From Salvage to Strategy

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

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.