Encounters with Law and Lawless Encounters

• Main Author: Geiger, Andrea
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of North Carolina Press 2022
• Subjects: Atlin; British Columbia; Canada; Pacific; Taku; Taku River; Yukon; tlingit; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469641140.003.0004

Exclusion on various scales and in a variety of forms was central to the reimagining of the north Pacific coast as Euro-Canadian or American space, including restricting the entry of Japanese migrants at international borders, the denial of the of the full rights of citizenship to Japanese immigrants and Indigenous people, and barring access to certain kinds of occupations by law or in practice. On both sides of the Canada-US border, exclusion also sometimes took the form of overt expulsion. This chapter examines instances where Japanese and Chinese labor migrants and settlers were driven out of towns in British Columbia, Alaska, and the Yukon, arguing that the use of mob violence was integral to the reimagining of this region as “white”. Like government-sanctioned forms of exclusion, the expulsion of Japanese migrants mirrored efforts to erase the presence of Indigenous people, including the Taku River Tlingit near Atlin, B.C., from the colonial landscape in both countries. During the early decades of the twentieth century, the governments of both Canada and the US repeatedly worked together to ensure that the race-based barriers each erected against Japanese immigration and the acknowledgment of Indigenous rights reinforced those of the other.