Vancouver has always been a city of immigrants and a new touring play and exhibition coming to the Museum of Vancouver reveals a fascinating part of Western Canadian history.
The inspiration for the exhibition Journey of a Lifetime, presented by BMO Financial Group, was a vintage colonist car owned by Calgary’s Heritage Park Historical Village that could help Canadians learn how early settlers travelled when they first came to this country.
“Immigration dynamizes the economic and cultural fabric of the city” said Viviane Gosselin, Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Museum of Vancouver, adding that today 45 per cent of Metro Vancouver residents were born outside the country and only 33 per cent of residents of the city were born in British Columbia.
Gosselin explained that the promise of extending the railway to Vancouver, linking British Columbia to the rest of Canada, was one of the main reasons the province B.C. joined Confederation in 1871. The completion of the railroad in 1887 brought successive waves of immigrants who reshaped local landscapes, as the city grew, frequently at the expense of local First Nations- ancestors of the Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
In the 1870s, First Nations and immigrants from Asia outnumbered European immigrants, added Gosselin. With the completion of the railway you had movements of goods and people coming into the city, not only from the east by train she said, but also from the west through steam ships, making Vancouver a tremendous hub of activity. Many immigrants arrived with the idea that Canada was an empty landscape, available for settlement and development.
The tour’s final stop is at the Museum of Vancouver from November 25 to December 3, 2017. Prior to that, the exhibition and the play ran this summer at Heritage Park Historical Village in Calgary before stops in Halifax, Gatineau, Kitchener, Winnipeg and Edmonton.
The tour features a recreation of the colonist car in Heritage Park’s collection that was built for Canadian Pacific Railway in 1905, the same year Alberta joined Canada, and is one of only two that have survived of the more than 1,000 originally built. As many as 60 to 70 immigrants would have crammed into these railway cars for the week-long journey while sleeping on wooden benches, having only two shared toilets and a single stove to cook the food that they brought with them.
“It’s been part of Heritage Park for over 50 years, but once you start looking into the story of how it was used to transport thousands of immigrants across Canada, there are a lot of stories that come out of that,” said Heritage Park Historical Village Interpretation Manager Susan Reckseidler. “We wanted to look at ways of bringing those stories to life.”
“We couldn’t take a 112-year-old wooden train car across the country, but we wanted to share that story of the settlement of western Canada with all Canadians because it really is a Canadian story,” added Heritage Park Historical Village Communications Specialist Barb Munro. “That is why we created this tour that would go across Canada.”
Travelling with the exhibition will be a theatre troupe performing a play written by Alberta playwright Winn Bray, focusing on a cross-section of new Canadians who settled the west. The play will also highlight the story of the Bank of Montreal’s role in the growth of western Canada.
“The Bank of Montreal financed the Canadian Pacific Railway to open the west for settlement and they helped a lot of the settlers coming out there with land purchases. They are also celebrating their 200th anniversary this year,” added Munro.
Performance times for the play at the Museum of Vancouver are Tuesday to Friday at 10:30 am and 12:30 pm and Saturday and Sundays at 11 am and 1 pm. Admission to the play is included with general admission tickets.
“We had 6,000 people visit on Canada Day and we actually had to turn some of them away. People were lined up to get in and the venue was not huge. We have never had to turn people away from a performance before,” said Heritage Park Historical Village’s Munro.
While the exhibition mostly focuses on the European immigrant experience, it also features the stories of Asian newcomers who made journeys via rail to the prairies from western ports like Vancouver, the challenges Black settlers from the United States faced and the impact these mass immigrations has had on Canada’s First Nations, .
Visitors to the exhibition will also be invited to record their own immigrant experiences or those of their ancestors who might have travelled in a colonist car. Munro says they selected some of the more powerful stories from visitors at each of the exhibition’s stops for people to watch.
“We captured a wide range of immigration stories, including one dating back to 1792,” she said. “We had children; we had senior citizens; we had lots of millennials all of whom were really excited to be able to share their stories,”
“We think it’s timely because immigration is such a hot topic right now,” said Munro.
“This is the story of the hopes and dreams and hardships of immigration, then and now. And it’s a tangible reminder of those who migrated across the vast landscapes of a newly connected country, and the challenges they faced in both getting here and settling the western frontier. This was the largest wave of immigration in Canada’s history and we hope it will be an eye-opening experience for visitors.”