This talk focuses on the history of Paldi, B.C., a logging community founded in ~1917, by Punjabi Sikh immigrants, on unceded Hul’qumi’num Territories (near Duncan, B.C.).

Due to the diversity of its workforce, which included Punjabi, Chinese, Japanese, and white men and their families, Paldi has been described as the origin of Canadian multiculturalism; a 2023 Canadian Heritage Minute called Paldi “one of Canada’s first inclusive, multicultural communities.”

These representations of the community as “multicultural” aim to honour the achievements of the racialized workers and families in Paldi, who were denied the vote, paid less than their white counterparts and subjected to harassment and surveillance by Canadian police and immigration officials.

But do these uses of the term misrepresent both Canadian multiculturalism and the history of Paldi? Scholars have long argued that celebratory national discourses around multiculturalism often obscure historical and existing forms of racism, and sideline Indigenous land claims and work towards decolonization.
In this study of Paldi, the presenters try to offer a fuller account of this complicated community, in which early immigrants of color leveraged their participation in resource extraction (on unceded Indigenous lands) in ways that expanded the category of the “Canadian” beyond the imagination — and the legal limits — of the white settler nation.

Thursday April 4, 2024 – 6:00-7:30pm on Zoom

Zoom Link
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https://capu.zoom.us/j/68639181135?pwd=ak0vUy9LWG41TEhWbVhFUzF4Z2o1dz09

Meeting ID: 686 3918 1135
Passcode: 142488

For more information: https://www.capilanou.ca/student-services/community/get-involved/community-programs–lectures/capilano-universe/