Standing in the Doorway Transcript

Reid: Hi, my name is Janet Reid. I'm curator at Markham Museum, a community museum located in the city of Markham.

Mitchell: My name is Rebekah Mitchell and I'm the curator at the York Region District School Board Museum & Archives.

Reid: Standing in the Doorway is an exhibition in three parts. Initially, there was a website that opened in May of 2023, followed by a gallery exhibition that now tours around York Region to various museums, galleries, and libraries, and finally there's an inter-school touring exhibition version. It's a little bit smaller and moves between schools, ensuring that the content of the exhibition can be seen by the largest number of people in the York Region communities.

Mitchell: This project was brought to us by a community member Nancy Siew in the summer of 2022. She invited me out for lunch and she wanted to find out what my museum was doing to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act. This was a really important milestone, and it was something that I realized my museum could not do on its own. We decided with Janet Reid at Markham Museum to collaborate on this project and to bring in community partners like Nancy and Tribute to Early Chinese Immigrants Foundation to tell the story of Chinese immigration to York Region. It was a story not only telling the story of Chinese immigration, but also what the community looks like now, the story of resilience, resistance, and celebrating things like arts, culture, sports, and so that's how the project started.

Reid: The exhibition was created with the support and assistance of over 500 members of the Chinese communities and Chinese diasporas throughout York Region. It includes the voices of youth, adults, business owners, community leaders, elders, politicians, and really a whole coming together of community. 

Mitchell: I really hope that the lasting impact of this project will be that family members and community realize the importance of their family archives and that holding on to those memories really inspires the next generation. The recognition of this word for our community is phenomenal. Our school community, our larger community here in York Region, people from the Chinese diaspora, it really — it is so significant because this project never would have happened without their support.

Reid: I think there are a number of changes that this exhibition has brought to the way our museum works with community. In addition to long-standing relationships that we're developing now that we are taking forward into new projects we are also thinking differently about how we collect for the museum, how we care for collections, all of the aspects of what museum work is. We also have new approaches to how we work with community and how community can come to us and together create stronger exhibitions that support the interests and needs of the whole community, rather than just some of our early European settlement groups. 

Mitchell: I really believe that our community members have so much in their family archives, and that is important to say to this important part of Canadian history, and I really am thankful to the community members that came in and gave their time, and their memories, and their artifacts and archives, and to share it with the community because it really became a rich exhibition all because of those participants. Working within the school board I think that we often teach history, but really we need to engage in history. We need to get our students excited about history and this project really got family members, from really young youth up into our seniors, excited to tell their story and to share their experiences, and to see the commonalities between each other's stories and also the greater community at large. So I really think that history is something that is exciting and we can make it exciting, and this project really made so many families excited to tell their story. 

Reid: The recognition of this award is really for the community itself. Those 500 and more individuals who stepped out of their comfort zone and trusted us as museums to create a project that shared their stories, some of which were comfortable and some which were very difficult to tell, and for them it's a chance to see and be seen, and to understand that their history is Markham's history and York Region's history, and it matters. I think that for a community like Markham where our modern history is very short it's important for individuals to see themselves in the communities they live in, to feel that their individual histories and their larger diasporic communities matter, and that a museum should be a space that's open to all and and open to contributions by all. One of the things that was interesting about this project: it was completed on a very aggressive short time line, but also a major challenge for us was that we knew very little about the 19th and 20th Century Chinese histories of York Region, and for me Markham specifically, and it really required the community support to help us discover that history, and through our oral histories we've now created a great baseline for scholarship where in the past there has been none. 

Mitchell: This project was really important — it was important to touch on the history of the Chinese Exclusion Act and this racist piece of legislation, but when we spoke with community we really heard that while they wanted to acknowledge that history they also really wanted to showcase the celebration, the successes of their story, and so it really is a project that's identity affirming. It really showcases how the successes of our community here in York Region from the Chinese diaspora and it wouldn't have happened without our community partners so we're really really thankful for their engagement in this project. 

Reid: We also discovered that we have a very misbalanced collection. At the beginning of this project we had only five objects that authentically could be considered of Chinese cultural value, and only one of them actually made the exhibition, and the reason for that was that so much came from the community, so many offerings of great material, that only one of those objects really made sense to be in the final project. But what we have today now is access to a wonderful collection of resources that can be used towards the future.