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This article explores the concept of community engagement and the Sikh Canadian experience through histories of community resistance, especially Asian Canadian resistance that does not focus on whiteness or stories of “resilience” but rather on how community experiences and historical retelling between Asian Canadian communities is itself a form of resistance.[1]

This article builds on the work I have done over the past decade both as a museum professional and during doctoral research on the histories connected to the Sikh Heritage Museum and the Gur Sikh Temple, the oldest still-standing gurdwara (Sikh sacred space) in the entire western hemisphere and a national historic site. Here, I explore both the contestation that adheres to the use of the word community first and foremost and then highlight some important Sikh Canadian experiences in British Columbia that evoke concepts of resistance. I end with an analysis of how there is space between the official archives, fostered through the relationships between many different Asian Canadian communities, to find these resistant spaces that move us away from white nostalgia and focus on the relationships between multiple Asian Canadian communities in British Columbia. For the purposes of this article, I use of the term white nostalgia much like Michael Wayne uses it, that is, in connection to an affective remembrance found in systems of white supremacy, where “the logic of white nationalism … can best be understood with a focus on its affective character and a comparison between this character and the affective mode of nostalgia. The social significance of affect and … nostalgia often persuades individuals to invest in reactionary versions of society like patriarchy and white supremacy by romanticizing the past.”[2] The romanticization of a past that favours white power structures is white nostalgia, and the affective resonance to that romanticization and nostalgia becomes embodied as fact and as capital-H History. A historical practice that counters this narrative, utilized through the relationships forged through community, is a powerful act of resistance within the discipline.

First, however, it is important to interrogate the language in relation to the Asian Canadian experience. The word community is too often overused, usually by organizations and power structures that are either historically colonial or carry their own histories of white supremacy, to take power away from racialized communities. Community is certainly not a homogenous umbrella, and nor should it be used as such. When community engagement is devoid of its power, it is not community engagement. And so, my interest lies in community engagement as resistance and community engagement as a means of regaining power that is taken from — in the context of this joint collection of articles — Asian Canadians. Community engagement is about resistance to decades of the discipline of history taking from people and not honouring and empowering Asian Canadians’ traditions, including by disempowering us to tell our own stories and to find unique stories of resistance. In the introduction to her contribution, Laura Madokoro interrogates the word community as well as the many modalities through which the word has been used in academic and intersectional spaces. Continuing to challenge the word, even as we persist working within community, is important. Community engagement, for me, is about decentring whiteness and relocating ourselves as both historians and community members within the very communities we write about.

Much of this idea of community engagement as resistance has been fostered through my experiences over the past decade, including during my PhD program (from 2014 to 2022). My thinking about community engagement as resistance is rooted in the work of such scholars as Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Michel Rolph Trouillot, bell hooks, and many others. These scholars reminded me of the power of not speaking in the language of colonizers, of not relying on the traditional processes of archival collecting, and of not seeking power within the centre alongside the colonizers. It is a powerful reminder that other avenues of approach not only exist but are equally legitimate and aligned with the histories of racialized communities.

bell hooks’s concept of power in the margins has become a mantra in many ways for the way I have used community engagement both as an act of resistance but also as a purposeful interjection into the way Asian Canadian histories are explored. A quotation perhaps too often cited, but less often enacted, is bell hooks’s powerful statement of where she positions herself in this work:

I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance — as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination.

We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which is difficult, challenging, hard and we know struggle to be that which pleasures, delights, and fulfills desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.[3]

Rather than seeking to constantly find “a seat at the table,” a positionality which affirms power structures, I am most fulfilled in re-envisioning what the margin itself can look like, including embracing relationships that we foster within that margin that do not rely on white supremacist structures or approvals. Finding those histories between Asian Canadian communities and not solely in relationship to whiteness is where I find resistance within the historical margins.

There are stories about the Gur Sikh Temple, National Historic Site, and Sikh Heritage Museum that are contained within this frame of marginalized resistance, and it is to there that we go next.[4]

The Gur Sikh Temple (Gurdwara)

In the Fraser Valley region in 1909, thirty-five Sikh men worked on farms in Mission and Matsqui, fifteen worked at construction sites in Abbotsford, while 160 men worked at mills in Abbotsford, Huntingdon, and Harrison Mills. Another forty men found work in the village of Clayburn at the Clayburn brick plant. The year before, in 1908, approximately fifty local Sikh men made the decision to build a Sikh gurdwara under the auspices and overarching organizational title of the Khalsa Diwan Society. The gurdwara building project was spearheaded by Sunder Singh Thandi, who along with Arjan Singh, purchased a one-acre property on a prominent hill adjacent to the mill at Mill Lake where they worked.[5] They gathered money to obtain the permits and designs for a new Sikh gurdwara. Since most of the men involved worked at the Abbotsford Lumber Company mill, they asked owner Joseph Ogle Trethewey if he would consider donating some lumber for the gurdwara. These men, as well as others who worked on farms in the area, were told that any lumber they could carry on their backs would be donated by the Trethewey family’s company. To prevent this story from enabling interracial nostalgia or formulations of white benevolence, it is important to acknowledge that all the Sikh men working for the Trethewey family were still paid a fraction of the wage of their white counterparts. The Sikh men willingly carried the lumber on their backs up the hill from Mill Lake to the gurdwara site — a trek of about two kilometres and largely uphill.[6]

The Abbotsford gurdwara, officially named the Gur Sikh Temple, was completed in 1911 and officially opened the following year. It is the second official gurdwara built in the Americas and is today the oldest still-standing gurdwara. On 26 February 1912, the Sikh gurdwara was declared open, and many Sikhs as well as non-Sikhs from throughout British Columbia came to take part in the opening prayers and ceremonies. The Abbotsford Post reported on 1 March 1912 that the members of the congregation “were much impressed with the highly intelligent address delivered by Priest Sant Teja Singh, who spoke in his native tongue and in English.”[7] Sant Teja Singh was a Harvard-educated philosopher and globally recognized scholar and activist in the Sikh community.

The gurdwara positions itself as a form of resistance through its location. When choosing the site for the gurdwara, the Sikh men who founded and built it purposely chose, what at the time was, the highest hill, a position that would mean the Gur Sikh Temple would stand taller than any other building in the Fraser Valley and would be visible from across the region: “The site where the gurdwara was built in 1911 was strategically chosen: a small hill sat in the centre of Abbotsford, surrounded by farms, close to the lumber mill where the Sikh men worked, with a strategic view of the entire city up to the American-Canadian border about six kilometres away.”[8] Though in outward appearance, the gurdwara did look like a home, the nishaan sahib, or symbolic flag, atop a seventy-foot-tall wooden poll was a specifically Sikh marker that the gurdwara next to it was indeed that — a Sikh religious gateway to the guru and Sikh holy text.

The positioning of the gurdwara and its history is once again a stark reminder of the work yet to be done regarding decolonization and reconciliation. The modern-day work of reconciliation at the national historic site takes the form of signage in both Punjabi and English that acknowledges the Stó:lō lands that the gurdwara, which now houses the Sikh Heritage Museum on the first floor, is built upon. The message, permanently placed onto the heritage building itself in 2019, reads: “In Solidarity: This National Historic Site Gur Sikh Temple is located on the unceded territory of the Stó:lō First Nations. We stand in solidarity with the Stó:lō peoples. We acknowledge the Stó:lō peoples ongoing struggle for self-government and recognition. These lands have been theirs from time immemorial.” The statement, made accessible to all visitors through two languages — as the first sign seen before entering the museum space and as a marker permanently etched onto the heritage building — is the first step in the ongoing process of reconciliation at the Sikh Heritage Museum. Beyond this work of acknowledgement through panels, meaningful relationships with Indigenous colleagues propels dialogue into meaningful action.[9] And so, I lean on the work of scholars like Iyko Day and Lorenzo Veracini in helping foster the nuances of language that differentiate between settler and migrant, wherein “settlers bring their sovereignty with them, and migrants do not.”[10]

The Gur Sikh Temple, from its inception, has conveyed a powerful message of resistance through expressions of faith, permanency, and belonging. Like all other gurdwaras built in North America during this period, the Gur Sikh Temple was built in the context of state-sanctioned and legislated racism(s). Its inward and outward forms, as well as its location, are unique to its space only when compared to other gurdwaras, and thus offer unique histories of belonging, not-belonging, and resistance to racism.

Though the outside of the gurdwara reflected the appearance of white settler homesteads of early twentieth-century British Columbia, the interior reflected Sikh beliefs and values.[11] This emphasis on the inside space as a uniquely built Sikh space is perhaps a way to rupture the ongoing perpetuation of the white settler colonialism exhibited through the external building. The gurdwara building consists of two floors: The second-floor prayer room housed the sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, and provided an open space for worshippers to sit cross-legged on the carpet. The ground floor contained a kitchen and a dining hall where the langar (a vegetarian communal meal) was prepared by volunteers and eaten together, affirming the equality of those who partook in it. Following an architectural aesthetic that communicated an openness to all — much along the lines of the Sikh epicentre, the Harmandhir Sahib — the Gur Sikh Temple is accessible via four doorways, which adheres to a common Sikh practice that the gurdwaras are welcome for people of all faiths and beliefs, from all four corners of the world.[12]

Beyond the history of the building itself, there are stories of resistance that took place within this building. This includes stories from the height of the anticolonial ghadar movement; oral stories indicate that ghadarites coming from the US followed the light bulb atop of the original wooden nishaan sahib and made their way to this space to recite poetry and ignite the idea of revolution and resistance.[13] While giving tours of the museum, every time I stop at the nishaan sahib to share this powerful story of the ghadar anticolonial movement, I see the eyes of the young Sikhs in particular widen. I see a visualizing of the story I tell through their eyes, and I see them realize that our stories are deeply embedded through acts of resistance, art, poetry, and critical anticolonial intelligence.

It was within the walls of this gurdwara space that ghadar poetry was recited, invoking staunch anticolonialism and antiracism. Poems like “Chalo Chaliye” (Come, let’s go), directly called out the racism within Canada, but also the challenging of that very racism:

Come Let’s Go. Let’s move forward and flee to Canada, let’s go and find some work there Let’s travel around and see the country well, since we are sitting around for long, and now is the time to move. It’s not good to sit idle on a foreign land, let’s unite with the ones who came before Let’s plant our seeds in the fields and do businesses, together we all prosper plentifully. The Whites of this Province are unreasonably cruel, jealous they are of Us They bypass the truth and justice totally, Ignore the Rights of others, nor they think of giving Rights. Just beautiful is this part of Canada, but they elbow us down here, Let’s hunt the whole Nation, where truthful are the people at least![14]

Seema Sohi argues that we should understand the “gurdwaras of North America during the early decades of the twentieth century as critical sites for not only religious worship and refuge from the toils of labor in the agricultural valleys and lumber mills of the Pacific Coast, but also of resistance, anticolonial mobilization, and state surveillance.”[15] The rapid emergence of Sikh gurdwaras at a time when the Canadian state was erecting such barriers to migration as the Continuous Journey regulation of 1908 and denying Sikhs the right to vote from 1907 to 1947 suggests Sikh resistance to narratives of not-belonging but also counters assumptions that racialized migrants to Canada in the twentieth century were simple “sojourners.”[16]

In this way, the Gur Sikh Temple plays a significant role in Sikh settler discourse around resistance and belonging. The building of the Gur Sikh Temple is not only an example of this resistance to both racism and a “sojourner statushood” imposed by the state but also a marker of Sikhs’ belonging.

There is an affect of resistance forged within the walls of the Sikh Heritage Museum, and that affect of resistance has been shaped by both the gurdwara’s history and the extant historiography. That is why during my PhD research, when I interviewed visitors at the national historic site, the Punjabi word bhavna, and the sense of affect it conjures, was frequently invoked. One visitor told me: “Because it’s [the museum is] made in the langar hall, which I really like that because it’s like so much was done here, so much happened in this space and now it’s been created into a museum. I really like the location and I like the space and how it was utilized to become something so great from so many years ago.” Another said, “But those emotions, that bhavna should exist inside this space. You should take that feeling out with you when you leave.” And a third shared: “Well it definitely made me feel like when someone says like, ‘Go back to your country,’ or, ‘You’re not from here.’ We’ve been here for a long time. So it definitely made me feel like this is our place. It’s not like we’re not from here. Our immigration happened a long, long time ago. This is our home.”

Bhavna, in this context, means affect.[17] It means an affect that is found through a deep reflection on one’s history, an emotional attachment to that history, and a responsibility to move through that history into the present moment and beyond, into future. There is a disjuncture, however, between how these stories of resistance, belonging, and affect are reflected from within the Sikh community, as we see with some of these powerful responses above, and the ways in which histories of Sikh settlement in Abbotsford, or of the gurdwara itself, are shaped by an erasure of many of these voices of resistance. The overarching markers and stories of resistance about the Gur Sikh Temple are too often erased to emphasize the history of the building of the site, which is laden with white benevolence and nostalgia.

Extant histories of the Gur Sikh Temple rely solely on archival documents in official repositories, which erase stories of resistance or otherwise reshape them either as “resilience” or through the lens of white nostalgia. Here, Michel Rolph Trouillot’s words are a stark reminder: “Silence enters the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance). Any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences.”[18] Even when an archive negates concepts of white nostalgia in relation to racialized histories, those racialized histories are erased within both narratives found in particular works of history and the capital-H History to which those works contribute.

There has been a recent and fascinating shift in historical narratives about the building of the Gur Sikh Temple. A few years ago, even I would have been complicit in reproducing the dominant nostalgic narrative that the Sikhs who built the gurdwara worked for the Trethewey family at the Abbotsford Lumber Company and that, in a kind, generous display of white solidarity, the family had donated the lumber to build it. The Trethewey family’s own biographical publication notes that

the mill attracted a large number of Sikhs to Abbotsford to work at the millsite, and there is still a large community of Sikhs living in the district to the present day. Their original wood temple … the Trethewey family believes may have been donated by Arthur and Joe. They probably gave the lumber for the temple also. There is no documentation of for this, but the story goes that at quitting time each day the Sikh millworkers were allowed to take some lumber away with them to use on the project.[19]

It is quite shocking that despite the writer clearly saying that there was no “documentation,” that is, no evidence, for this claim, that from 1908 until the 2020s an unproven or, at least, only half-truthful narrative constituted an entire community’s History. It would seem that historical evidence is only needed, or asked for, when it serves racialized community histories and stories.

Memory and erasure in the archive, a theme also explored as part of our joint panel, is connected intimately to my local Sikh community histories here in Abbotsford, BC, and of the Gur Sikh Temple. In September 2020, a Vancouver Sun article revealed that, in fact, the patriarch of the Abbotsford Lumber Company, the same company that apparently donated the lumber to build the gurdwara, also happened to be the first card-carrying member of Abbotsford’s Ku Klux Klan chapter. This revealing of a historical truth, which had been hidden for almost one hundred years, during the resurgence of a global Black Lives Matter movement, reveals some of the slippages in the racial logic and the need to preserve a white nostalgic past.

An original source, from the 3 December 1925 issue of the Abbotsford, Sumas, and Matsqui News reads:

A common oath, into a brotherhood of strict relations; to cultivate and promote patriotism towards our civil government; to practice an honorable clannishness towards each other; to exemplify a practical benevolence; to shield the sanctity of the home, and the chastity of womanhood; to maintain forever “White Supremacy”; to teach and faithfully inculcate a high spiritual philosophy through an exalted ritualism, and by a practical devotion to conserve, protect, and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights, privileges, traditions, and ideals of a pure Britishism.

After calling upon those in favor of Klan principles to stand, application blanks were distributed to those present. The institution fee was stated at $10. Mr. S.D. Trethewey was the first to profer his application.[20]

For almost a century, this newspaper clipping, the organization, and the family existed within a particular power structure of memory and history. There is a street in Abbotsford named in honour of the Trethewey family, and the family continues to hold prominence and power in the community in education, business, philanthropy, and even through the Abbotsford Heritage Society.[21] And so, nostalgia for the family and its history and legacy meant that it remained uncomplicated and historically inaccurate, or at least incomplete. The problem was that nobody wrote about it, and preserving a certain image of benevolence in the community took precedence. It took the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement for this source, despite it having existed for nearly a century, to fuel a public conversation and critical evaluation of the white nostalgic narrative of the gurdwara’s history. This too, is a powerful reminder of how larger activist moments or movements help to foster reconciliation and redress in History. This context matters when we share the fulsome story of the building of the gurdwara, and it suggests a limit to Melanie Ng’s ethical arguments about respecting archival secrets when those secrets are about the white supremacy hidden within the sources and archives on which Histories of racialized communities are built. In this case, exposing the Trethewey family’s association with the Ku Klux Klan laid bare Canada’s white supremacist histories.

The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots and Asian-Canadian Solidarity

Learning the stories of resistance that are a part the history of the Gur Sikh Temple is important, but so too are the stories fostered from within the Sikh Heritage Museum. A community’s ability to tell its own stories within a national historic site and sacred space is a powerful act of community engagement as resistance. For twelve years, I had the privilege and honour of curating stories within the Sikh Heritage Museum through Sikh, Asian, and feminist lenses. This engagement work helped to foster meaningful, personal, and long-lasting relationships built on shared solidarity for the Asian communities I have had the privilege to work with.

Figure 9.1

“Building damaged during [anti-Asian] Vancouver riot of 1907 – 130 Powell Street, $139.”

Source: Rare Books and Special Collections, Japanese Canadian Research Collection, JCPC-36-017, https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/jphotos/items/1.0048857/. Image courtesy of University of British Columbia Library

-> See the list of figures

It is because of relationships fostered through my community engagement work that I learned about the incredible story of inter-Asian resistance, solidarity and friendship behind the iconic image and archive from the 1907 anti-Asian riots in Vancouver. The image in Figure 1 features a smiling woman of Japanese descent peeking her head out from a family-owned shop the day after the riots, during which white vandals broke glass windows, physically beat up, or tried to vandalize Asian-owned businesses. The image also shows three white men in front of the shop, including one dressed in what appears to be a police uniform. The part that is sometimes cut off in digital versions of the photograph is the image of a Sikh man wearing a white dastaar (turban) staring directly into the camera.

While giving a tour of the Sikh Heritage Museum to colleagues from the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in 2019, we stopped at this iconic image. The museum’s curator, Lisa Uyeda, asked if I knew the full story about this picture, and I told her no, and that often, if one were to search for this image online, the version that one finds excludes the Sikh man on the right-hand side. She then told me this story.

The family who owned the shop was from Japan.[22] According Denise Nishimura, her father and older brothers ran the store and were very active in the community. Her father’s best friend was the Sikh man pictured in the riot photo, and by 1907 they had been friends for years. After white vandals and racists, led by municipal leaders through the Asiatic Exclusion League, attacked businesses and racialized people, the Japanese owner called his best friend, the Sikh man, and a group of their friends to help in the cleanup. Denise’s mother is the woman smiling from in the doorway and holding a baby with another child next to her.

During the Second World War, Denise and her family did not go to an internment camp.[23] Instead, her father’s best friend, the same Sikh man, helped them secure a place to go to outside of Vernon, and from there they moved around the area during the war. Her brothers, who would have been in their twenties and thirties by then, stayed behind to help close the same shop that was destroyed during the riots.

In learning of this story of meaningful friendships and relationships fostered between the Nishimura family and the Sikh man, I realized the importance of not speaking about the riots in a monolithic way. Out of the macrocosm of stories of white supremacy and racism in British Columbia, I honed in specifically on this story of friendship, of intimacy, and of care that extended beyond hate. This is the story that matters to me, a story that focuses on the power of the margins. And yet, much like the story of the KKK in Abbotsford, it is a story that for more than one hundred years has not received enough attention, not been the subject of further research: who is the Sikh man? What is his name? What became of him? These stories, stories of intra–Asian Canadian relationships and community are where our historical energies should be focused for they offer rich possibilities for where archives in the margins, histories in the margins, and relationships between Asian Canadian experiences can go.

After learning this story, I decided that the second case study for my dissertation would be the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre. Again, community engagement, and the relationships that I have been so lucky to be a part of, and continue to be a part of, provided me the exact Asian Canadian solidarity, story of resistance, and research to help shape my own dissertation. The process of welcoming communities long ignored or denied and representing them in museum spaces on their own terms can foster meaningful belonging. That is why the strength of the Sikh Heritage Museum lay in stories by the oppressed, in remembering the past but also feeling pride in that past.[24] That is why visitors at the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre felt pride, felt a sense of inclusive history being told; and that is why Chinese Canadian visitors had such high expectations of future possibilities for the white settler Burnaby Village Museum space.

The strength of Asian Canadian experiences lies not only in the intricacies unique to, for instance, Sikh, Japanese, or Chinese Canadians but also the stories that tie us together, bind us together, and foster solidarity with each other. This is but one story, and there is more need for the scholarship to reveal other stories.

There are so many stories and histories that are worthy of being explored from the perspective of inter-Asian solidarity, resistance, and community. And as Laura Ishiguro reminds us in the introduction to this collection of articles, there are ways that tensions between the academy and Asian Canadian studies can and should be addressed. My article, in showcasing Sikh settlement history as a counter to white nostalgic histories, is but one small example of how we can address that tension within the academy. But rather than ending on a note of tension, or contention, I wanted to end on a note of optimism and hope. In the summer of 2022, my boys (then aged thirteen and eleven) joined me on a trip to Paldi, British Columbia, where there are many more stories of Asian experiences from within the microcosm of a sawmill community in the early twentieth century. These intimacies were fostered around food, work, sacred spaces, home spaces, school spaces, and so much more. To this day, my boys still talk about it. Jovin Singh, at age eleven, had the particular task of helping Michal Abe talk about his Japanese Canadian aunties in Paldi by holding up Abe’s family tree. These sticky moments in a child’s experience, fostered through community engagement, and inter-Asian relationships, which constitute a form of resistance to histories shaped through white supremacy, are long lasting and impactful, and where our work needs to go.