Blog & News

BCHF president Rosa Flinton-Brown (pictured) presented a speech at the awards dinner at the annual conference in Williams Lake on May 5. 

Rosa's recent remarks reflect her understanding of the critical nature of our work, the current threats to the historical record and how we can support each other in it.  An excerpt is below.

Rosa will remain with the BCHF in her role as past president/treasurer for the next three years. She is very excited to support Sarah Lim, an excellent historian and experienced leader, as she takes over the presidency of the BCHF.

While I am not a historian myself, my involvement in this organization has deepened my appreciation for the members of the BCHF. Public historians are the architects of our social fabric. The work you do transcends academic interest—it weaves together the disparate threads of individual lives, community experiences, and cultural traditions. When you recover forgotten voices and overlooked narratives, you help create a more complete understanding of who we are as a society. In an era of fragmentation and division, this work of connection and contextualization has never been more essential.

As we learn more about what has been happening across the border over the last 100 days, we are reminded, once again, of a very sobering reality.  We must confront an uncomfortable truth: history is fragile. It can be lost, altered, or deliberately erased. We have witnessed this in our own province, where certain narratives—particularly those of Indigenous peoples—were systematically suppressed by government policies. The residential school records that disappeared. The documents regarding the Chinese Exclusion Act that are just now becoming available for the first time. The countless women's stories never deemed worthy of official record.

These are not just gaps in our archival collections; they are wounds in our collective memory. They remind us that history is never neutral—it reflects power structures and priorities. Current events underscore the ethical responsibility that comes with this work. When we preserve the past, we are making a statement about what deserves to be remembered.

Archives and record-keeping are acts of resistance as much as they are acts of preservation. The digital revolution has transformed our field in ways that expand our reach and capabilities, allowing us to safeguard deteriorating materials and make collections accessible beyond physical walls. But these advances also create new vulnerabilities—digital decay, format obsolescence, the overwhelming volume of information being created daily. Meeting these challenges requires not just technological solutions but institutional commitment and public support. 

And now a terrifying new challenge, that a government can choose to erase large swaths of these digital archives with relative ease. How do we, as a historical community, speak out and act to avoid the mistakes of the past?  How do we build meaningful relationships across borders to allow for a replication of records, a duplication of archives to ensure that the historical record cannot be “disappeared”?

Throughout this weekend, we have experienced together that peculiar mixture of sadness and revelation that comes with uncovering difficult histories. There is genuine grief in confronting the violence and exclusion that mar our provincial story.

Yet there is something profoundly healing in this work. When you recover silenced voices and forgotten experiences, you open the possibility of a more honest reckoning with who we have been—and who we might become. There is redemption in truth-telling, even when the truths are painful. There is dignity in remembering, even when the memories are difficult.

This tension between sorrow and enlightenment is at the heart of what historians and storykeepers do. You dwell in this space not because you enjoy discomfort, but because you believe that a society can only move forward when it has fully acknowledged where it has been.

Tonight, as we celebrate achievements in your field, let's also celebrate each other and the community you've built together. In a profession that often involves solitary hours in archives or behind computer screens, you sustain each other. As we enjoy this evening and the year ahead, let's continue supporting one another in this vital work. Let's share our successes, learn from each other's approaches, and remember that while our individual projects matter tremendously, it's our combined effort that truly preserves the fullness of British Columbia's story.

Thank you all—not just for being here tonight, but for the work you do every day to ensure that our history endures in all its complexity, challenge, and wonder.

A restored gravemarker has been dedicated in Revelstoke for Jennie Kiohara, a young Japanese-Canadian woman murdered 120 years ago.

Read more in the Revelstoke Review.

The BCHF's annual report highlights the important work of the organization for the 2024-25 fiscal year. We hosted an amazing conference, delivered four excellent BC History magazines and honoured writers, historians and projects with awards and grants. All the details are here: 2025-annual-report-bchf.pdf

Please take special note of the financial statements. The treasurer's report (page 20) details the necessity of increasing subscription and membership fees to meet the rising costs of the print magazine. The motion to increase membership fees was passed at the annual general meeting on May 2. If you have any clarifying questions or concerns, please contact Rosa at treasurer@bchistory.ca.

Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra of Belonging Matters Consulting is the recipient of a BCHF Centennial Legacy Fund award in the amount of $2,500.

The funds will support research, design, and curation of a project called Pyaar and Basketball - Exploring Heritage, History, and the Brownness of Basketball in BC.

The project merges a basketball tournament and a story exhibit as a means to bring racialized youth into the cultural landscape of BC history.

A basketball tournament proposed in Surrey, BC will be set against the backdrop of story telling panels and imagery highlighting the significant contribution of Punjabis and Filipino communities in BC's diaspora within the sport in solidarity with the foundations of Black identities to the sport.

In 1791, Captain Vancouver and Third Lieutenant Joseph Baker, along with other officers and crew, set sail from Falmouth Harbour in England, for a 5 year journey to find the North West Passage.

This Coast Salish family story weaves together primary source narratives, personal recollections, knowledge keeper voices, and new revelations. It shows how and why Vancouver's journals were suppressed when he returned to England. The journal descriptions of the high level relationships and alliances with the Indigenous people they were meeting were redacted and kept from later historical materials which then informed educational textbooks. This is a re-interpretation of the story of those times, through an Indigenous lens. Baker and Tasi's research into primary archives and oral knowledge around the world is a significant contribution to reconciliation, and correcting an injustice.

Watch the full video here.

Historic Places Days is July 11-20, 2025

From the National Trust for Canada:

"Join hundreds of historic sites across Canada for the ninth annual Historic Places Days! This nationwide event invites you to help shine a spotlight on historic places from coast-to-coast-to-coast. Sites like monuments, cultural landscapes, geocaches, and more are welcome to register!

Over 900 historic places participated last year, and we are poised to reach even more places and people across Canada.

Learn more about Historic Places Days and register today!

New for Historic Places Days 2025

This year we invite you to share stories from arts, crafts, storytelling and artistry that connects us to our past. From intricate woodwork, textiles weaving, Indigenous traditional crafts, music, and more. Exploring historic places through the lens of craftsmanship and creativity allows us to not only admire their beauty but also celebrate the enduring legacies that continue to inspire and evolve. 

Please contact historicplacesdays@nationaltrustcanada.ca for further information."

Dr. Lorne Hammond, retired curator at the Royal British Columbia Museum, takes us on a journey through the Cariboo, following the legends of the packer, “Cataline.”

Cataline (Jean Caux) was one of the most famous packers who ran trains of horses or mules in British Columbia. Pack trains delivered materials required to live and work, and were vital to the building of railways, roads, and telegraph lines. Hammond explains how the pack trains followed trails created by Indigenous peoples and later by fur trading companies, to reach settlements in rugged terrains including Barkerville.

Presented at the BCHF Conference in Williams Lake, May 2025.

Watch the full video here.

Art by Reiko Pleau for "Umami"

From Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre:

"In our 25th anniversary year at the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre (NNMCC), we celebrate artists of Japanese ancestry with the Umami: Savouring Artistic Nikkei Identity exhibition from February through September in the Karasawa Gallery.  

Just as “Umami” represents the rich and complex layers of flavour in cuisine, this exhibition delves into the depth and richness of nikkei artistic identity. Featuring a diverse range of artists, from emerging to established, including Japanese Canadian Legacies Art fund awardees. From traditional to contemporary art practice, the Umami exhibition shares the rich essence of our Japanese Canadian creative community.

Anchoring the full run of the exhibition is an interactive heritage inspired contemporary multi-media installation by Annie Sumi and Brian Kobayakawa called Kintsugi. Kintsugi is best known as a traditional Japanese technique of mending ceramics with gold. Annie and Brian’s Kintsugi conceptually mends broken and shattered experiences of what it means to be Canadian of Japanese ancestry through original music and spoken word activated by the visitor manually manipulating a Singer sewing machine that survived the era of Japanese Canadian internment and dispossession.

In Part 2, we introduce Molly JF Caldwell, the estate of Yoshiko Hirano, Marlene Howell, Vivien Nishi, and Reiko Pleau.  All of the artists investigate Japanese Canadian experience in their own style and media. Caldwell reimagines vintage textiles. Hirano, a long-term resident of Nikkei Home honed her skill in sumi-e.  Howell paints for the love of her heritage and sometimes dark history. Nishi honours her father’s internment era experience with manga-like illustrations, and Pleau mines the complex history and connection to her maternal ancestors."

Visit the exhibit's website page here.

Author Eve Lazarus describes the shocking tragedy of the Empress of Ireland, which sank near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in 1914 with the loss of more than thousand lives, and her connections to the story, including her deep-dive research into the victims and survivors from all across Canada.

Watch the full video from the Vancouver Historical Society here.

Marion McKinnon Crook received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Seattle University (although a Canadian from the Fraser Valley) and worked as a public health nurse in the Cariboo until 1986 and in the Fraser Valley until 1989. Those were the days of treacherous roads, severe and dangerous weather and wide-spread populations. Her original nursing district encompassed 3,600 square miles. During her nursing career in the Cariboo, she wrote and published with trade publishers: ten novels for young adult and middle grade readers. She also researched, wrote and published non-fiction around teen problems such as suicide, eating disorders and adoption.

Her memoirs Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching and Rural living and Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin have proven to be popular reads. She is presently working on a biography, Bloomsbury to Barkerville: The Life of Miss Florence Wilson.

Marion presented at the British Columbia Historical Federation's annual conference in Williams Lake, May 3, 2025.

Watch the full video here.