“We were all strangers once, elbowing for a place called home"* Wave after wave of immigrants were unfriendly to the next. The Chinese were treated like outcasts and forbidden to bring their wives to Canada. The Sikhs were driven from our shores during the Komagata Maru. Black Americans were denied entrance during the great pre-war immigration boom. The Ukrainians were subject of intense slander. Italian immigrants were considered undesirable people and the Jews were excluded from all Canadian systems.
Yet this country was built upon “The tears of immigrants that moisten the railway tracks, whose bones still groan on the land they opened, whose laughter rings out at the sudden surprise of ourselves. We are their children gulping the air of Canada.”*
Canada will be 150 years old this year on July 1, 2017. So studying our Canadian history this year is perfectly timed for us. This great country of ours was built upon three generations of immigrants who arrived, but it was the enormity of those first early immigrants who’s identity was the most difficult. It is the efforts of these faceless immigrants who toiled in the fields of our raw rocky land. It is their efforts not to be forgotten. “It was tolerable for faceless immigrants to toil in the fields, but quite another thing to have them rub up against decent society in the cities.”
Multicultural immigrant history is scratched inside the steamer chests of our great-great-grandmothers, scribbled on the musty paper of ancestors whose true names were misspelled at ports of entry. It is in the fallen timer of long-lost homestead where the immigrants found the courage to keep on going because there was no going back home again. These people came along before ideas of entitlement, education, equality, welfare and medicare. The cold hard facts of starvation, illness and survival is who’s bones this great nation rises on.
In researching for this project our eyes are opened to our own personal families history and you will read of their stories throughout this website as well. So sit back and listen as you read about their quiet courage and try to imagine the hardships, losses, and triumphs of the three generations who came before us.
* Quotes taken from the book: A Scattering of Seeds- The Creation of Canada By Lindalee Tracy