Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. He hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Crying. It's time
for some Six Impossible Episodes. If you are new to
the show. A couple of times a year, we do
(00:22):
an episode that looks at six different stories that, for
whatever reason, we can't really do as a standalone show.
A lot of the time it's because there's not enough
information to fill out a whole show, or because there
are six stories that have some similar themes in common.
Back in we did an episode called Six Impossible Episodes
Deja Vu Edition, and that was on topics that were
(00:44):
so similar to things we had already covered that if
we had done a whole episode, it would have sounded
almost like a rerun, just with different names and dates.
Just swap those out. It's the exact same story, and
today we're doing something a little bit similar to that.
Several times over the past few years, we've done an
episode about something that happened in the United States, and
(01:05):
then afterward we've gotten lots of notes from listeners about
the same thing happening in Canada. Although the first story
that we're going to get into is actually the reverse
of that. Also, I do want to note that these
are mostly not happy stories. Apparently mostly people tell us
that also happened in Canada about really appalling incidents in history.
So we saved the most heroic one for last. So
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starting out on July, we published a podcast on Le
fi Duchroix, or the King's Daughters, And this was an
effort by Francis, King Louis the fourteenth to send eligible
young women to New France. In the sixteen hundreds, francis
focus in northern North America had been on the fur trade,
not on establishing permanent settlements with families, and as a consequence,
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by sixteen sixty three, there were six frenchmen for every
frenchwoman in what is now Canada. So the monarchy recruited
French women and paid for their transport to North America
in an effort to try to balance things out. A
very similar scenario also played out in French Louisiana. At first,
authorities had expected that French men would go to Louisiana
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and marry Native women, and then they also expected that
these brides would assimilate into French colonial society. That is
not how it worked out, though. It turned out that
the women in question had their own opinions on this subject,
which was to do essentially the opposite. By the late
seventeenth century, French officials were actively discouraging colonists from marrying
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native women to try to preserve the frenchness and the
whiteness of the colony. But then that meant that they
needed more French women because there weren't enough to marry
these men. The first group to arrive by order of
King Louis the fourteenth came aboard a ship called the
Pelican and are nicknamed the Pelican Girls as a consequence.
The ship arrived at Dauphin Island in what's now Mobile County,
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Alabama in seventeen o four. It's passengers included twenty three
frenchwomen and two families. Sent after repeated requests by Governor
Jean Baptiste Lemoine de Bienville and other colonial officials. The
Chancellor of France wrote to the governor about these women,
and this is what the letter said, quote. Each of
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these girls was raised in virtue and piety and knows
how to work, which will render them useful in the
colony by showing the Indian girls what they can do
for this, there being no point in sending other than
a virtue known and without reproach, His Majesty entrusted the
Bishop of Quebec to certify them in order that they
not be suspected of debauch. You will take care to
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establish them the best that you can, and to marry
them two men capable of having them subsist with some
degree of comfort. Although most of these women got married
very quickly beyond that, this first effort did not go well.
Recruiters had described Louisiana as an amazing and wealthy paradise,
which was not even remotely true. The women arrived during
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a persistent and severe food shortage. Diseases were rampant, and
the terrain. If you've ever been to Louisiana you know
this was swampy, and the French colonists faced ongoing and
justified threats from the region's enslaved and indigenous populations. Conditions
were so bad and so different from what they had
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been promised that in seventeen oh six a lot of
these women launched a protest trying to get passage out
of the colony. And back to France. This uprising was
given the disparaging nickname the Petticoat Insurrection. Today, this protest
is folded into the lore about the origins of Creole cuisine.
Supposedly everything was resolved when the governor's housekeeper, Madame Langnois,
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taught the women how to cook with local ingredients and spices,
because that would solve all the problems shrug um. But
it is not clear whether Lanois ever existed, and this
story really minimizes as indigenous and African contributions to Creole cuisine.
But it is clear that this protest was about a
lot more than cooking ingredients. Yeah, even in in accounts
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written by like the male leaders of the time were like,
they're just unhappy because they don't like to eat corn,
and that was not That was like one tiny piece
of this whole situation. Regardless, though, word got back to
France about what this Louisiana colony was really like, and
soon women were no longer willing to go there. Unsurprisingly,
so authorities started recruiting women from orphanages, hospitals, and prisons,
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and especially when it came to women who had been
convicted of a crime. These migrations were forced, they were
not voluntary as that first shipload had been, and even
for the ones that were technically voluntary, the women in
question a lot of the time did not have many
other options either way. Many of these women died on
the way to Louisiana, and the ones who survived often
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were not all that eager to marry a colonist and
start keeping house for him. France ended the formal migration
program in seventy but the most famous group of women
arrived in New Orleans early the following year. These are
the ones most commonly known as the Casket Girls. These
were eighty eight women recruited from a hospital in Paris
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that wasn't just a medical facility, but was also housing
for both orphans and prisoners. Although nineteen of these women
married quickly and thirty one married later on, the rest
either refused to marry or return to France. The name
casket was reportedly from the boxes that these women were
using to carry their belongings as they traveled. They'll see
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articles online that variously explained the name casket is coming
from the French caskette or cassette, even though caskett is
not a box it is a hat the story of
the Casket Girls departs from reality, though articles all over
the web describe a group of women who arrived in
New Orleans in seventy eight, all meticulously chosen to be
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attractive and virtuous, but the migration program had been over
for years by that point, and according to Marcia A. Zug,
who has written a book on these programs, the only
ship carrying a group of women that arrived in New
Orleans in seventeen was carrying ursuline nuns, not women available
for marriage. As a side note, if you want to
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hear Zug talk more about this, she is on episode
one twenty of the podcast Ben Franklin's World that has
titled Marcia Zug History of Mail Order Brides in Early America.
This is not the only departure from reality when it
comes to the story of the Casket Girls, though if
you go on a ghost tour of New Orleans, you
might hear a story about how these mythical seventeen eight
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arrivals came with their caskets and were immediately suspected to
be vampires because they sun burned easily and the trunks
they were carrying looked like coffins. This just doesn't hauled
up from the beginning because it was completely normal for
new arrivals in the colony to get sunburns and the
subtropical sun and to carry their things in trunks and
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other boxes. There's a whole story about these women being
taken to that ursuline convent in the French Quarter and
then their caskets being found to be mysteriously empty, after
which point the nuns had the attic windows nailed shut
using just an astounding number of silver nails. All of
this because vampires shure. Uh. These women's stories are not
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as well documented as the King's daughters, though possibly because
there were far fewer of them, and also because the
program in Louisiana was just not as successful as it
had been in Canada. Yeah. That and we we talked
so much and so much more detail about the program
uh in in what's now Canada, where the women had
a lot of choices, they had a lot more freedoms. Um.
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It was one of those circumstances where you're like, Okay,
people probably didn't have as many options in Europe as
they did in North America, and in a lot of
ways that life turned out to be better, and in
most cases that was not the case. In Louisiana's women
showed up and we're not really appreciated, and we're made
fun of and called ugly, and we're much smaller in number.
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So when you look at French Canadian genealogy, so many
French Canadians are descended from these these women in Canada,
but it's not um. There's not as much of a
through line in Louisiana, although an astounding number of people
say they were descended from these um fictitious seventeen twenty eight,
meticulously chosen to be virtuous and beautiful casket Curl. I
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feel like that happens in almost any mythology, right, I mean,
we've been to places that are are famous for various reasons,
and there are often people who are like, yes, I
am descended from person X, Y or Z, and it's like, um,
I have some questions that person did not live here though, right,
Like there's some possibilities going on, But who am I
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to take that away from them? Yeah, at least were
real and complicated women in their stories have been really
pretty heavily mythologized. To move on. On November seventeen, We
put out a two part podcast on the Fort Shaw
Indian School girls basketball team, and a big part of
that episode was the system of boarding schools established in
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the United States to separate Native children from their cultures
into so called americanized them. Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, who
was a major figure in establishing this whole system, summed
it up as quote, killed the Indian and save the man.
Canada had a nearly identical system of boarding schools known
as residential schools, as was the case in the United States.
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Mission schools in Canada went all the way back to
the early colonization of New France, but in terms of
a more formalized, systemic program that started in the eighteen
thirty expanding dramatically in the eighteen eighties after changes to
federal policy regarding both education and Indigenous people. By nineteen
thirty one, when the Canadian system was at its largest,
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there were about eighties schools. With the exception of Newfoundland,
Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, every Canadian province and
territory had at least one school. Over the course of
the program, about a hundred and fifty thousand children were
separated from their families for months or years at a time,
and the last of these schools did not shut down
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until nineteen ninety six. These schools were part of a
government program, but until nineteen sixty nine they were run
by churches, primarily the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church,
the United Church of Canada, and the Presbyterian Church. The
Methodist Church also operated some schools up until nineteen twenty five.
These schools had the same goals as the ones in
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the United States did, to separate Canada's first nations Inuit
and may teach children from their cultures, to christianize them,
to teach them English and French, and to assimilate them
into Euro Canadian society. Conditions at the schools were often
very cruel. There were also documented cases of physical and
sexual abuse. As many as six thousand children died in
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these schools, including from disease and malnutrition, and some of
these students were experimented on. There was a series of
experiments carried out in the nineteen forties and fifties that
studied the effects of malnutrition, and these were conducted with
the government's knowledge. Basically, somebody visiting the school had noticed
that the children were malnourished, and instead of fixing the problem,
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only supplemented the diets of parts of some of the
children to study what happened with the others. In the
nineteen nineties, the Canadian government convened a Royal Commission on
Aboriginal Peoples in response to a call from Phil Fontane,
who would later become the National Chief of the Assembly
of First Nations. Advocacy had already been going on at
that point, but Fontane was really the key figure bringing
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it to national attention. The Commission issued a report about
the schools and recommended a public inquiry, although the public
inquiry never happened. A later class action settlement resulted in
the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which came into effect
in September of two thousand seven. This agreement included the
Common Experience Payment, which was a one point nine billion
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dollar compensation program for people who had been forced to
attend these schools. Former students were eligible for ten thousand
dollars for their first year or partial year in attendance
and three thousand dollars for each subsequent year, and as
of September, one point six billion dollars had been paid
on more than a hundred and five thousand cases. The
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agreement also set up an assessment process for cases of physical,
psychological and sexual abuse. It established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
and set up a commemoration fund. There have been some
criticisms of this settlement, though, including unethical lawyers who took
advantage of people seeking restitution, and the exclusion of Newfoundland
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and Labrador from the settlement. Yeah, the argument was that
that wasn't part of Canada yet during a lot of
this time, but there were still people there who were affected.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized for the boarding school
system on Jounal eleventh, two thousand eight, and several churches
that were involved in these programs have apologized as well.
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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was established under the
settlement agreement issued its final report in TWI. Its introduction
began quote for over a century, the central goals of
Canada's Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments, ignore aboriginal rights,
terminate the treaties, and, through a process of assimilation, cause
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Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct, legal, social cultural, religious,
and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of
residential schools were a central element of this policy, which
can best be described as cultural genocide. This report went
on to make ninety four recommendations to repair the damage
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caused by the schools. This report also noted a related
practice that became known as the sixties scoop. From the
nineteen sixties through the nineteen eighties, thousands of Indigenous children
in Canada were taken from their families and placed in
foster care, then adopted by white families, sometimes white families
who lived in the United States or the United Kingdom
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between nineteen fifty in the mid nineteen sixties, these Aboriginal
children went from making up about one percent of the
children in care in Canada to making up more than
a third of the children in care. And that also
has parallels to another past episode in our archives, which
is Australia's Stolen Generations. What's followed a really similar pattern
from about nineteen ten to nineteen seventy And we should
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also note that there are ongoing issues with Indigenous and
Aboriginal children in the child welfare systems in the United States,
in Australia and Canada, all all three nations. Um we
mentioned these boarding schools really briefly in those in that
too part are about the Fort Shot Indian School program.
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But I wanted to take the opportunity to go in
a little more detail here today and we will talk
about something else that similarly happened in Canada. After a
quick sponsor break on February fifteenth and seventeen seventeen, we
did a two part podcast on Executive Order nineties sixty
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six and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World
War Two. When we posted these episodes on our social media,
one of the comments that we got was this happened
in Canada to which is not something we had mentioned
in that episode at all. But it's not just that
this happened in Canada to The Canadian incarc ration of
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its Japanese citizens and residents directly followed what happened to
the United States during World War One. The Canadian government
had passed the War Measures Act, which granted very broad
authority when it came to restricting civil liberties during wartime.
During World War two, the War Measures Act was used
to incarcerate about twenty four thousand people in Canada, nearly
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all of them Japanese Canadians. Other people incarcerated included German
Canadians who were members the Canadian Nazi Party or German
sponsored organizations, and approximately six hundred Italians who were suspected
of supporting fascism. About three thousand refugees from Germany and
Austria were also incarcerated, many of them Jewish, and many
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of the Jewish refugees were incarcerated along with Nazi prisoners
of war. When it came to the Japanese Canadians, though,
all Japanese Canadians, regardless of their citizenship status, were required
to register with the government in March of nineteen forty one,
and then after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in December
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of nineteen forty one, events in Canada followed the same
basic pattern that they did in the United States that
we talked about in detail in those two episodes. A
small number of Japanese nationals were taken into custody right away,
and then white business owners, farmers, and political leaders on
the Pacific coast of Canada started pressuring the government to
remove their Japanese neighbors. These arguments and language that were
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used were just virtually identical to what was used in
the United States. First Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King
ordered the removal of adult men of Japanese ancestry from
Canada's West coast on January fourteenth, ninety two. Then on
February nineteenth, nineteen forty two, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed
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Executive Order ninety sixty six regarding the removal of all
Japanese Americans from the U s. West Coast. Five days
after that, the Canadian Cabinet followed suit in Canada and
approved Order in Council PC fourteen eighty six, which the
Prime Minister announced on February twenty six. This broadened the
earlier removal to include everyone of Japanese ancestry living within
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one hundred miles of Canada's Pacific coast. The British Columbia
Security Commission was created to oversee and manage the expulsion
and incarceration. About sixty five percent of the twenty two
thousand Japanese Canadians who were removed following this order had
been born in Canada, and in many cases their property
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was confiscated and sold or otherwise never returned to them.
Japanese fishers on the west coast of Canada were also
required to turn over their boats, which was of course
the source of their livelihood, and these also were not returned.
During this removal. More than two thousand single men were
sent to work on road labor camps, and about thirty
five hundred were sent to work on sugar beet farms
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outside to British Columbia. Everyone else was sent to segregated
concentration camps. As was true in the United States, these
Canadian camps were very hastily built or were converted from
facilities like abandoned mining camps. They were totally insufficient to
provide shelter from the elements and the United States, the
government had provided food, clothing, and schooling for incarcerated children,
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although overwhelmingly these were inadequate at best. The Canadian government
provided the camps, but no food or clothing, and no
education beyond elementary school for the incarcerated children. There was
also an organized resistance to this in Canada, including the
creation of the niss A Mass Evacuation Group. The incarcerations
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in the United States and Canada ended slightly differently. In
the US, many Japanese Americans returned to the West Coast
after the end of the war, even though often they
had to start completely over and they faced ongoing prejudice
and discrimination in Canada. Japanese Canadians were not allowed to
return to British Columbia. Instead, they had two choices to
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settle somewhere in Canada outside of British Columbia, or to
return to Japan. Although some people did return to Japan voluntarily,
thousands were forcibly deported after refusing to move out of
British Columbia, which had been their home. And I should
also note that some of them were not originally from Japan.
They were born in Canada and had never been to Japan.
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Investigations conducted after this incarceration was over concluded that the
property of Japanese Canadians that had been sold during the
war was sold for far less than it was worth,
But the Canadian government really resisted offering any kind of
compensation or acknowledgement for this, or in general, for the incarceration. Then,
in September of Canada reached a settlement agreement that included
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an official apology and a redress payment of twenty one
thousand dollars for each person who was affected, along with
the estab pulishment of a twelve million dollar funds to
create a Canadian Race Relations Foundation. The United States had
taken similar steps in a law that was signed in
August tenth of the same year. So that was another
way that the two countries paralleled each other and all
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of this so moving on to our next uh again
not super delightful story. UH. At the beginning of our
podcast on Executive Order ninety six, we set the stage
by talking about the history of immigration from Japan and
other parts of Asia to the United States, as well
as the history of discrimination against these immigrants. A big
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part of that discussion was the Chinese Exclusion Act of
eighteen eighty two, and that act has come up in
other episodes as well, including our episodes on Levi Strauss,
the Bisbee Deportation, and the history of Foreign Foods in
the US. This act banned all immigration from China for
a period of ten years. It was the United States
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first major law restricting immigration and the first time time
that the US banned people from a specific nation. Canada
faced a very similar trajectory in the late nineteenth century.
Large numbers of Chinese immigrants arrived in Canada, first with
the gold rush and then to work on the construction
of the Canadian Pacific Railway. As the number of Chinese
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people in Canada increased, so did anti Chinese prejudice. A
lot of white residents resented Chinese immigrants under the idea
that they were stealing jobs. Then this sense increased as
the railway was finished and these laborers started finding work
in other industries. Emotion was made in Parliament to enact
a law prohibiting all Chinese immigration into British Columbia, just
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as the United States had done. Rather than simply passed
the law, Parliament established the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration
to evaluate quote all the facts and matters connected to
the whole subject of Chinese immigration. Although the Commission had
been established after a call to ban Chinese immigration and
heard a lot of racist testimony, the Commission found that
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these racist stereotypes were untrue and that overall Chinese labor
was beneficial to Canada. It did recommend implementing a ten
dollar duty on immigrants from China to pay for health
inspection at the port and other administrative costs. Some of
the study was actually conducted in San Francisco, UH specifically
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with officials from the Chinese consulate there, but the Chinese
Immigration Act of eighteen eighty five ignored the findings from
the Commission and instead instituted a duty of fifty dollars
a person specifically to act as a deterrent. The act
did allow some exceptions from this duty, including diplomats, government officials, tourists,
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and students. It also imposed restrictions on the vessels that
were carrying Chinese immigrants to Canada. There could be only
one Chinese person for every fifty tons of the ship's weight.
Ships carrying European immigrants, on the other hand, could have
one immigrant for every two tons. This was Canada's first
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major immigration lots and to target immigrants based on their
nation of origin. The fifty dollar fee did reduce the
number of Chinese people who tried to enter Canada, but
not for long. As the economy of British Columbia continued
to expand, there was more and more demand for labor.
There weren't enough people in British Columbia to meet this demand,
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so within five years the number of Chinese immigrants to
Canada was increasing again. In response, the Canadian government kept
increasing that duty, which had been fifty dollars, and it
rose all the way up to five hundred dollars in
nineteen o three. Then twenty years after that, the Chinese
Immigration Act of banned nearly all Chinese people from entering
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Canada at all, with the exception of students, merchants, diplomats,
and Canadian born people who were returning to Canada. There
were also some exceptions to the exceptions. Urchants excluded, laundry,
restaurant and retail operators. The three Act also required everyone
of Chinese descent to register for an identity card, regardless
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of whether they were Canadian citizens. This Act was repealed
in ninety seven, although there continued to be traces of
these restrictions in Canadian immigration law until nineteen sixty seven.
We're going to get to some more Canadian history after
we pause for a little sponsor break. In eleven, previous
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hosts Sarah and Dablina released an episode on the New
York Draft Riots. We rereleased that episode as a Saturday
Classic on July seven, eighteen, and, like its name suggests,
the New York Draft Riots of eighteen sixty three started
because of the Civil War draft. But the riot was
not only about the draft. Another big factor was discontent
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among working class people who were facing increasing competition for
jobs as escaped slaves and other people of African descent
were moving into New York. Race also was a huge
part of it, and the rioters primarily targeted the black community.
The Shelburne Riots of seventeen eighty four weren't identical to
the New York Draft riots, but they had a lot
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of similarities and parallels, including connections to war, labor, and race.
During the Revolutionary War, roughly a fifth of the black
residents of the British colonies fought on the side of
the Loyalists, who wanted American colonies to remain part of Britain.
The vast majority had been enslaved and expected that after
the war was over they would be granted their freedom
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in exchange for their service. But when the loyalists side
lost the war and the colonies became independent, some of
those people were recaptured and returned to slavery. Many of
those that weren't ultimately made their way into Canada. In particular,
in seventeen eighty three, about fifteen hundred black Loyalists settled
in Nova Scotia, many of them concentrated in Shelburne County,
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which was home also to about sixteen thousand white loyalists.
Most black Loyalists made their homes in a community that
was not far from the town of Shelburne called Birchtown,
and soon that became the largest community of free black
people in North America. However, slavery also existed in Canada,
including in Shelburne. Slave owners in Shelburne felt threatened by
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the free black community in Birchtown and the effects that
it might have on their enslaved workforce. Nova Scotia's white
residents also tended to view all people of African descent
as slaves, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free.
Working class white residents also faced increasing competition for paying
work from this growing black community, especially since people who
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needed to hire labor could do it much more cheaply
by exploiting the black population. Another complication in all this
was soldiers who were returning home from the Revolutionary a
War who no longer had employment or income. A lot
of people in the area had also been promised land grants,
but those grants had been repeatedly delayed, and a lot
of the land turned out not to be suitable for farming.
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So in both New York in eighteen sixty three and
Shelburne nearly eighty years earlier, white residents were increasingly resentful
of a growing population of free black residents as a
result of a war and the effect it was having
on their lives and income. In New York, the draft
tipped this resentment into violence. In Shelburne, that spark came
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from the intersection of religion and racism. Baptist preacher David
George had been born in Virginia in seventeen forty two
and was enslaved from birth. He escaped to South Carolina
and lived in hiding for several years before being captured
and sold back into slavery. He fled to British occupied
Savannah during the Revolutionary War in seventeen seventy eight, and
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then traveled to Charleston, where he was evacuated along with
about five thousand black residents in seventeen eighty two. Although
most of these evacuees wound up being enslaved again and
sent to the Caribbean, George wound up in Nova Scotia.
He established his church in Shelburne rather than in Birchtown,
and some of his congregation built their homes on church property,
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and at first the white residents of Shelburne mostly left
them alone, but eventually George started baptizing white loyalists. The
idea of a black minister baptizing white people, especially at
a church in quote their part of town, outraged many
white residents. In July sight four, a group of white
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loyalists tried to forcibly remove a white woman who was
about to be baptized by David George. Then, on the
twenty sixth of that month, a group of about forty
white loyalists attacked Georgia's house, physically pulling it down using
a ship's tackle. They went on to tear down other
homes that had been built on the church property, destroying
about twenty houses. This swelled into a riot that lasted
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for about ten days, with the white residents of Shelburne
trying to drive the black residents out of both Shelburne
and Birchtown. Eventually, four companies of the sevente Regiment and
later a naval frigate were dispatched to restore order. The
rioters did not succeed in evicting the black community from
Nova Scotia, but that community did continue to face racism
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and discrimination in the years that followed. Economic changes also
made life more difficult. Seven years after the riot, when
black residents were offered the chance to relocate to a
colony in Sierra Leone, about half of them accepted. We've
talked repeatedly on this show about how the term race
riot is really a misnomer because it makes it sound
(31:43):
like people of multiple races were equal aggressors and some
kind of mass violence. Overwhelmingly, though, these incidents of mass
violence are really the result of a white mob attacking
members of an already oppressed race or religion or ethnic group.
That said, the Shelburne Riots are often described as North
America's first race riot. This also has a connection to
(32:06):
another previous episode. Nova Scotia is where a large number
of Maroons wound up after the Maroon Wars in Jamaica,
which we talked about in February of seen. And now
we will move on to our last and less appalling,
h impossible episode on this show. For a long time,
every time we mentioned Paul Revere on our social media
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or whatever, folks would ask what about Sybil Lettington? So
we talked about her in our second ever installment of
six Impossible Episodes on September six. There were already episodes
in the archive about Paul Revere and his famous ride.
Now it is just as likely that mentioning either Paul
Revere or Sybil Lettington will prompt people to ask what
(32:50):
about Laura c Cord. Paul Revere was one of three
men who rode to raise the alarm of a British
attack on Lexington, Massachusetts, on April eighteenth, seventeenth seventy five.
Sybil Luttington rode to raise the alarm of a British
attack on Danbury, Connecticut, on April seventeen seventy seven, although,
as we noted when we talked about her, there is
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no primary source documentation of that ride. And in eighteen thirteen,
Laura see Cord raised the alarm of an incoming American
attack on British forces on foot. This was during the
War of eighteen twelve. S Cord was the wife of
James c. Cord, who had been serving as a sergeant
in the First Lincoln Militia when he was injured in
(33:33):
the Battle of Queenston Heights. His wife rescued him from
the battlefield personally. After the fighting was over, while Laura
was nursing James back to health, American troops occupied Queenston
in present day Ontario, where they lived. After the c
Cords were forced to house some American officers, Laura overheard
them talking about a planned attack on British forces at
(33:55):
beaver Dam's, who were under the command of James Fitzgibbon.
Since Ja names her husband James c Cord was still recovering,
Laura decided that she would raise the alarm herself. Beaver
Dams was about thirty two kilometers or twenty miles away,
and Laura Secord made this trip on foot through occupied territory,
taking a really winding route over difficult terrain to try
(34:18):
to avoid detection. She arrived on June twenty or thirteen,
and on the incoming American force was ambushed by a
First Nations fighting force that was allied with the British.
The American force, which numbered about five hundred men, ultimately
surrendered before British reinforcements arrived. As was true of Sybil Luddington.
(34:40):
There was no mention of se cords warning in the
official report. However, unlike Leddington, Secord petition the government for
a pension leader in her life. This led James Fitzgibbon
to testify that yes, se Cord had warned him of
the incoming attack, so we do have an official statement
from someone who was actually there. It's not clear whether
(35:01):
c Cord's warning arrived ahead of the indigenous scouts who
also brought fits given the same intelligence, but her trip
definitely did happen. The petition for her pension was also unsuccessful,
but Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, who would later become
Edward the seventh, did award her one hundred pounds. Another
parallel between Sybil Luttington and Laura cie Cord is that
(35:23):
they have both become really heavily mythologized and commemorated, especially
in a whole lot of children's literature. There's also a
candy company that bears laurasie Cords name. I think listeners
have sent us laurasie Cord chocolate before that company was
started in nineteen thirteen by Frank P. O'Connor who named
it after her, And those are our six things that
(35:45):
also happened in Canada, which I guess is really five
things that also happened in Canada and one thing that
also happened in the United States, most of them terrible. Yes,
do you have terrible email? I mean it depends on
whether you find Sir Walter Raleigh's head funny, terrible, or terrible.
(36:08):
So this is from Susannah, and Susannah says, Hello, Holly
and Tracy, thank you for your podcast on Sir Walter Raleigh.
I grew up in a small English town that was
home to Sir Walter for a while, then immigrated to
the US and specifically to Raleigh, North Carolina. Given this,
if you would think I would know more about him,
alas I did not. What you said you knew in
(36:28):
the opening was about all I knew, with the addition
of thinking that he was beheaded for his marriage to Bess.
Thank you for filling in all my gaps. I would
like to take a moment to pause and say, I
am so glad I'm not the only person who seems
like I should know a lot more about Sir Walter
Raleigh than I did when I started on that episode.
(36:50):
To return to the letter, I wanted to let you
know about a Sir Walter Raleigh legend that I grew
up with. Sir Walter Raleigh was given Sherburne Castles. Sent
a link to that website, which is in the town
I am from. Rumor has it that in the nineteen
seventies some Americans were working on the lake. As they
were working, Sir Walter in ghost form, walked on the
(37:12):
lake toward them, holding his head under his arm. The
Americans ran and refused to finish the work on the lake.
I'm sure this is not true, but it is a
fun story. I myself have had an experience with ghosts
in this castle, so maybe it was a different ghost
and not Sir Walter. Side note, my uncle worked at
this castle for his whole working career and he has
(37:32):
many many ghost stories. Thank you for all your amazing episodes.
I also saw you live and rally a few months ago,
which I really enjoyed. Susannah. Thank you Susannah for this
note and for this story that I found very funny.
Just the idea of some workers and lake being like
no gooda go that cracked me up. A little bit,
and also thank you for coming to our show and rally.
(37:53):
We had a very good time there. Indeed, if you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast where a history pie gasts at how stuff
Works dot com and then we are all over the
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and find show notes on all the episodes that Holly
(38:14):
and I have ever done together in a searchable archive
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