From Salvage to Strategy

A conversation with Paul Yee on Archival Consciousness and the Chinese Canadian Archival Record

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14288/bcs.no218.197750

Keywords:

archives, race and racism, Chinese, Vancouver

Abstract

Based on a series of interviews with author, historian, and archivist, Paul Yee, this article explores his work over many years to preserve the documentary record of Vancouver’s Chinatown. In conversation about his early efforts to salvage records from abandoned buildings and businesses closing, Yee highlights the need for community-based archival work to be adequately resourced and supported, as well as the affective burden of doing this type of work when it is not. Placing these conversations within the contexts of research on community archives related to their affective impacts, sustainability, and relationships with mainstream archival institutions, the article demonstrates the urgent need for greater collaboration amongst different stakeholders involved – or potentially involved – in the preservation of Chinese Canadian archives. Preservation of these materials is, we argue, an issue of equity; this article calls upon mainstream archival institutions at the local, provincial, and national level to examine their roles and responsibilities in the long-term viability of archives they have marginalized and neglected.

Author Biographies

June Chow, University of British Columbia

June Chow 周慕慈 is a graduate of the archival studies masters program of the University of British Columbia. Her professional practice seeks to critique and correct systemic power imbalances in Chinese Canadian archives, most recently, at Library and Archives Canada for the community's 100-year commemoration of the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. She is currently special collections archivist with the Chinese Canadian Archive at Toronto Public Library and a collaborator on a UBC Research Excellence Cluster.

Jennifer Douglas, University of British Columbia

Jennifer Douglas (she/her) is an associate professor at the School of Information, University of British Columbia, where she teaches in the Master of Archival Studies program. Her research areas include personal and intimate archives, person-centred archival theory and praxis, and archival arrangement and description. Her recent research has focused on the relationships between recordkeeping, bereavement and grief work and on archives creation and concepts of care. She lives and works on the unceded territory of the Musqueam people. 

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Published

2023-11-16

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Section

Articles