This week in my ASTU class, we did a presentation on our archive project that aims to bring archival materials in Rare Books and Special Collections at UBC to the public. As all the groups had pointed out, archives play a role in recording and preserving historical event which allow future generations to remember to past. This project thus allows us to gain a better understanding on little-known history as we tried to organize materials that we found disoriented in meaningful ways (such as in chronological order and under different themes), and provide context for each of the item. Furthermore, by showcasing archival materials in various forms like websites, Tumblr page or infographic, we brought archives that we worked on beyond the scope of academia and engaged the public to this collective memory. The public could access to those valuable experiences that are often neglected and use them to reflect on their present life. Take me, as an example, this project matters a lot to my identity building when I know more about the history of Chinese immigrants in Canada. It is only when I looked through the archives in the Chung Collect that I realize the discriminatory treatments Chinese immigrants once had in Canada. I felt a stronger sense of belonging and pride as a Chinese after acknowledging their achievement and contribution in Canada. At the same time, I came to appreciate the progress made by the Canadian government to mitigate racial discrimination (for example abandoning immigration restrictions based on race), and cherish the acceptance and diversity in Canada nowadays.
Inspired by this project, I am interested to further investigate the significance of archives, particularly immigration archives, and the ways in which archives are presented by looking at an interactive webpage—Redress Remix.
Redress Remix surrounds the topic of Canadian government’s apology in 2006 for their unfair treatment on Chinese immigrants in the 1900s. A combination of photography, government documents, archived documentaries, and interviews are gathered and put under 16 themes to reveal the unfamiliar but important chapter in Canadian history. Each theme explores issues like head tax imposition, Angel Island Immigration Station, and Chinese Exclusion Act through a series of videos and brief introduction to the background history and speaker’s personal information.
Most of the items in this website are archival materials that serve as a “tangible memory site” (Hume 184). They give information about the cultural and social settings of their users, and allow us to revisit and remember the past in present days. When it comes immigration archival sources in particular, archives play a vital role in unifying people with the same ethnical background, as each group has their own unique ways to record their past influenced by their culture (Hume 191). More importantly, archives on immigration give voice to immigrants whose participation are often omitted or being written out in official government record. Personal or community archives are therefore a place for them to channel their anxiety and frustration. In Redress Remix, the section of Discrimination exemplifies this idea. Frank Wong, a World War Two veteran, recalled his experiences of being treated as an “alien” in Canada as he were not given the right to vote, not permitted to go anywhere but Chinatown, and not even allowed to sit in the front role at theaters. His oral history about his trivial, yet thought-provoking, everyday lives provides another facet of the story that can supplement official government documents and reflects a more complete situation of society.
Immigration archives are by no means exclusively important to the community involved. The representation of archives on immigrants is crucial to the construct of a country’s history as well. Daniel turns to Schereck when discussing the function of archival material, and suggests that archives reveal how different groups in society contribute to “progress and development of the state” (174). Immigrants are often marginalized by the dominant group in the host country. Their contributions are not may not be always taken into account in official records. Thus, collecting, organizing, and analyzing immigration archives offer scholars a “bottom up’’ as well as an ‘‘inside out’’ view of the host country’s history (Daniel 177). In Contribution, Bill Chu, the founder of Canadians For reconciliation, stated that Chinese people had engaged in a variety of tough and unpleasant jobs in addition to the well-known Canada Pacific Railway construction; they had also taken part in mining, farming and installing telephone wire, to name a few. This often unsaid piece of Chinese is integral to the whole puzzle of Canada’s nation building as it laid the groundwork for future transportation and economic development.
Moving beyond the content of the webpage, the medium itself is also worth noticing. Redress Remix is a digital archive that uses internet “as a vehicle of collecting, preserving, and displaying traces of the past” that is an easy access to people from all walks of life (Haskins 401). Digital archives are a “much better medium than print culture for capturing the fluidity, spontaneity and multilayered quality’’ of a culture as it enables multiple medium for presentation, such as photographs and recordings (Harney cited in Daniel 194). Visitors to the webpage can gain a vivid experience through videos which exhibit speakers’ reaction and emotion. For example, when they watch the video of a woman who talks about the hardship she had on Angel Island immigration station, they can feel her anger, sorrow, and fear as she describes the station as a “jail.” These feeling are not as easily felt when looking at mere words.
An interesting feature in this website is that visitors can respond to the videos by shooting a short clip expressing their thoughts. As the filmmaker, Chan, said, the webpage can track historical changes as respondents’ feedbacks differ with time. By inviting people to engage in this “living documentary”—a documentary that is made interactive by networked media and digital technology to establish relationships between producers and users, and induce changes in both parties (Gaudenzi 27)– we can track how our attitudes towards racism evolve and hopefully come up with methods to alleviate it. This kind of participation in the production of collective memory online is difficult to achieve in many conventional archives.
“The history should never be erased out of the book. It should be continued regardless [of] what kind of history. It should be passed on to the next [generation] people to know about it.” Memory matters. And an effective way to preserve memory is through archives, especially digital archives that are accessible to many, that can persist through generations.
Works Cited
Daniel, Dominique. “Archival Representations of Immigration and Ethnicity in North American History: From the Ethnicization of Archives to the Archivization of Ethnicity.” Archival Science 14.2 (2014): 169-203. ProQuest. Web. 6 Feb. 2016.
Gaudenzi, Sandra. “The interactive documentary as a Living Documentary.” Doc on-line 14 (2013): 9-31. Directory of Open Access Journals. Web. 6 Feb. 2016.
Harris, Jake. Redress Remix. Stitch Media, 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2016.
Haskins, Ekaterina. “Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37.4 (2007): 401–422. JSTOR. Web. 6 Feb. 2016.
Hume, Janice. “Memory Matters: The Evolution of Scholarship in Collective Memory and Mass Communication.” The review of communication 10.3 (2010): 181-196. Taylor & Francis Combined Library. Web. 6 Feb. 2016.
Takeuchi, Craig. ‘Redress Remix addresses Chinese Canadian head-tax with “living documentary.”’ The Georgia Straight. 3 Nov 2010. Web. 7 Feb. 2016.