CCIE presents Cedar & Bamboo – Film Première and Panel Discussion

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Canada, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Live Events, New Media, Social Science, Videos on 2010-09-24 02:13Z by Steven

CCIE presents Cedar & Bamboo – Film Première and Panel Discussion

University of British Columbia, Point Grey Campus
UBC First Nations Longhouse
Thursday, 2010-10-14, 12:00-14:30 (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE).

There are numerous First Nations in what is now British Columbia and Chinese people arrived on BC’s shores many generations ago. Since then, Indigenous and Chinese people have interacted and forged relationships. Set in Vancouver and other locations in BC, Cedar and Bamboo opens with a survey of the lives of early Chinese immigrants and concentrates on addressing the more recent history of highly complex and troubled issues of interracial relationships and marriages, multiracial identity and identification, alienation and belonging. Its central focus is on the lives of four people of mixed Indigenous and Chinese ancestry and their formation of strong and meaningful identity in spite of the difficulty of reconciling divergent identities, racist laws, the complexities of familial and ethnic acceptance and/or rejection and personal identification with and alienation from Canada and Canadianness, China and Chineseness and First Nations and Indigenous identity. Lil’wat elder Judy Joe reflects on being “abandoned” by her Indigenous mother, being sent to her father’s village in China at age five, being ill treated there as a foreigner and returning to Canada as a teenager to a Vancouver from which she felt completely alienated. Musqueam elder Howard Grant, whose Chinese father worked in the market gardens near his Musqueam mother’s family, reflects on his experiences with both cultures and his principal identification as aboriginal. Siblings Jordie and Hannah Yow, now in their 20s, reflect on growing up “Canadian” in Kamloops with knowledge of being quite multiracial and multiethnic but with virtually no information about either their Chinese grandfather or their Secwempec grandmother.

As a bonus- 1788: A History of Chinese and First Nations Relations in British Columbia, 10 minutes of academic commentary from Professors Henry Yu and Jean Barman of the University of British Columbia and Harley Wylie of Nuu-chah-nulth ancestry on the intersecting histories of First Nations and Chinese people in British Columbia.

For more information, click here.

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