History
Chair: Satwinder Bains, Director, South Asian Studies Institute and Associate Professor, Department of Social Cultural & Media Studies, Unversity of the Fraser Valley
Session B - Read More About the Panel Theme
Since March 2020, amidst a world-wide pandemic, there emerged a resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Canadian history discourse has been particularly impacted and called to task with a demand and calls to action to rectify, change and counter homogenous, white-washed histories of the past. This rewriting of history is at both National and localized levels. Abbotsford has also become embedded in conversations of historical recourse when looking at histories of white supremacy and white terrorist groups locally such as the KKK. This panel presentation will look at histories of race and racism in Abbotsford and the Fraser Valley through the KKK movement locally, and how there is a movement to rewrite histories of white exceptionalism through nuanced histories of racialized experiences in the Valley. This historical recourse includes the meaningful and critical embedding of Sikh historical experience as it relates to their positionality as settlers on Indigenous Stó:lõ land.
Chair: Shannon Bettles, President, BC Historical Federation
Chair: Daniel Sims, Associate Professor/Chair, First Nations Studies, University of Northern British Columbia
Chair: Keziah Wallis, Assistant Professor, (Anthropology), Social Cultural & Media Studies, University of the Fraser Valley
Chair: Ben Bradley, Assistant Professsor, Department of History, University of Northern British Columbia
Session B - Read More About the Panel Theme
Central and Northern British Columbia were closely associated with the province’s prosperity, optimism, and culture of abundance – what Jean Barman has called “the good life” – during the first three decades after World War Two. These regions contained important engines of the provincial economy, and the pace and scale of changes associated with modernization were especially obvious there: new infrastructure; rapid population growth; new kinds of work, businesses, and cultural amenities; and greater socio-economic stability in many communities (especially emerging regional centres such as Prince George, Quesnel, and Smithers).
Car culture epitomized modernization and “the good life” in Central and Northern BC, both concretely and symbolically, in the form of new automobiles and new and improved roads. However, the proliferation and entrenchment of car culture in those regions was not a story of smooth, linear progress. The papers in this session reveal that numerous unanticipated complications and consequences resulted from rising automobile ownership, higher traffic volumes, and motoring-dependent patterns of business and leisure. Together, they complicate our understanding of BC’s postwar gender history, urban history, and histories of small business and popular culture.