Cedar and Bamboo: A Documentary about Chinese and First Nations Relations
Release date: 2010
Running time: 22 minutes
Directed by: Diana E. Leung, Kamala Todd
Produced by: Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC, Jennifer Lau, Karin Lee
Purchase the film: Moving Images DistributionChinese people arrived on the Western shores of Canada many generations ago. Since then, they have formed unique relations and shared many experiences with this land's Indigenous people. Cedar and Bamboo explores those relationships through the lives of four people of Chinese and Aboriginal roots. Set in the stunning land of British Columbia and the bustling multicultural city of Vancouver, their stories reveal the difficult circumstances of aboriginal people and early Chinese immigrants that both led to these unions but also challenged these families to stay as a whole.
At the age of five, elder Judy Joe was taken from Vancouver to her father's village in China, where she was raised by her stepfamily. She fought to reclaim her Canadian identity. When she finally returned to Canadian soil, she found herself only to be like an immigrant in her place of birth.
Musqueam elder Howard Grant, who shares a long heritage of the Musqueam people through his mother and a Chinese heritage through his father, reflects on his experiences with both cultures. Siblings Jordie and Hannah Yow, who grew up in Kamloops and are now in their 20s, reflect on growing up in an absence of information on their cultural backgrounds.
As an extra on the DVD, 1788 provides 10 minutes academic commentary from Harley Wylie of the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation and Professors Jean Barman and Henry Yu of the University of British Columbia on the shared histories in British Columbia of these two peoples.