I’ve always been curious about my family’s lineage — who are they, where did we come from, when did we settle here, what was life like? Could a pioneer Chinese family, who helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway and who paid the Head Tax, have envisioned an extended family that would include Finnish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Indigenous, Filipino, Dutch, German, Black, British, Irish, Scottish or Jewish descendants? When I was growing up in northern B.C., this was the family I knew.
To learn more about my family’s multi-ethnic, racial and cultural dimensions, I studied with the University of Toronto ethnic and migration historian Robert F. Harney. As I stepped into the foyer of the grand Victorian mansion where he conducted classes, and which housed the MHSO, I had no inkling of the integral role the MHSO would play in shaping my worldview and in guiding me as I journeyed into the field of multiculturalism.
In 1976, nine years before the Canadian Multiculturalism Act was enacted (the 1985 act was a direct result of Trudeau’s policy statement), Harney, together with professors Milton Israel, Frank Iacobucci (later of the Supreme Court of Canada), Harold Troper and other colleagues founded the MHSO. This group of visionaries was convinced that chronicling migrant, ethnic and Indigenous stories was essential to understanding Canada in the 20th century and beyond.
The MHSO recognized that history writing and recording could be as varied and as encompassing as the daily lives of people. Harney, its academic director, noted that historical records of the migrants themselves presented “ … a chance to make ‘articulate again people who had been articulate in their own time,’ but who, through no failing of their own, had been lost to history and their descendants because insufficient interest existed to preserve those records which could give them back significance in our history.”