This is story about fish, a steam ship and a mural. It’s about the City of Vancouver’s (“City” or” COV”) desire to apologize to the South Asian community for its past racist conduct and its inability to correct a report which is incorrect.

The City of Vancouver has appointed a South Asian Descent Advisory Group to address “Historical Discrimination against People of South Asian Canadian Descent“ (“HDSA”). The City has already decided that at Phase 5 of its “next steps” plan a future official “meaningful” apology will be issued to the South Asian community along with “dedicated funding”. The research being conducted is to build a foundation for the apology to come. It is unclear who is setting the research agenda and who has final oversight and approval of any research conducted on South Asian redress.

As reported in Rungh News, “Vancouver City Council Remembers and Forgets in Komagata Maru Apology”, the City of Vancouver has been apologetic in the past to the point where it even forgets how often it has apologized.

Pending the future “meaningful” apology in Phase 5, in May 2023 Mayor Ken Sim proclaimed a “Komagata Maru Day of Remembrance”. It was the 109th anniversary of the Komagata Maru incident of May 23, 1914 when 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus arrived in Burrard Inlet onboard a steamship.

The Komagata Maru was not allowed to dock and its passengers were not permitted to disembark due to Canada’s racist laws. It sat anchored in Vancouver harbour in full sight of the public and under the watchful eyes of armed policing officials on boats.

Mayor Sim’s 2023 proclamation relied upon a report dated May 15, 2023 (“Commemorating the Komagata Maru Incident Secondary Naming of a Street” - RTS NO: 15600 VanRIMS No: 08-2000-20,

Council Meeting Date May 30, 2023) (“Report”) which cited a mural as evidence that there “are accounts that Indigenous people, attempted to provide aid to passengers in the form of food and water but were unsuccessful as the Government restricted access to the ship.”

As evidence for its claim of Indigenous aid, the City of Vancouver report includes a footnote citation, at footnote 16, about the Vancouver Mural Festival’s Taike-sye’yə mural and the City of Vancouver’s own video “Remembering the Komagata Maru”, which video also relies on the Festival’s mural as evidence.

Rungh News sought clarification about these “accounts” of aid more than eight months ago before publishing, “City of Vancouver’s Flawed 2023 Komagata Maru Proclamation – Symbolic art proclaimed as fact by Mayor Ken Sim”. Rungh News asked the City of Vancouver if it would amend its report and was informed that “at this time, the City of Vancouver will not be making an amendment to this report or proclamation.” After publishing the flawed City proclamation story, Rungh News followed up with Councillor Christine Boyle about why the City of Vancouver was not willing to amend its report.

Sandra Singh responded to Rungh News on January 17, 2024, after receiving Boyle’s request for “review and follow up” to the Rungh News story. Singh apologized to Rungh News for “not being clear in our earlier response” and wrote: “We have no provisions for going back and revising a report already received by Council or a proclamation already issued. We can however, note a correction in a future work related to this effort should that be assessed to be necessary.” Singh committed to additional research on the sources relied upon for the story of attempted Indigenous aid to the passengers on board the Komagata Maru.

Rungh News followed up with the new General Manager of Arts, Culture and Community Services in January, March and April 2024 seeking more details about any new research.

On May 23, 2024, the City of Vancouver provided further details that Ari Bhullar, a Social Planner, at the City of Vancouver had received “an oral histories account by a South Asian community elder.” No further details were provided as to the nature of the “account” or the South Asian elder. More than a year after the original report was accepted by City Council, no more is known about the information cited in the report.

The narrative about Indigenous aid being provided to the Komagata Maru passengers began as political opportunism. It then turned into “fact-by-press-release” as the media repeated what they were told and the public relied upon the media stories. Historians who have studied the Komagata Maru incident for decades began to push back against the “aid” narrative, resulting in the story depicted by the mural as now being referred to as “imaginative” not factual.

The Taike-sye’yə mural was painted on the back of what was named the Harry Stevens Federal Building at 125 East 10 th Avenue in Vancouver as a part of the Vancouver Mural Festival. The mural was planned and painted within a whirlwind 6-week period. The building name was removed on August 9, 2019 in an “un-naming” ceremony, just before a federal election took place. The ceremony provided photo and media opportunities for the politicians involved, as explicitly noted in the project brief.

A Vancouver Mural Festival video includes images of the mural being painted and an artist stating (at the :55 second mark and onwards) that supplies were running low on the ship and how “different communities would come out in secret and deliver supplies [and] [one] of those communities were the Coast Salish people”. The text at the end of the VMF video states: “This mural depicts oral accounts gathered from Musqueam and South Asian community members of the welcome that Musqueam paddlers who canoed out across the inlet to feed the passengers on the Komagata Maru as they were blocked access to the shore for 62 days”. The Salish Sea Sentinel news site quotes Carla Qualtrough as stating: “If it were not for the compassion of the local Coast Salish people who came to the ship by canoe, bringing food and water, this tragedy would have been even more horrific.”

The City of Vancouver video, which was also cited in the report (at the 7:10 mark) further muddies the story of who provided aid to the Komagata Maru passengers. There is ample historical evidence that a South Asian “shore committee” was permitted to provide some aid to the Komagata Maru passengers.

The speaker on the video refers to both, Indigenous and South Asian peoples providing aid and being restricted from doing so.

For readers not deeply immersed in the history of the Komagata Maru, it becomes difficult to understand what is artistic license and what is fact. Over time the “fact” that Indigenous people provided actual aid to the Komagata Maru began to seep into the public discourse. There are no Indigenous sources for this story and a lone South Asian elder’s second-hand recollection which contradicts the Festival’s narrative.

Professor and filmmaker Ali Kazimi noted this slippage from an artistic mural into historical fact in his article “Did Indigenous paddlers smuggle food to the Komagata Maru?” He concluded by writing: “I believe honouring the truth requires evidence to substantiate it, so I urge all involved with the mural including both the federal and municipal governments to recognize that the recently circulated story that ‘…the Indigenous people delivered food and water to the passengers on the ship’ is not verified. Re-framing history is not the same as speculative history. Let’s seek to arrive at fact-based truth as a path to redress and reconciliation.”

On January 4, 2021, The Tyee online news magazine published an opinion by Bal Dhillon on the India Farmers protests in which Dhillon cited the Taike-sye’yə mural as evidence of “Indigenous people [paddling] out to the ship in canoes to provide food for the would-be immigrants.”

Kazimi, along with Professors Anne Murphy and Hugh Johnston submitted an opinion piece to The Tyee challenging The Tyee’s acceptance of the story told by the mural. The Tyee declined to publish the opinion piece and, to its credit, began its own investigation about the story of the mural. The declined joint opinion, “True Both to History, and to Solidarity”, was published in Rungh Magazine, and it challenged the manner in which the mural framed the history of the Komagata Maru. It counselled caution, noting that the Komagata Maru’s history is “part of a highly scrutinized part of modern Canadian history, particularly in the last two decades.”

The three Professor also noted the Festival’s framing of the term “taike” (which is included in the mural title) as being a family kinship word in the Punjabi language is a “complete misrepresentation of the term”. The original project brief for the mural event only notes the “affinity” to the word “cousin” without any of the derogatory meanings of the term. It appears that after Kazimi began to make enquiries about the mural, the Vancouver Mural Festival site page for the Taike-sye’yə mural was changed to note the more “negative connotations” of the term. Kazimi, Murphy and Johnston, cite Professor Kamala Nayar’s study of Punjabis in British Columbia when Nayar writes: “from the 1960s through to the early 1990s, Punjabis began to attach the negative stereotypes of First Nations people to the word taike and used it in a derogatory manner when communicating among themselves.” Sources Rungh News has spoken to have also confirmed the term’s derogatory and racist underpinnings.

Reporter Christoper Cheung researched the story of the mural and published his findings in “This Mural Tells a Beautiful Tale of Cultural Solidarity. But Did It Really Happen?”. Kazimi shared his research with Cheung and communicated with The Tyee’s editor. In the three-thousand-word article, Cheung tries to find sources for the story which the mural tells. Cheung found no Indigenous oral history sources. His request for information to Musqueam Elders, as well as Musqueam nation’s archives and research department, yielded no responses. The curator of the Taike-sye’yə mural, Naveen Girn, is much more equivocal about the basis for the mural story in Cheung’s reporting. Girn refers to the mural story of Indigenous aid as being a “highly symbolic and imaginative piece”. The only source for the mural story, so far, is a South Asian elder who related a story he had heard about how “Indigenous people in ‘small boats’ had come up to the ship to sell fish and other goods, drawn to the ‘circus’ of an event”.

Kazimi replied to Cheung’s reporting in The Tyee with his own blistering article, “A Response to The Tyee About the Taike-sye’yə Mural” concluding that: “This investigation by The Tyee has muddied the waters further, and in doing so it has made The Tyee, inadvertently, complicit with the Vancouver Mural Festival and the Government of Canada in the creation of a false history.”

The story of the mural is now undergoing further research by the City of Vancouver but the “symbolic” story is still being accepted and repeated as a “fact” with no efforts by the Vancouver Mural Festival, politicians, or others involved with the project to correct the record.

The Taike-sye’yə mural represents a cautionary tale about political agendas, accepting Press Releases as if they were facts, and the responsibilities which racialized communities need to embrace as they seek meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.