Talk:Won Alexander Cumyow

POV tag
The reason is that this article is less concern with Cumyow as a person, than as a political object used to illustrate the "we were victimized" version of Canadian history; there's a lot more to his life and the times in question than what's here; and I dispute the context of the disenfranchisement account; this isn't as bad as many other Chinese-Canadian history sites, but the ethnocentric is bias is still implicit in its content; and in the single-mindedness of its content.Skookum1 23:32, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * The photo of him voting in 1949 election has appeared in numerous newspapers. The "times" are a good deal about what many people are about. Would you have all reference to his voting, and all mention of Exclusion Act excluded? While his ever being allowed to vote seems anamolous, his being on voter's list for 1898 is some objective evidence indicating that he had been able to vote at one time and was then disenfranchised. What would you add? --JimWae 23:53, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

There are other aspects to 19th Century British Columbia than the Exclusion Act. Where's a writeup on his services to the court, notable cases, what life in Port Douglas was like, the role of his father and other Chinese merchants in the gold rush (all profitable, despite the CCNC's propaganda to the contrary). By only addressing the Exclusion Acts and the voting thing he's reduced to a political object, not a person, and not a pioneer of a province he helped build. Instead, it comes off as only more bleating of the kind we were subjected to in the Sun a couple of weeks ago.Skookum1 23:57, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * How much of that can be sourced? I have connections to the family & very little of that is ever recounted, much less verifiable. The UBC fonds came from the family.There's some more info at http://nacrp.cic.sfu.ca/CCHS/JanetNicol-Cumyow-article.pdf - but how much of that is well sourced is uncertain to me. For example, it makes a blunder with his father's name - and hence shows no understanding about Chinese names --JimWae 00:01, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
 * While you have a point that charges of racism are often an incomplete explanation of events, it would be foolish to deny that racism has been a problem & makes other problems worse --JimWae 00:45, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

But the article addresses the history of the Head Tax, Exclusion Act and voting laws; why not also the nature of the multilingual courts, the personalities he worked with in his his career (e.g. Judge Begbie, Henry Crease, etc); and the reasons for the changes to the voting laws and the other statutes which affected him; which are NOT reducible to simply saying "racism"; sure, it exacerbates things just like it does in the post 9-11 world or, for that matter, during the Boxer Rebellions and Opium Wars; but there are many sides to any story, and here only one is being toldSkookum1 07:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)


 * What "other reasons" would there have been for disenfranchising Cumyow & others who were born as British subjects but were not white? Do you have sources for the other material? This does not seem to be a POV problem as much as a scarcity-of-sources-for-other-material problem. --JimWae 02:24, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I'll dig some out, as he crops up in McDonald's Vancouver:A Visual History and some of the local histories of Port Douglas and other places; fragmentary mentions but each with a different aspect, perhaps anyway. The idea is that someone born in 1861 would have already had a pretty interesting life in the early province by 1890; they were interesting times; also worth noting that the municipal franchise had been in place, unlike the provincial and federal franchises. Despite, that is, the anomalous voting in the Lillooet riding, which included Port Douglas although by that time - 1871 onwards - it was depopulated and most businesses and families had relocated to the Lower Mainland or, in the case of freightage businesses, to Yale; but in his capacity as a court translator it seems to me he would have done a lot of travel with the circuit courts, i.e. on horseback in company with Begbie and other justices to Barkerville, Quesnellemouthe; the court records themselves are all in the BC Archives and one day I'd like to get at them for a parallel reason; Begbie's and Bushby's margin notes (and perhaps Cumyow's?) on local Chinook usages (Chinook varied from region to region somewhat, or so the evidence suggests). He's only briefly mentioned in my histories of the Lillooet Country, other than Decker's Pemberton: History of a Settlement (which is fascinating, as I think you'll find, especially in its chapters on the heyday of the Douglas Road) but I'll see what's there; I was also going to put in what's in those books about the Lillooet Chinese whose names "we" have; including the first homestead of the Yick/Yip family at Upper Hat Creek, and their stores in Lillooet and Cache Creek...perhaps, uh, if you found these stubs interesting you might be the person to liaise with the Chinese-Canadian historical resource archive at UBC to see what there might be in Chinese or any family fonds concerning that country, and also concerning life in Lillooet's Chinatown; which was a pretty unique place, by the way, as the Chinese had learned from the Mexican packers during the gold rush how to build in adobe and most of Chinatown was built out of that, other than the merchant buildings on Main Street and "China Alley" (where the BCR/CNR tracks behind the main block of Main Street are, and ironically where some of the remaining Japanese families have their residences; and the Chinese Jim family, still in the drygoods and grocery business, with roots dating back to who-knows-when....anyway, the idea is that it would be a lot better for all concerned if histories of Chinese Canadians weren't just about the Head Tax, Exclusion Act, etc.....Skookum1 06:47, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

As for the "other reasons" I'll find my copy of Morton and cite his mention of the circumstances there; in my estimation the disenfranchisement wasn't directed at long-time British Columbian Chinese, but at the ongoing wave of new migrants from China; in much the same way old-stock Vancouver/Victoria Chinese find themselves suffering from the backlash against the post-Expo immigration wave....Skookum1 06:50, 11 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Well it likely was not directed at him - but the lawmakers do not seem to have concerned themselves about whether they disenfranchised people who otherwise fulfilled every qualification for voting except for their ethnicity - and who, if they were white, would have been allowed to vote. If the concern was about non-citizens (or non-British subjects) voting, the law could have laid down stricter requirements regardless of ethnicity - but that is not what happened. Racist attitudes either motivated -- or blinded -- the lawmakers. It does not violate NPOV to mention this in an article such as this. The photo of him voting is practically iconic & thus the issue needs to be in his article --JimWae 03:12, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Note on JimWae's comment-out

 * According to some accounts, he was also the first'' Chinese Canadian to vote in the 1949 federal election, but this is unlikely given the time-zone differences

Yeah, true; because even adding a qualifier like "he was also the first Chinese Canadian to vote in British Columbia in the 1949 federal election" won't even work because of the Mountain Time Zone, which is a normal thing in the East Kootenay and Peace River districts; unless there were, perhaps, no Chinese voting or who voted east of the Pacific Time Zone; the phrase seems more symbolic than factual, though.Skookum1 07:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Removal of POV tag
Took it out, after our discussions; meant to do this a few days ago. I think you understand where I'm coming from on this now; the idea is that individuals do not exist in cultural/polticial ghettos in the history of 19th Century BC; and shouldn't in the 20th either; but in the 19th everybody knew and interacted with everybody else, and in Cumyow's case there must be other stuff around, other than in the family fonds (which for anyone can be notoriously selected; it's what gets kept, not what gets thrown out, as I've found in the case of some Lillooet-area fonds and I know would be the case if my own father's papers ever found their way into the archives; a lot got thrown out after the wake, I know that for sure, and I wasn't enough of a history person back then to care). As said before, I've seen other bits on Cumyow (MacDonald's Vancouver: A Visual History didn't have much, as I'd thought before; must have been in Early Vancouver but I'll check some more in what I've got here; might have been in Morton, maybe the Akriggs, or in Decker anyway). I'm trying to find my OCR program disc so I can re-OCR some scans I have on the Chinese in Lillooet from Lillooet: Halfway to the Goldfields by Lorraine Harris, which I'm sure you'll find interesting; they're currently PCX files so I can send or link them for you if you can OCR them yourselves; or just want to read them as image files; a fair bit of detail, plus individual names, earnings and which ranches and stores they owned, and obviously from a source with a lot more detail (probably dox in the Lillooet Museum archives, or from The Prospector, which is the 1890s newspaper there, which is in UBC and BC Archives in 'fiche but I've never read them; VPL will have BC Directories (not in SFU, which I'm near) which will list Chinese merchants in any of the towns involved (Boston Bar, Lytton, Spences Bridge etc). NB the Chinese-Canadian history pages use the term "settlers", as do other Canadian history pages; the term "colonist" in all cases is far more accurate, since many (of any race/culture) were not settlers so much as merchants, prospectors, and so on; it's like that term "immigrants" when applied to non-Britons; but even the Britons were immigrants (esp. if you ask First Nations people....); and "colonist" reveals the nature of the beast IMO. BTW did you know Cum Yow's mother was the first Chinese woman in BC; somewhere I came across a mention of her arrival in Victoria, which turned heads; first woman by name anyway, as I'm pretty sure there were prostitutes in Victoria who'd come up from San Francisco, but on the other hand maybe they weren't Chinese but some other kind of East Asian, e.g. Malay or Filipino....Skookum1 19:15, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum
Please see RE BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum re: Talk:List of United States military history events. If you think maybe I should also move some or copy some of my other stuff from NW history and BC history pages and various Indigenous peoples project article/talk pages let me know; I never mean to blog, but I'm voluble and to me everything's interconnected; never meaning to dominate a page so have made this area to post my historical rambles on. Thoughts?Skookum1 03:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Comment on my posting of this: if anyone has any questions or wants to debate any issues relating to Oregon Country/Columbia District/Pacific Northwest history/historical geography, colonialist, aboriginal/indigenous, Pacific Rim/trade/migrations re Pacific NW, please feel free to drop by the forum and start a thread/topic, or just butt in at yer leisure.Skookum1 05:50, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Sorting people by Regional District
I just noticed the change in Cat from British Columbia to the Fraser Valley Regional District. I'm not sure this is the way to go and I'll take this up at the BC Wikiproject page (see box above) as Regional Districts change in boundaries over time and are not the parametere people identify themselves as coming from; a city, a town, a settlement, a "country" (Boundary Country, Cariboo Country, Thompson Country etc.), but nobody thinks in terms of Regional Districts except for municipal politicians and those who have to deal with them. In Cumyow's case, he was born in Port Douglas and while yes that is currently part of the Fraser Valley Regional District historically it was part of the Lillooet Country; it happens to be in the New Westminster Land District I think; or just north of the border between that and the Lillooet Land District, I'd have to check. But Port Douglas had virtually ceased to exist by the time Cumyow was 10 or 12, although it didn't fully peter out until the era when by then it was only a small handful, and AFAIK no Chinese were left as it happens. Where Cumyow is "from" is matter of debate; certainly he was born at Port Douglas, but he lived where his work was; his main domicile was Victoria was it not (I'll have to read the article again), or New Westminster (where he must have had digs, because of the role of the court and prisons there). Anyway, the basic point is that the FVRD is a modern invention and didn't exist in Cumyow's lifetime. How can he be "from there"?Skookum1 19:01, 2 January 2007 (UTC)