1. Indigenous women played a critical role in the development of BC’s fishing industry starting in the 1880s. They worked alongside family members in boats harvesting salmon and provided labour in the canneries that dotted the province’s coast. Indigenous women also participated in other industries such as mining. 2. Helena Read more…
With high unemployment and a recession in full swing, the Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) was formed by the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council in August 1907, with the aim of “keeping Oriental immigrants out of British Columbia”. It is a sad and troubling part of BC’s labour history. Unfortunately, this Read more…
(Excerpt from On the Line: A History of the British Columbia Labour Movement, by Rod Mickleburgh [2018]) The thousands of Chinese immigrants who endured so much helping to unite Canada by rail left little record of their ordeal. But we do have one personal account written by former railway Read more…
In the summer of 1954, racist signs on the women’s washrooms at the Namu fish cannery divided the facilities between “Whites” and “Natives”. They had been there for years, but despite demands from both the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union (UFAWU) and the Native Brotherhood of BC (NBBC) they Read more…
(Photo: Four members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Canadian Pacific Railroad Division, posed standing: Frank Collins, Joe(?) Hudson, L.M. Alexander, and Sam Lewis, ca. 1943. Frank Collins became President of the Vancouver Division of the Union, as well as the BC branch of the Canadian League for the Read more…