lost hope

A recent Greater Victoria School District Media Release sets out that George Jay Elementary School will be renamed:

“We are grateful to work in partnership with Songhees and Esquimalt Nations to develop a process that will support a new name for George Jay Elementary School that is reflective of the traditional territories we reside on,” said Board Chair Nicole Duncan. “We are committed to honouring local Indigenous language, culture and history as we continue the important work of building culturally responsive and welcoming spaces for all students. A new Lekwungen name will open the door to enriching conversations and learning about Indigenous language, culture and history.”

The School District doesn’t explain why the name change is necessary but a Times-Colonist article provides:

Jay brought in a regulation in 1907 requiring Chinese children to pass an English test to get into public schools, a regulation that didn’t apply to children of other nationalities. He also decided in 1920 that more than 200 Chinese students attending public schools would have to move to separate facilities on Kings Road and in Rock Bay, sparking a year-long strike by the students.
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By today’s standards George Jay was obviously prejudiced against school children of Chinese ancestry, and although such bigotry was endemic at the time, his legacy is over. However, lost in the conciliative pander are the actual Chinese-Canadian victims. Why is the new name going to involve the Songhees and Esquimalt when they had nothing to do with the name problem?​

​Last September marked the 100th anniversary of the student strike that took place in response to the School Board’s attempt at segregation. As discussed in the September 5, 2022 address to the Commemorative Fundraising Luncheon of the Chinese Students School Strike: The locally born Chinese who were young adults in 1922 were the real leaders of the strike.

The speech goes on to say that one of those young leaders was Low Kwong-Jo, or Joe Hope.

Hope became the president of the Resist School Segregation Association and spoke for the strikers at public meetings in Chinese in Victoria and Vancouver and lead delegations to the school board. Along with other locally born, he publicly exposed the Board’s justifications for segregation. As Hope explained, segregation put the future of the locally born into question, so that we will be unable to take our part by the side of other Canadians …

Joe Hope Elementary has a nice ring to it, but more virtue-points are to be gained ingratiating the local indigenous; and after all the school is on Songhees territory … wait a minute, didn’t they relinquish that land as part of their Douglas Treaty? It’s confusing.

It seems all cultures have a dark history. The colonials were bigoted but the Coast Salish were slave owners/traders, as discussed in the journal article Predatory Warfare, Social Status, and the North Pacific Slave Trade by Donald Mitchell, past Anthropology Professor at University of Victoria. An excerpt including a mid-nineteenth century observation, describes the south island demand for slaves that fuelled north island raiding:

Kwakiutl now sold slaves to the Songhees and other Salish near Fort Victoria. “This induces them (the Kwakiutl) to raid their neighbours to supply the slave market to the south”.
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Hope continues to fade in the search for both sides of the truth, on the road to reconciliation. The school district should know its local history given that education is their day-job, but rather than commemorating the Chinese-Canadian society directly harmed by George Jay, they choose to honour a different past culture that, ironically, supported even greater anti-human practices.
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