The British Columbia Historical Federation (BCHF) announces the South Asian Studies Institute of the University of the Fraser Valley is a grant recipient of the 2019 Centennial Legacy Fund in the amount of $4,000.Â
The Centennial Legacy Fund, initiated in 2017, acknowledges in turn and collectively the anniversaries of Canada 150, British Columbia’s Union with Canada 1871 Sesquicentennial 2021, and the centennial of the founding of what is now called British Columbia Historical Federation, in 1922.
The Centennial Legacy Fund supports projects that encourage historical research in regards to British Columbia’s history, its communities and its diverse peoples.
The South Asian Studies Institute will put the funds towards a project called Missing aesthetics of early Sikh settlers in BC: Where are the women?. The research project interrogates missing and omitted women’s stories in the experiences of early Sikh settlers in the first four decades of 20th Century BC.
Students hired by the South Asian Studies Institute will research archival images and re-imagine old family portraits. The researchers will conduct interviews with family members connected to the portraits, recording the stories of women and children missing in the archival images. Images, stories and information learned from the project will be published in British Columbia History magazine, online at the South Asian Studies Institute’s website, and will inform future exhibits put on at the Gur Sikh Temple and Sikh Heritage Museum in Abbotsford.
In lieu of an annual conference this year, the fund recipient is being announced May 13, 2020 via a recorded interview between BCHF President Shannon Bettles and UFV’s South Asian Studies Institute Satwinder Bains (Director), and Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra (Coordinator).
