Volume 11 | 2017
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THE ATLAS | 2017 The Atlas | 2017 UBC Undergraduate Journal of World History Editors-In-Chief Amrit Toor | Adam C. Gold Editorial Board Ayush Datta Mohsin Ali Khan Caroline Ho Peter Bennett-Koufie Duncan F. Parizeau Rebecca Silver Gwyneth Evans Sammi Xenia Wong Helen Wagner Stephanie Stearman Cover Art Bygodt Michele 1 THE ATLAS | 2017 Acknowledgements Dear Reader, The following journal is the collaborative effort of many students and faculty members, who spent the last year putting together this journal. First, we would like to thank our editorial board, who invested a great deal of time selecting, editing, and preparing articles for publication. We are also indebted to the faculty of the History Department for their excellent working reviewing these papers before submission. We appreciate the efforts of all the individuals who submitted papers this year, and we encourage interested students to do so again in the coming years. This year we received a record number of submissions from undergraduate students, and they all displayed an exemplary level of research and academic writing. Therefore, we would like to make a final thank you to our authors for adhering to a tight editing scheduling, collaborating with our editorial board, and allowing us to publish their excellent research. Sincerely, Amrit Toor and Adam C. Gold Editors-In-Chief 2 THE ATLAS | 2017 Table of Contents Through the Lens: Public History and the Experiences of Japanese-Canadians in Richmond, British Columbia Sammi Xenia Wong 4 - 22 “Oui Will Not Go”: Examining Competing Claims to Nationhood Within the Province of Quebec Carmen Watson 23 - 45 Repatriating Inuit Land and Life: Unsettling the Eastern Artic and the Creation of Nunavut Helen Wagner 46 - 67 “No Future for You”: Youth Resistance in Early British Punk, 1975-79 Alice Gorton 68 - 81 Ballet and the Modern: The Abstraction and Americanization of Ballet, 1925 to 1957 Elizabeth Benoy 82 - 93 Women of Hope: Zainichi Writers in Postwar Japan Joelle Lee 94 - 105 Joseph Chamberlain’s Final Campaign: Representing the Increasingly Enfranchised Edwardian Working Class in a Fight against Unfair Free Trade Andrew Gong 106 - 123 In Defense of the Realm: The Land Reform Agenda of Tiberius Gracchus Peter Bennett-Koufie 124 - 137 Performing Auctoritas: The Spaces of Political Spectacle in Colonial Cosa Charles Connor Kelly 138 - 152 3 Sammi Xenia Wong | Through the Lens Through the Lens: Public History and the Experiences of Japanese- Canadians in Richmond, British Columbia Sammi Xenia Wong Currently, the Canadian public tends to selectively remember Japanese-Canadians’ roles in history. In many resources that people are able to access today, the deep contributions and existence of such a vibrant Japanese-Canadian community in the Vancouver area are often reduced to brief, impersonal mentions as “fishermen” or “internment victims”, thereby robbing them of any agency or diversity.1 In some of these instances, Japanese-Canadian communities are even completely removed from collective histories, as has been in the case of Richmond, British Columbia. Japanese-Canadians lives’ throughout history are largely glossed over, beginning with how first settlers came to the country in the nineteenth century, when various waves of immigrants came from Japan to Canada as temporary workers or permanent settlers.2 The majority of these early immigrants ended up living and working on Vancouver Island or along the coast of the Lower Mainland and numbered 4,597 out of about 178,000 British Columbians at the turn of the twentieth century.3 Like many migrants and ethnic minority groups, Japanese-Canadians tended to concentrate settlement in specific enclaves like Richmond, BC, for the convenience of familiarity, 1 Gulf of Georgia Cannery, http://gulfofgeorgiacannery.org/; “Culture and History,” Hello BC, http://www.hellobc.com/richmond/culture- history.aspx; “Our History,” City of Richmond, last modified November 24, 2012, http://www.richmond.ca/discover/about/history.htm; “About Us,” City of Richmond Archives, last modified November 12, 2015, http://www.richmond.ca/cityhall/archives/about/about.htm 2 Catherine Lang, O-Bon in Chimunesu: A Community Remembered, Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996: 9. 3 Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura, Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century, University of Washington Press, 2005: 5; “Population, Urban and Rural, By Province and Territory (British Columbia),” Statistics Canada, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum- som/l01/cst01/demo62k-eng.htm 4 THE ATLAS | 2017 community, and as defensive measures against discrimination. 4 Even within Richmond—a small island city south of Vancouver—in the pre- World War II era, Japanese-Canadians clustered in the fishing village of Steveston. In Steveston, they were either directly or indirectly employed in this industry as fishers, fishing materials producers, and cannery employees. The creation of the Gulf of Georgia Cannery in 1894 cemented Japanese immigrants in Steveston through providing a permanent means of employment. 5 Japanese settler participation also extended beyond just fishing. 6 Although Japanese-Canadians were alienated and subject to racial discrimination prior to WWII, when Japan fought alongside Nazi Germany against Canada and the Allies, Japanese settlers nonetheless maintained their lives in Richmond and left their mark on the geographical, political, and social development of the city. In the official government and institutional accounts of Richmond, there is no rooted and in-depth analysis of this piece of the city’s past.7 No major official site has devoted extensive sections or pages to exploring the history of Japanese-Canadian Richmondites. Although primary sources on this demographic group do exist, they are often mere “fragments”; images and documents are strewn about and sit there without much thought, context, or attention given to them. In spite of this, these “fragments,” particularly archived images, can be pieced together to thoroughly examine the experiences and lives of Japanese- Canadians in pre-WWII Richmond to demonstrate the importance and presence of the Japanese community. 4 Lang, 10. 5 Gulf of Georgia Cannery, http://gulfofgeorgiacannery.org/; Mitsuo Yesaki and Harold and Kathy Steves, Steveston Cannery Row: an Illustrated History, Peninsula Publishing Company, 2005. 6 Although all non-indigenous Canadians from all backgrounds are technically settlers to what is modern-day Canada, this essay will occasionally use the term “Japanese settlers” to broadly refer to all Japanese-Canadians, whether they are Canadian-born generational residents or first-generation immigrants. 7 “Culture and History,” http://www.hellobc.com/richmond/culture- history.aspx; “Our History,” http://www.richmond.ca/discover/about/history.htm; “About Us,” http://www.richmond.ca/cityhall/archives/about/about.htm 5 Sammi Xenia Wong | Through the Lens Approach This essay will first assess the inclusion (or lack thereof) of the Japanese-Canadian community in public history, as well as the significance of popular and public history. In some cases, the scraps of writing that exist about Japanese-Canadians in public history reveal a lot about the source type (for example, an official city website), the author, and the author’s values and agenda. Then, this essay will analyze the value of visual primary sources and what they can reveal about the histories of Japanese communities, families, and broader social currents in Steveston-Richmond. Visual primary sources offer both challenges and advantages that differ from those of written sources. Visual sources offer instantaneous images that writing might not be able to describe properly, but images also lack substantive descriptors and leave interpretation open to the viewer. By evaluating the pros and cons of images as sources, this essay will seek to maintain the legitimacy of online archived images as a tool for public education and history. Finally, this essay will look at some online archived images of Steveston- Richmond from the digitized Richmond Archives and BC Archives. Through exploring photos and pairing them with popular historical context, this essay will look to rework Japanese-Canadians back into public consciousness. Popular Public History To start, a focus on online public history will serve to reveal the lack of information that exists on Japanese-Canadians in Richmond. Online sources, in general, are available for most people as internet connection has become more low-cost, publicly accessible, and commonplace, as have internet devices like smartphones and computers. The public history sources evaluated in this essay are deficient in mentions of Japanese-Canadians. While there are some detailed sections regarding other key players in the history of Richmond on the various websites, Japanese settlers are noticeably missing from these narratives, and the propagation of a non-inclusive history speaks to how the community and its authors envision the past. Writing history (public history in particular) comes with a degree of power and privilege. Here, this is the ability to present the unfolding of a city’s history as being attributed to certain people and not others. These histories effectively 6 THE ATLAS | 2017 erase the presence and agency of Japanese-Canadian families in the public mind. Narratives are important—as per Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”, the memory of history informs the identity of communities of all scales, from