Resisting White Nostalgia: Sikh history in Abbotsford

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the Sikh Heritage Museum, a National Historic Site Gur Sikh Temple, the oldest still standing gurdwara in the western hemisphere, in Abbotsford, BC, as a living site of Sikh story telling. The author shares her journey of transformation over the past decade, based on stories and archives that have emerged reminding us that histories of racism, including that of the ku klux klan continue to be relegated to the margins in the name of white nostalgia. Sikh story telling then, through truth and radicalism, is a reclaiming of histories that are nuanced, and can move communities forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Sikh
• Abbotsford
• heritage
• nostalgia
• activism
• archive

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I capitalize the first letter in the word ‘History’ throughout this paper to address the broader systemic and power structures that shape the discipline, and in many ways, continue to exclude racialized, and Sikh voices.

2 I appreciate the contention in the use of the name ‘Temple’ to speak about a gurdwara, as a form of colonized erasure to the unique Sikh experience and ethos; however, historicizing the time in which the gurdwara was built (1911) means that I utilize both – Temple, to honour that was the context within which the sacred space was built, but I also interchange and use the word gurdwara throughout this paper as a reclamation of the need to recognize that the site represents a Sikh religious site.

3 Many of these past historical remembrances are based on early Sikh settler interviews collected by the South Asian Studies Institute and can be found at http://canadiansikhheritage.ca/community-stories/.

4 Historians of Asian settler histories have written about the supposed ‘sojourner’ status of these settlers to British Columbia in particular (see, e.g., Franklin Ng, "The Sojourner, Return Migration and Immigration History," The History and Immigration of Asian Americans 1, 1998). Hugh Johnston in particular argues that early Sikh settlers had no intention of settling and staying in Canada, and were in fact ‘a society that they initially created in British Columbia was in no sense a microcosm of the one they left behind; rather, it was a worker community that, when stripped of religious and ethnic identifiers, resembled those of other groups of ethnic workers of that era – Italians, Chinese or Japanese – who were in competition for the same kinds of labouring jobs’ (Johnston 2005, 4). I would argue that those ‘religious and ethnic identifiers’ in the Sikh context are deserving of a broader analysis of this sojourner status labelling, especially set against the context of the rapidity of gurdwara building in British Columbia.