Toronto-based labour rights activist, scholar, and community organizer who has written extensively about anti-colonial and anti-racist intersectionality and the labour movement.
When union leaders decry ‘a worker is a worker is a worker’ as their operative mode, as if they are gender or colour blind, they have failed to see the complexities of capitalism where race, and other forms of social constructs are used to divide and weaken the working class
—Dr. Winnie Ng (2010)
Indigenous and racialized workers in British Columbia faced pervasive racism in their everyday lives, a symptom of broader white supremacist ideologies and xenophobia that sought to control and restrict Asian immigration in order to preserve a “White Canada forever,” as the 1900s song goes.
These sentiments were perpetuated by unions and workplaces that deliberately excluded, barred, and undercut non-White and “Oriental” workers. For instance, the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council (VTLC) organized boycotts of Japanese-Canadian businesses as they believed cheaper Japanese-Canadian labour undermined union workers. Furthermore, members of the Canadian branch of the Asiatic Exclusion League—formed under the auspices of VTLC—were behind the days-long September 1907 anti-Asian riots which injured many and caused extensive damage to Chinese and Japanese businesses in Vancouver’s Chinatown and Japantown/Paueru-gai パウエル街. These riots resulted in the Vancouver Chinese community calling a general strike of all Chinese labourers days later, a story previously unknown to me, found documented in a newspaper article seen on the rightmost window display.
Rage is when slaves are aware of their conditions, when their hearts can feel the depth of the oppression, when the conscious self begins to demand change. Rage is that moment of clarity of clenched fists.
A. Merrifield as cited by Dr. Winnie Ng (2010)
In the vein of my past work utilizing archival records to explore Chinese immigration and the Exclusion Era years, I draw connection between the forces that gave rise to historic events to today’s collective struggles against escalating white supremacist, fascist, carceral violence, all while racial capitalism continues to prevail. This is especially relevant during this time, five years after the COVID-19 pandemic when anti-Asian racism was particularly rampant, and in the context of compounding crises and state neglect in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which encompasses Chinatown and where this installation appears.
This project’s title is based on “A Report on Oriental Activities Within the Province” — an official document prepared for the BC Legislative Assembly in 1927 with statistical data on “the evils of Oriental penetration” in British Columbia.