Beyond the Journey : Women's Stories of Settlement and Community Building in Canada

Althea Prince; Catherine Bain; Cynthia Ding; Gabriele Hardt; Maya Roy

The notorious examples of this include the Chinese, who endured the indignity of a head tax; a boatload of Indian men; another boatload of Jews after the Second World War; and the treatment of domestic workers from the Caribbean and the Philippines, whose struggles to stay in the country have been quietly kept in the background of people’s consciousness. [...] Canada does, however, need more labourers to work on its con- tinually growing economy; this is a situation that has been so since the end of the Second World War, and the ebb and flow of the economy has not changed the need for large numbers of immigrants to fill the labour void. [...] While the nuts and bolts of immigration discourses are not the focus of this collection of stories of settlement, it is important, I think, to note that the journey of the immigrant does not end with the struggle to actually obtain entry to the country, but continues in the work to be accepted by the institutions and the people of the country. [...] My concern, as an educator, as an immigrant, and as a Black person who is a woman, is that as we ap- proach the ideal of a society in which explicit and sys- temic bias is legally challenged, we are not willing to recognize and acknowledge the hidden prejudice and racism that still hinder the elimination of institutional and systemic racism and gender bias. [...] The dream changed and the house was the sidewalk, open to the elements and unsafe.