Ghostly Labors: Japanese Canadians in Western Canada's Settler Ecology

In 1942, my great uncle, Haruo Komori, was removed from the West Coast along with more than 21,000 other Japanese Canadians. Throughout his incarceration, Haruo corresponded with agents at the Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property about the forced sale of his belongings. Of particular concern was the future of a fishing boat, the F. C. Vancouver. In a 1944 letter, Haruo explained that he was “worried over this boat,” which he had been holding in trust for a man named Frank Charlie, who, “being an Indian, could not have it registered in his name.” By the following year, however, the boat had been auctioned off along with all of Haruo’s property, never to be returned to its rightful owner. While the fact of Haruo and Frank Charlie’s relationship arrives to us through the voluminous government records produced during mass incarceration, it tells a broader story than the typical narrative of Japanese Canadian dispossession and confinement to concentration camps. Haruo’s letters give a glimpse of how he and Frank were enmeshed in the provisional and fugitive interracial communities forged in Western Canadian resource extraction industries. My dissertation, Ghostly Labors: Japanese Canadians in Western Canada’s Settler Ecology, takes up the experiences of Japanese Canadians like Haruo to examine the tensions and solidarities between the settler, migrant, and Indigenous workers caught up in the settler colonial transformation of the local environment from 1858 to the present. Through fieldwork and analysis of archival documents, oral history, novels, visual art, and my family’s history, I theorize Western Canada’s “settler ecology” as an integrated system of racialized labor exploitation for resource extraction and I highlight Japanese Canadian embodied knowledges and practices that offer immanent critiques of the racialized exploitation of both workers and the environment. The first chapter, “Slimers, Skippers, ‘Slaves’ Indigenous, Japanese, and Chinese Workers of the Fraser River,” elucidates the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fishing and canning industry’s recruitment of an interracial labor force. I argue that the salmon industry’s growth depended on the consolidation of locally specific racializations of seasonal Asian and Indigenous workers, who were represented as both a threat to settler society and as uniquely suited to salmon work. These emergent racializations and settler colonial conceptions of the environment drove in turn the destruction of the local ecology and the restriction of Indigenous fishing rights. The second chapter, “Spectral Yellow, Fine White: Homegrown Sugar Beets and the Racial Stratification of Labor,” analyzes the successive recruitment of incarcerated Japanese Canadian, Indigenous, and Mexican migrant “stoop laborers” to cultivate a domestic sugar supply. I argue that the industry’s collaboration with the Canadian state to produce new classes of temporary workers who are stripped of or denied citizenship has, rather than solving the “labor problem,” exacerbated ecological issues and reinforced systems of racialized employment that undergird white Canadian settler sovereignty. In the third chapter, “Foraging for Ghosts: Steveston’s Migrant Ecologies,” the dissertation follows contemporary Japanese Canadian foraging trips for yomogi back to the historical site of the salmon industry, home to the largest pre-war community of Japanese Canadians. I analyze Japanese Canadian knowledge of Steveston’s migrant ecologies less to retrieve prior Japanese Canadian inhabitance per se, but to interpret the foraging trips as a response to the municipal government’s initiatives to eradicate “invasive species,” present-day anti-Asian racism, and the Musqueam people’s ongoing struggle for land and fishing rights.The dissertation is grounded in Japanese Canadian knowledge—produced through the experience of laboring in British Columbia and Alberta’s rivers, oceans, and fields—and transmitted today in the intimate archives of foraging trips, novels, art installations, oral histories, and old letters. Taking inspiration in Haruo and Frank’s improvised solidarity, I contend that the knowledge forged in fishing and agriculture, and the environmental devastation these industries have left in their wake, offers an immanent critique of Western Canada’s “settler ecology” and harbors strategies for building solidaristic relationships within it.

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