Chinese Christian group reclaiming two peoples histories

The Chinese New Year's Day parade in Vancouver, B.C., happened to be on Jan. 27, 2009, and was a very cold and wet event this year. Bill Chu who organized an assembly of First Nations in the Main Street parade had to house his guests, the Elders from Sto:lo, Stat'myx, Salish, and Nisga'a Nations, out of the elements during the wait for the march of the dragons. Chu, who has organized similar multi-cultural events over the past few years in Vancouver, said that doesn't normally happen.
"It always seems to be raining on the New Year's parade," said Chu, "but this year it was bitterly cold."
Chu is a driving force behind Canadians for Reconciliation, which has as its mandate "a peaceful non-partisan grassroots movement with Christian affiliations committed to developing a new relationship with Aboriginal people, one that signifies a deep apology for past injustice, a willingness to honour truth now, and a resolve to embrace each other in the new millennium."
The organization has taken an active role in creating special liaisons between Chinese Canadians and Aboriginal Canadians. Chu, an immigrant from Hong Kong and retired engineer, has made an extraordinary commitment, through his organization, to uncover truth in Canadian history. Canadians for Reconciliation has managed to reveal important pieces of lost Fraser Valley and Canyon history in recent months and over the years the discoveries point to an epic part of Canadian history that merits wider exposure.
Uncovering the depth of Chinese history is difficult for a people whose history was ultimately displaced and erased. "It's all with the help of quite a few Aboriginal Friends. One-third of the blood of Sto:lo Nation people is Chinese," said Chu, a discovery that may surprise many people.
He asserts that this racial integration is probably more widespread than the Sto:lo Nation, and agrees that it likely extends northward up the Fraser to the Shuswap (which lies roughly from Hope in the east to Coquitlam in the west along the wide Fraser and its many tributaries). This depth of Chinese lineage would extend east beyond Chase, B.C. At minimum the relationship between Chinese and First Nations is far more deeply entwined than most of Canadian history depicts.
Chu regards the truth about Chinese and Canadian Aboriginal racial integration as a hidden fact of the Canadian cultural mosaic and he points to last year's BC-150 celebrations as an indication of what he is referring to.
The government of B.C. put up a website (http://www.bc150.gov.bc.ca/) that didn't celebrate the entirety of history in the colonial period.
On the website some of the behaviour of colonials and succeeding national entities of "the white guys" toward the Chinese and First Nation populations was "glossed over," claimed Chu, who ponders the need to celebrate becoming a colony to begin with.
Chu reflected on Hong Kong's experience with British colonialism. "We saw our Chinese history removed from the school books of Hong Kong. They do the same thing here. In the BC-150 website there is hardly mention of Chinese," and he added the Aboriginal reality is "severely truncated."
It is galling for Chu to think a casual visitor "is going to leave the site believing the Chinese have no history in the province of B.C. and that Aboriginals hardly existed. That set me to thinking (that) if our history is not there, what does that mean to us as a people with our own history?" Chu asked. "I think we have to expose it."
He is working toward filling that knowledge vacuum. "We have identified these Chinese historical sites along the Fraser Canyon. We went up and looked closely at some of those sites. It is not one or two sites; not even tens of them. It is well into the hundreds." He noted, "The whole idea on our part is not only to look at how many sites, but also to look at what our history was in the Fraser Canyon. A good starting point for us came in 2008 when we made six trips into the Fraser Canyon. Four of these trips we made with Aboriginal friends to help us step into some of these sites."
They explored from Hope to Lillooet and their discoveries were reported to the Lower Mainland in the daily media. Chu wants to continue to spread the word through a variety of local, national, and international media. "We haven't done any digging. I am not an archaeologist." From the exposed evidence Chu is convinced that "there is a whole lot of evidence underneath."