Illustrating Racism: Challenging Canada’s Racial Amnesia with Comics

It has been ten years since Chester Brown challenged Canadian historians to think more carefully about comic books with the publication of Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography.¹ Over the past decade, comics with historical content have become increasingly popular resources for people to learn about the past.² Yet many historians remain uncertain about the value and legitimacy of the emerging field of historical comics. This hesitancy is understandable; many comics practitioners make interpretive choices that disrupt disciplinary practices, often blurring distinctions between fact and fiction as well as popular and professional history. Historical comics are also rarely the products of archival research and are not subject to a peer-review process. Yet, prominent scholars such as American historian Paul Buhle and Canadian education historians Michael Cromer and Penney Clark argue that there is great pedagogical potential in engaging with comics in the history classroom.³ Cromer and Clark suggest that comics are “multilayered” and encourage students to “marry print and visual representations in order to read in ways that are deeply meaningful, because the narrative is incomplete without both dimensions.” Moreover, they contend that the process of reading comics, which requires readers to piece together the story through their own interpretation of the visual and textual material provided, has the potential to increase students’ “tolerance of ambiguity and appreciation for the nature of history as interpretation.”⁴ The scholarship of Buhle, Cromer, and Clark has sparked a much-needed academic conversation about the merits of comics as history. To add to this discussion, I offer a review of three recent Canadian history comics that make significant contributions to Canadian social history and warrant critical attention: David H. T. Wong’s Escape to Gold Mountain: A Graphic History of the Chinese in North America, Zach Worton’s The Klondike, and David Robertson’s and Scott Henderson’s Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story.

Each of these works, like Brown’s Louis Riel, draws attention to Canada’s hidden histories of racism. Despite the fact that racism has deep roots in settler societies, it is commonly believed that racism did not, nor does not, exist in Canada. Sherene H. Razack calls this forgetting a racial “amnesia.”⁵ Although attitudes toward race are socially constructed, their material and historical consequences are not. “’Race’ is a mythical construct,” Constance Backhouse reminds us, “’Racism’ is not.” Escape to Gold Mountain, The Klondike, and Sugar Falls illustrate for readers how racial differences have been “pressed into service” to justify, rationalize, and reproduce asymmetrical social relations to the benefit of settlers.⁶ By examining Chinese immigration to North America, the dynamics of race relations during the Klondike gold rush, and one student’s experience in a Manitoba residential school, these historical comics demonstrate the effects of racist practices in Canada. Far from being silly or irrelevant, these historical comics contribute to Canada’s complex social history and can be used to challenge Canada’s racial amnesia. Comics, then, might be used by historians as another tool in an increasingly diverse toolkit.

“A time of great and unspeakable hurt”: Escape to Gold Mountain

David H.T. Wong’s Escape to Gold Mountain examines the migration of poor Chinese people to the United States and Canada in the mid-1800s and their struggles to create new lives for themselves and their families. While Wong’s story is fictional, the artist borrows from his family’s real-life experiences in “Gold Mountain”—a term many Chinese used to refer to North America during the nineteenth century gold rushes—for inspiration. The central focus of the comic book is on how different generations of Wongs (used to symbolize all Chinese immigrants) experienced racism and overcame its consequences. Though it is problematic to assume that the Wong’s family story can...