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One hundred and forty years ago, Canadian Pacific Railway’s freight trains first flowed into Calgary, carving a new path for the city’s future. Along with prosperity, they also brought the Calgary Herald’s first press on their cars.
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And thus marks the theme of the 33rd Historic Calgary Week, an 11-day showcase of the city’s roots and the leaps it has made over a century and longer.
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Organized by the Chinook County Historical Society (CCHS), the festival, set for July 28-Aug. 7, will highlight the journey of transportation through Calgary and the people behind its growth.
The events will revisit strides in transportation that precede recent technological advancements which transport us, albeit artificially, across continents within seconds, making the issue especially relevant in the times we live in, said Walt Deboni, president of the Historical Society of Alberta, CCHS’s parent organization.
“Electronic communication obviously transcends anything we had here when the railway arrived,” Deboni said.
“There’s no question that transportation throughout history has been the key,” he said, adding it propelled cities, such as Vancouver and New York, into prominence.
Role of Chinese immigrants to be highlighted
The history week will feature a suite of talks and walking tours, along with presentations by people who worked at CPR. Among the 65 events, the festival will also examine the extraordinary role played by Chinese immigrants in propping up the country’s railway infrastructure and the abuses they endured at the hands of government institutions.
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The society invited Lindy Cho, associate professor of English at York University, to present the findings of her award-winning book Mass Capture: The Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens, which investigates the stories of Chinese workers who remained in Canada after the 1923 passage of the Chinese Immigration Act.
Another event traces the career of Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve, an early Chinese North American fiction writer, journalist, screenwriter and playwright whose best-known works were published under the pen name “Onoto Watanna,” a controversial Japanese persona that she assumed for over two decades.
These events are important in understanding our past mistakes, Deboni said.
“We need to understand our history, especially not so much the built history, but the history of our people, so that we understand where we came from and the mistakes we made in the past and what we need to do in the future to grow as a society, to grow as a country so that everybody has an opportunity to prosper,” he added.
“We know that mistakes were made in the past and we probably will make mistakes in the future. But without understanding where we came from makes it difficult for us to progress.”
More information is at https://chinookhistory.ca/historic-calgary-week .
