1788
The region now known as British Columbia was imposed through colonialism on the unceded territories of the Indigenous people who lived there for thousands of years. Non-Indigenous individuals are uninvited guests who use land and resources taken from Indigenous peoples. Since colonial settlements and claims of belonging were built on ideas of white supremacy, Indigenous peoples have faced many forms of racism. The belonging of white settlers on the land depended on the exclusion of Indigenous peoples and others who were considered non-white.
Chinese migrants have had a long history of travelling across and around the Pacific for work and trade. Cantonese carpenters built the first fur trade fort and first non-Indigenous locally-made vessel (on the coast of what is now called Vancouver Island) that helped initiate the transpacific fur trade that connected the west coast of North America with China. Their shipbuilding and artisanal skills grew out of industries and trade in Southeast Asia which built teak and ironwood ships that enabled the transpacific Manila-Acapulco galleon trade between Spanish colonies in the Philippines and Mexico.
The first transpacific Chinese migrants to what is now Canada—around 75 Cantonese-speaking artisans who were carpenters and shipwrights—reached Yuquot in present-day Canada as early as 1788. There, Chinese migrants first made contact with the local Indigenous communities during British expeditions that sought furs to trade in China. They would largely be forgotten, because the British sea captains whom they arrived with on Nuu-chahnulth First Nations land renamed in English every site and location they mapped, which were later claimed for the British Empire. These 75 artisans were from Macau, where they built the ships for the British expedition leader John Meares that landed in Yuquot. Yuquot was one of the settlements in Mowachaht-Muchalaht territory on the west coast of what would later be called Vancouver Island–named by the British after Captain George Vancouver, who visited Yuquot in 1792 in order to enforce British claims over those of Spanish claims. Neither the British nor the Spanish recognized the sovereignty of the Mowachaht-Muchalaht over their own territory.
Comekela, the brother of Chief Maquinna from the Mowachaht Nation, would join one of these British expeditions. He left Yuquot in 1786, sailing on a fur trading ship that stopped in Hawaii before arriving at its destination in Guangzhou, China. Comekela would explore Guangdong province in China for one year before returning to Yuquot. As evidenced by Comekela’s travel to China, and the presence of Chinese and Native Hawaiian migrants on the northwest coast who would interact with local Indigenous communities in the 19th century, there existed overlapping trans-Pacific networks that developed alongside the expansion of European colonialism.
Chinese workers also built the transcontinental railroads that allowed many Europeans to move across North America, first across the United States in the 1860s and then to British Columbia in the 1880s. Chinese could travel to the west coast of North America by transpacific ships before most European migrants travelling by transcontinental rail settled on the west coast of North America. Before the CPR was completed in 1885, many European migrants used the transcontinental railroads built in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s to cross by land to California and then by coastal shipping to British Columbia. Yet, many white, English-speaking European migrants to British Columbia asserted that Chinese workers would take their employment opportunities. Thus, Chinese Canadians faced many struggles when seeking belonging in a society that often excluded them.