Racism united Chinese men, Indigenous women
Jenna Tickell remembers five ladies running down the stairs toward Lillian Dyck, after the senator finished speaking at a Luther College event in 2011.
“They’re like, ‘That’s my story, I haven’t heard anyone else talk about it, this is crazy.’ And that I found really empowering and impactful,” Tickell said.
That story, a little-known part of Canadian history, is one of a mixed-race heritage fostered by racist legislation.
Tickell hopes to share that history in her University of Regina master’s thesis and in a public presentation in Regina on Wednesday night.
Dyck was born in 1945 in North Battleford to a Chinese father and a Cree mother. Dyck’s aunt also married a Chinese man.
Many Chinese men had come to Canada to build the railway, with the Canadian government’s $500 head tax — equivalent to two-years’ wages — forcing them to leave their families behind.
Then the government closed the borders, Tickell said, so the men were unable to return to China.
Stuck in Canada, many resorted to opening restaurants, in which white women were prohibited from working.
Aside from some Ukrainian women, Tickell said, “The only other people that were here were Indigenous women.”
The scenario was mutually beneficial: If the women could woo a Chinese husband, it would be a step up in social status for them.
“At that point in time, it was looked at as a positive, that they were moving up a class,” Tickell said. “That encouraged them to work as servers at those Chinese food restaurants.”
When the Canadian government lifted its restrictions on the Chinese immigrants, though, it left the First Nations women in a precarious position.
“Because the Chinese men were technically married before, their new marriages to the Indigenous women were now null and void,” Tickell said. “Indigenous women, because they married off the reserve, they lost their status, so they can’t go back to the reserve.
“Their life and their livelihood was at the mercy of the Chinese man.”
In some cases, the man left the Indigenous wife behind. In others, the Chinese family came to Canada and they all lived together. In yet other cases, the Indigenous woman moved to China with her husband.
These events took place almost a century ago and exist mostly in oral history.
“The people — those are the stories,” Tickell said. “If we don’t get them written soon, then pieces like this are not going to be written at all.
“This is just one small aspect of a piece of our Canadian history that is threatened with erasure because it hasn’t been written about, so we have to try and capture it in some way. Otherwise it’s going to be gone and it’s a really interesting piece of history.”
Tickell is speaking Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Wesley United Church, 3913 Hillsdale St. in Regina, the first in the church’s six-part graduate student lecture series.
She is also looking for people with a Saskatchewan connection to share their stories about Chinese-First Nations heritage. She can be contacted at tickellj@uregina.ca.