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Multicultural Canada
July 7, 2008
There might be only 33 million Canadians, but there are a lot of different flavors of Canadians.
One reason I know this is because I grew up not far from Vancouver. I heard British accents there, saw bilingual food labels in the grocery stores, watched East Indians playing cricket amidst the Northwest Coast Indian totem poles of Stanley Park, in a city where nearly a fifth of the population is ethnic Chinese.
But there's better-maintained evidence than that of Canada's rich diversity. The Multicultural Canada website
is truly a thing of beauty. It is the fruit of a digitization project that sensibly organizes archives of several outstanding libraries and historical/cultural institutions.
In English, there is the amazing Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples, with its in-depth essays on hundreds of groups and its bibliographies that lead to further readings. Want to know about the cultural expression of El Salvadorans in Canada? One of the ECP's subsections includes passages like this:
The financial assistance of humanitarian agencies and the unpaid help of translators and typesetters have been crucial to the publication of Salvadorean literature in Canada. One such work is a bilingual collection of remarkably outspoken and passionate poems by María Luisa Villacorta, a woman who came to Canada as a refugee. Villacorta was seventy-seven when The Grandmother’s Poems/Poemas de la Abuela (1989) was published jointly by the Workshop of Popular Salvadorean Literature and Write-on Press Publishers in Vancouver. Most of her poems openly celebrate the FMLN as the champion of peasants, workers, and other oppressed groups.The ECP alone is a dazzling resource. But the Multicultural Canada site also includes teaching materials and archival collections. Most of the collections are in languages other than English. As described in the site notes, "The geographic coverage is wide, from Franco-Ontarien newspapers to the organizational records of Victoria’s Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. Material types include audio files, published text such as books and newspapers, unpublished text such as manuscript documents, photographs, and ephemeral items such as identity cards. While most collections focus on a single ethnic group, the BC [British Columbia] Multicultural Photographs collection includes images of most cultural groups found in BC."
This exemplary collection, this wonderfully executed tribute to the peoples who make up the fabric of a great nation, is a giant collaborative project led by the Simon Fraser University Library, the
Multicultural History Society of Ontario, the University of Calgary, the University of Toronto, the
University of Victoria Library, and Vancouver Public Library, along with dozens of other groups and individuals.
Posted by Bruce Jensen on July 7, 2008 | Comments (0)
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