at first i wasn't so hot about the idea of having to keep a blog for this class, but now i'm making my writing process public as i continue to build my paper (due apr 6). i'm going to be putting updates all week on the blog, and if folks want they can comment right on my paper as i write it (which i would highly encourage). this is an experiment.
There is a mountain on the central coast on Nuxalk/Oweekeno/ Kwakwaka’wakw[1] land, north west of Vancouver and south east of Haida Gwaii that is renamed[2] after the first Japanese settler to come to what is now known as Canada[3]. Mount Manzo Nagano was renamed in 1977 by the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names to commemorate Nagano-san’s[4] landing a century before (Colombo, 2001). It is ironically fitting as, in a way, the mountains have also renamed the Japanese Canadian community (who I will refer to from now on as the Nikkei in Canada, or simply, Nikkei). Incarcerated and dispossessed en masse in isolated mining towns and work camps throughout the mountains from 1942-1946, the Nikkei in Canada became intimately familiar with the Canadian Mountain. The construction of space as race, the Canadian Mountain as a symbol of nation, as well as empty, isolated liminality - specifically the Rockies, and more generally the various mountain ranges patterning the landscape of British Columbia and western Alberta - have been instrumental in shaping the identity of the Nikkei in Canada as exiled people.
Sherene H. Razack (2002) writes that place, land as location, becomes race as a white settler society establishes a nation on non-European land. It is evident that space, land as geographical terrain, also becomes race with colonization. The reconstruction of the mountains is closely tied with colonization and the invention of nation and nationalist images. Benedict Anderson (1991) identifies the nation as an imagined community. While Gellner writes that nationalism “invents nations where they do not exist,” (1964, p. 169). To invent the nation and imagine its national identity, Canada has often appropriated from the many indigenous nations already inhabiting the land (Nelson, 2006). The maple leaf, the crucial element of the national flag, was chosen by an association the colonizers had with indigenous peoples and their use of the maple sap (Ibid). More recently, indigenous symbolism used by the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games was met with anger by several indigenous commentators. They recognize Canada’s tokenization of indigenous imagery and partnerships to construct a unique image of Canada while appropriating yet unceded indigenous lands in British Columbia for the setting of the Games, and maintaining a resistance to sharing its colonial legacy of indigenous genocide (Charleyboy, 2010; Kaste, 2010; Sherman, 2010; Wonders, 2006). It is ironic that while Canada relies on the geography of BC’s mountains to sustain its international image, there have been no treaties or agreements made that legally entitle non-indigenous people and governments, including the Government of Canada, the Government of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver, to most of the land in British Columbia. [5]
Colonially constructing space as race imbues the mountains with highly racialized meaning, meaning beyond geology alone. The project of Canadian nationalism has historically reconstituted the mountains through a very violent relationship with the land and the peoples of the land. I say reconstruction and reconstitution in acknowledgment of the relations and meanings the mountains hold for peoples indigenous to the land there. For instance, looking specifically to the Coast Mountains and Squamish traditional territory, the Squamish people have used the area for hunting, fishing, and gathering in temporary summer settlements for generations (Squamish Nation & Reimer, 2003). The Coast Salish people – of whom the Squamish people are a part – hunt Xwuxwelken[6] (mountain goat) at the highest altitudes, including in the Ch’ich’iyu’y Elxwikn area mountains, known by Vancouverites as ‘the Lions’ (Ibid). Hunting Xwuxwelken necessitates using other aspects of the mountains such as the rivers to bathe in often, cedar boughs to rub the hunter’s body in, and Xwuxwelken’s wool either from sheddings or from a blanket passed down from older hunters – all in order to keep Xwuxwelken from smelling the hunter while being tracked (Ibid). Wind direction, large rocks, other hiding places, and cliffs to drive Xwuxwelken off of have also been instrumental mountain elements used by the hunter. In turn, blankets made from Xwuxwelken’s wool have held high ceremonial value and at potlatches have been distributed as a sign of wealth (Ibid). This is part of the context filling the mountains with meanings outside of Canadian nationalism. Thus, when I refer to ‘The Canadian Mountain’, I’m referring to the various Canadian nationalist reconstructions of the mountains, and not the interpretations like the one described above.
Contrasting the Squamish understandings of the mountains, the national imagination has invented The Canadian Mountain as “the towering Rocky Mountains, whose grim, barren slopes, surmounted by glittering crowns of ice and snow, rise in inspiring grandeur and beauty,” (Talbot, 1915, p. 72). And engaging in this scene, the consumer of The Canadian Mountain should sit back and sip on the champagne the train’s stewardess has just flirtatiously brought (Preston, 2001, p. 206). Or else invoke the inner child and use the landscape as a personal playground, as the Vancouver 2010 Olympics have marketed. Tourism campaigns have constructed this version of The Canadian Mountain for consumption by the wealthy. With the goal of accumulating revenue for the nation, such campaigns advertise Canada as a destination of choice for travelers and exploit the awe and adventure non-mountain dwellers associate with mountains in general. Indeed, even the exact site of a Nikkei internment camp in the Selkirk mountain range has been written about as “one long span of bliss,” where paradise “is the only rival” (Lowery in Adachi, 1976, p. 251). On the official tourism website of the Canadian Tourism Commission the first page is filled with a photo of a skier, snow flying, mountains and more mountains stretching into the back ground. Searching ‘Canada’ in a search engine set on retrieving only images produces such nationalist pictures as the Canadian flag, the map of Canada, and photos of mountains. Even though mountain terrain currently[7] makes up only a small percentage of the ecosystems enclosed within Canadian borders, somehow the mountains have come to mean Canada more so than any other landscape.
Colonial remapping has contributed to the invention of the mountain space as race. Alexander Mackenzie and George Vancouver beginning in the late 1700s set out to map this last corner of the western hemisphere still unmapped by European imperialism (Brealey, 1995). Directed by the Carrier and Nuxalk peoples, the explorers were able to begin imagining the territory through mapping it, laying the foundations for claiming it as Canadian (Ibid). Yet despite their guides, the maps produced suggested the land was a “peopleless wilderness” (Ibid). Razack (2002) reiterates that with European settlement began a retelling of history, one that imagines the land as empty, developed only by European pioneers. In this way, the image of the empty land has also been a popular way to encourage European settlement. Indigenous peoples in British Columbia were evicted from their lands around Canyon Creek, Round Lake, Tyhee Lake and in the Telkwa river valley when in 1901, the BC legislation began providing white volunteer fighters for the British side of the Boer War[8] with scrip for free 160 acre homesteads (Gitxsan, 2010). The Canadian Mountain imagined as vast, empty wilderness by this settlement legislation as well as by current tourism ads necessitates the land’s historic and ongoing emptying.
Emptying the mountains to create The Canadian Mountain is a process done not only through remapping and eviction, but also through genocide. In the late 1700s with the beginning of European contact and colonial war, European-imported smallpox epidemics killed 30 per cent and later 50 per cent of the indigenous population in BC (Squamish Nation & Reimer, 2003). More specifically, by 1830, the BC’s indigenous population was decimated from a pre-contact estimate of several hundred thousand to 70,000 (Gitxsan). By 1929, the population was further reduced to 20,000 (Ibid). Residential schools have also devastated indigenous nations and their ability to reproduce their cultures.
In addition, several resistance wars fought by indigenous peoples in response to these emptying attempts punctuate Canada’s history. One such war, the 1858 Fraser Canyon War, resistance by the Sto:lo to mining activity and violence from miners, marked the end of attempts at treaty making in BC (Saunders, 2007). The Red River ‘Rebellion’ of 1869 and subsequent Northwest ‘Rebellion’ of 1885 were resistance wars fought by the Métis and Plains Cree who were being starved out by actions such as colonial policies of land reform (Miller, 1991). More recently, indigenous resistance manifesting in the military standoff between the army and the Mohawk at Kahnawá:ke in 1990 over contested land is evidence of ongoing Canadian attempts at emptying the land of indigenous people.[9]
Creating the empty Canadian Mountain is also done through law. After the colonial government of BC joined the rest of the country in 1871, Canada began setting a variety of laws restricting indigenous peoples from asserting their rights to exist with the land. Prohibitions on indigenous fishing rights were put into Canadian law in 1878 (Carrier Sekani Tribal Council, 2007). Six years later, the potlatch - a gathering instrumental to the functioning of many nations inhabiting BC - was banned (Ibid). In 1901, the provincial government requested Canada to reduce the size of existing reserves (Ibid). In 1927 the federal government made it illegal to raise funds with the purpose of pursuing land claims (Wonders, 2006). The Indian Act also attempted to legally empty the mountains and Canada in general of indigenous peoples by establishing that women lose their Indian Status when they marry men without it, and that children born out of such marriages cannot retain Indian Status and are legally non-Indian (Giokas & Groves, 2002; INAC, 2010). It should be noted that beyond the instances listed here, Canada has committed other genocidal crimes and attempted myriad other legal measures to erase indigenous people and empty the mountains (See Dickason, 2005; Foster, 1999; Furniss, 1992; Goikas & Groves, 2002).
Emptying the mountains required access facilitated by the railway’s construction, a process that further defined space as race. As Japanese labourers populated the mountains after being “supplied” by Japan to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, they along with other Asian labourers were signed onto contracts designed to ensure they did not stay and settle after the railway’s completion (Timlin, 1960). Yet, inventing the nation as a white space entailed the desired (read: white) settlement of Canada and was reliant on the transportation the railways provided. Being able to transport goods from the European home country to ports in eastern Canada and then across the continent by train to where scrips were being given out made settlement more attractive (Pizey-Allen, 2009).
Settlement required not only goods to be transported by rail, but also military might. Shortly before the CPR was completed the Métis and Plains Cree - starved by the concurrent extinction of the buffalo and oppressive land reforms put in place by the colonial administration in what was then known as the District of Saskatchewan - were in the grips of the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, a resistance war against colonial outposts (Miller, 1991). The railway, which was completed up to the District, had ensured colonial troops from eastern Canada could be transported into the interior on time to fight and eventually win the war (Berton, 1971; Pizey-Allen, 2009). Big Bear and Poundmaker, two instrumental Plains Cree chiefs were imprisoned and as a result died. Eight other indigenous leaders were hanged (Miller). Instrumental Métis leader, Gabriel Dumont fled to the US, while Métis leader Louis Riel was tried with treason and hanged (Ibid). Then-Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald invoked the imagined community and invented nation in the wake of such indigenous devastation when he announced “[l]ate events have shown us that we are made one people by that road, that that iron link has bound us together in such a way that we stand superior to most of the shafts of ill-fortune,” (Macdonald in Berton, 1971, Epigraph). Note that the nationalism of this speech reduces the indigenous resistance to a ‘shaft of ill-fortune’ to the nation. Ultimately, the surrenders of Big Bear and Poundmaker were major factors in the completion of the CPR, a project in risk of financial collapse prior to the war. The project gained political support because of its roll in winning for Canada (Berton; Pizey-Allen). The construction of the railway was simultaneously justified by and justification for the invention of the nation.
As indigenous space was being emptied to make white space, further important shifts the mountains’ meaning were taking place. Their emptiness and isolation were becoming associated with adventure and fortune for white entrepreneurs, largely through the ore and silver rushes of the 1890s. Several mining towns sprung up almost overnight scattered throughout the emptied mountains (Turnbull, 1988). Upon introduction of frequent railway service to these locations, more entrepreneurial European and U.S. settlers poured into the mountains. When the site to build Slocan City was bought by Frank Fletcher, it was already so popular that people were apparently standing in line to purchase property (Ibid). The mining town of Sandon had a population of 5,000 at its peak, boasting 24 hotels, 23 saloons, a newspaper, city hall, and even an opera house (Ibid). However, falling ore prices and the discovery of rivaling gold elsewhere from 1897 onward created economic hardship for these towns, and many underwent enormous decreases in population or were abandoned completely (Ibid).
Mountain roads, constructed often on top of existing pathways made by indigenous peoples[10], sustained the mining towns’ continued inhabitance and development of forestry after the fall of ore prices and up until current day. Several of the roads in the mountains were constructed and fortified in the 1940s from the forced labour of Nikkei men imprisoned and exiled from their homes west of the mountains (Morita, 1989; Nakano, 1980). In particular, the construction of the Hope-Princeton Highway killed several Issei[11] and Nisei as they were committed to forced labour as prisoners in road camps (Morita). Recently, as my family was driving along this road while travelling from Vancouver to the site where she was interned, formerly known as Tashme, my grandmother, with an ironic chuckle, recounted a popular Nikkei saying of the time, “the Hope Highway: built from the blood and sweat of the Japanese,” (Betty Tokawa, personal communication, September 16 2009).
The Nikkei labour assisting the construction of The Canadian Mountain was exiled labour, labour that was considered undesirable to the white space of BC’s coastal areas and major cities. Since Nagano-san’s 1877 arrival and until 1942, the Nikkei were largely a Pacific coastal community, rarely venturing across the mountainous border dividing the west from the rest of the country. In 1941, 95% of Nikkei in Canada lived in British Columbia (Sunahara, 1981, 10). They inhabited fishing villages and mining and logging towns on Vancouver Island, as well as farms and neighbourhoods in and around Vancouver (Obata, 2000). However, this coastal space, which had also undergone a colonial process of racialization, was having its whiteness threatened by Nikkei settlement.
All shades of political opinion are at one on the desirability of sharply calling a halt to the Asiatic innovation and at least taking steps to see that immigration across the Pacific ceases, if not indeed carrying the policy to the ultimate conclusion of repatriation of those who are already here…Mr. King [Premier MacKenzie King, of the province of Canada], of course, is fully in accord with the dream of keeping British Columbia a white man's country- in theory.” (The British Columbian, March 2 1928).
The Anti-Asiatic league fell on Vancouver’s city hall in 1907 demanding the stoppage of Asian immigration and rioted in Vancouver’s Chinatown and then-Japantown destroying Chinese and Japanese businesses and storefronts along the way. A kind of battle ensued as Nikkei women and children resisted by gathering on the roofs and throwing rocks on the rioters (Dan Tokawa, personal communication, September 18 2009). In response, Canada signed on to the 1908 ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ with Japan officially instilling quotas on the amount of Japanese male immigrants it would let into its borders.[12] In the 1920s and 30s legal restrictions on Nikkei fishermen were put into place to weaken the endurance of Nikkei settlement (Shibata et al, 1977). By 1941, the perfect excuse had been found to exile the Nikkei from the coast en masse - the bombing of U.S.-occupied Pearl Harbor by Japanese troops engaged in World War II. Official exile began with naming the Nikkei as ‘enemy alien’ and ‘disloyal’ simply by nature of their ethnicity (whether they were Canadian citizens did not matter), contrasting them out of the ‘Canadian’ spaces requiring ‘loyalty’ they had been settling in.[13]
The displacement and incarceration of some 22,000 Nikkei living in this coastal area followed this decree. It is necessary to acknowledge that the incarceration of the Nikkei in Canada was not a homogenous removal to the interior of BC, but consisted of varied sites of isolation including to the sugar beet farms and domestic work of Alberta and Manitoba, forced labour sites in BC, the Prisoner-of-War camps in Ontario, as well as to war-stricken Japan. Camps in the mountains held some 12,000 Nikkei from 1942-1946 (Mitoma, 2010).
Inside the isolated, emptied Canadian Mountain was seen as the ideal place to incarcerate the Nikkei. The geography of the mountains themselves provided prison-like conditions. “The valley in which Tashme [one such internment camp] nestles is about one mile wide and about 15-miles long, surrounded by precipitous mountain slopes closing in at each end into very narrow and easily guarded entrances. A better place could hardly have been found to house a large number of Japanese evacuees [sic][14],” (Oikawa, 2000, 91). Many of the camps were built (by forced Nikkei labour) in the old mining towns, known at the time as ‘ghost towns’. Recall the once booming town of Sandon. Even before it had been made into a Nikkei internment camp, it had garnered the name of ‘sunless city’ as the community was in a narrow valley whose surrounding mountains blocked much of the sunlight (Turnbull, 1988). It was often said that high rates of what may now be diagnosed as depression plagued Nikkei prisoners of this particular camp more so than elsewhere (Betty Tokawa, personal communication, September 2009). Uchida-san, a doctor working at the Nikkei T.B. sanitorium in the internment camp at New Denver recalls an alarming amount of Nikkei illness during incarceration, “that first winter we had an appendicitis operation every day for about four months. Something to do with the environment. When they'd get up in the mornings, the inside of the houses were all covered with frost and we had an operation every day,” (Uchida in Dubois, 1945, p. 9). My grandparents retained many photographs of New Denver as they were eventually both patients at the sanitorium, however Nikkei were not allowed to have cameras. Mark Toyama took most of the photos in New Denver as his role of x-ray technician made him one of the few Nikkei permitted to own a camera (Dubois, 1945). Toyama-san also contracted T.B. and later died of it (Ibid).
In deed, the prison geography constructed in The Canadian Mountain left its print on the identity of Nikkei. Raymond Moriyama who was only an adolescent at the time of incarceration recalls this feeling of criminality invading his young thought processes:
My tree house became a wonderful secret place. I say “secret” because I thought I was some kind of saboteur committing a subversive act. Like an underground guerrilla up in the tree! I didn’t tell anyone for a long time. I believed I was going to be carried away by the RCMP just as I had watched them carry father away earlier in Vancouver, (Moriyama in Enomoto et al., 1993, p. 53-4).
Shizuye Takashima, in her book based on her life in a camp, recalls the feeling as a young girl as well.
We see for the first time the office of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, half hidden among the dark pines. Yuki looks, says, “You realize we are no longer free to go from place to place.” I stare at the words, “R.C.M.P. Office” all in red. They seem to grow larger before my eyes. Yuki continues, “We even have to watch what we say or do.” I look at the closed door. Their power seems to come through the very walls. We walk quietly past, (Takashima, 1971[15]).
The Canadian Mountain also acted as a liminal space, a borderland in which families were divided by geography. Takeo Ujō Nakano’s poetry composed while imprisoned in a work camp recounts how the mountain geography was a painful reminder of his imprisoned condition and separation from his family.
Watershed’s
Whispering waters
Part and flow.
Separation anxiety
Revives. (Nakano, 1980, p. 24)
Several Nikkei like Nakano-san and my uncles Jimmy Minoru Tokawa and Al Arata Tokawa protested the break-up of families and were thus removed to the prisoner-of-war camps in Petawawa and Anger, Ontario for the duration of internment (Nakano, 1980; Dan Tokawa, personal communication, September 2009).
It was not only a separation facilitated through the geography of the mountains, but also an intense uncertainty about family well-being and location. Nakano-san’s poetry embodies this uncertainty:
Ken’etsu sarechi
tsuma yori no tegami
ami no gotoku
kiri-suterarete
handoku ni kurushimu
(A letter from my wife
the censor hacked to pieces
like a net.
Even what’s left
is painful). (Nakano in Shikatani & Aylward, 1981, p. 77)
Ken’etsu sarechi
tsuma yori no tegami
ami no gotoku
kiri-suterarete
handoku ni kurushimu
(A letter from my wife
the censor hacked to pieces
like a net.
Even what’s left
is painful). (Nakano in Shikatani & Aylward, 1981, p. 77)
Sachie Matsushita’s (nee Morimoto) mother’s diary reveals her worrying uncertainty, “[i]t is a clear starry night. I wonder which camp my husband is sleeping in tonight. He’s probably drifting off to a lonesome sleep as he worries about his wife and children” (Matsushita in Kobayashi, 1988, p. 133). Her later entries recall “it was some of my depressing years” (Ibid).
The Canadian Mountain as liminal space was used in the process of further exiling Nikkei from their west coast home, a marker the government used to divide Nikkei from the familiar geography of community. In 1942 Vancouver Centre’s member of parliament, Ian Mackenzie, had already began voicing his opposition to Nikkei return under the spatial slogan “Not a Japanese from the Rockies to the Sea,” (Sunahara, 1981, p. 118). In the winter of 1942-43, a policy of Nikkei resettlement ‘east of the Rockies’ was introduced (Sunahara). With the end of the war in 1945, the government had to figure out what to do with all the Nikkei who hadn’t voluntarily moved east and instead remained incarcerated. During their incarceration, all the property of interned Nikkei was taken by the government and sold at bargain prices. By 1947, approximately $11.5 million of Nikkei property had been disposed of for only $5,373,317.64 (Sunahara, 1981). Sunhara-san observes that this dispossession meant destitution for many Nikkei, and was the set-up for their exile.
[1] Various maps show different names occupying the land. BC Ministry of Education map blurs each boundary citing the complex territorial relationships involved as reason for doing so. http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/abed/map.htm
[2] Renamed in this case refers to the colonial act of reimagining and mapping a land already populated and mapped/internalized by peoples prior to colonial contact. All of Canadian geography has been renamed and remapped as a product of the colonial process.
[3] At the time Manzo Nagano landed in New Westminster, Canada was known as the Dominion of Canada, a British colony.
[4] -san is a Nikkei and Japanese suffix of respect on the name of a superior or elder, a kin to the English prefix of Mr. or Mrs. though not necessarily revealing marital status. In the attempt to re-establish Nikkei as respectable though exiled, I’ve added this suffix where appropriate.
[5] See Figures 1 & 2.
[6] Where indigenous language has been provided to name that which is related to the indigenous population referenced, the indigenous language name is privileged to stay true to the relation. English translations when available are provided after the name in brackets.
[7] Pre-historic mountain ranges across the Canadian Shield have since been worn down and are unrecognizable as mountains. See Wallace.
[8] Britain was also providing scrip to encourage settlement of Canada, as my great grandfather on my Irish side was a fighter on behalf of Britain in the Boer War, and established my family in New Market, Ontario on receiving one such scrip in return for his service from the British government.
[9] Named as the closest Canada’s come to civil war in modern times. See Tonelli.
[10] For more see Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, BC. Frontier to Freeway. http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/publications/frontiertofreeway/index.htm
[11] Nikkei have names for themselves connoting generational status in the country they’ve settled. Issei connotes immigrant, or first generation. Because the first wave was the largest wave of immigration from Japan in the late 1800s, Issei has become normalized as belonging to this time period. Nisei (sometimes spelled Nissei), are their children, the second generation. Sansei is third. I am a yonsei, which is fourth. Gosei, who’s rare use signals the breakdown of this understanding of identity, means fifth generation.
[12] The U.S. government had established this agreement with Japan prior to Canada’s signing.
[13] See Figure 3.
[14] ‘Evacuees’ was the common governmental term used to gloss over the reality of Nikkei incarceration. Evacuee implies voluntary removal away from danger, whereas the Nikkei were forced into exile and dispossessed of their liberty.
[15] The book has no page numbers to reference.
