Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

The arc of integration

The past, present and future of Squamish’s South Asian community
1529sikh
Under One Flag A bright yellow flag flutters above the Sikh temple in Squamish. Caled Nisan Sahib, the symbol represents the notion of life under one God

Four years before a cerebral haemorrhage took her life and ended an era, Queen Victoria travelled to Vancouver as part of her Diamond Jubilee. It was 1897, and the sun had yet to set on the often brutal doings of the British Empire. The longest reigning crown figure, Victoria was also the first Empress of India, and so princes and chiefs sent a clutch of Sikh soldiers to lend further pomp to an already extravagant pageant.

Had they not come, had the Queen been assassinated or mortally bucked from one of her prize horses, then Dal Dhani probably wouldn’t be sitting in Squamish today, wouldn’t be sipping a coffee in the shade of a downtown storefront over 100 years later. Those soldiers went back to India, and, true to one of the principles of Sikhism, they told their friends and families what they learned about Canada. And so, in 1900, Dhani’s great grandfather wound up working in Squamish as a millwright, setting off the sometimes meandering course of cause-and-effect that has seen Dhani produce Canadian children of his own.

“There was a lot of racism,” says Dhani, who, perhaps because of his job as a mortgage specialist, is simultaneously frank and inviting. “He couldn’t speak the language, and there wasn’t any structure. You got paid less wages than other Canadians.”

Those first years were hard going. Denied the right to vote unless born of Anglo-Saxon stock, Sikhs found themselves targeted both in the chaos of riots and the relative calm of legislatures.

Dhani didn’t come to Canada for another 70 years, when he was 10. He faced some of the same hurdles as his great grandfather, including racism and ignorance.

“But that’s changed,” he says. “And the town has, too. When you get more education, you get a more educated population.”

Many of those early laws and attitudes have faded into the trees of backwoods thinking. Critics may rightly consider the government’s redress as political strategy, but the recent apology for Komagata Maru immigration denial lends credence to that shift in values.

According to the 2006 census, there are 1,675 South Asians in Squamish, which has a population of nearly 15,000. They constitute the largest visible minority, with Filipinos, numbering 220, coming in a distant second. It was the same in 2001, when there were 1,690 South Asians amid the 14,247 people living in town. In 1996, there were 1,215 visible among the 13,935 residents. As a community, they’ve long been at the tricky work of balancing integration with multiculturalism. That journey has seen them shrug off most of the Indo-Canadian violence that makes headlines in other Lower Mainland communities, instead building a Sikh temple, reaching out to other races and denominations, winning local elections, starting businesses and planning for the future, both inside and outside their ethnic identity.

Dhani’s grandfather was one of the first to come. Others joined him, but they came in dribs and drabs. The Mahnger family was the first group of kin to establish itself in Squamish. They arrived in the 1960s, after the Canadian Colleries sawmill, later Interfor, relocated from Vancouver Island. Next came the Biln and Lalli families.

Paul Lalli descends from the latter. The first Indo-Canadian elected to Squamish council, he’s also a successful businessman, one of the modern Sikhs whose road was in part paved by the likes of Dhani’s great grandfather and the Sikh regiment before him. Sponsored by his aunt and uncle, Lalli’s father arrived in Victoria in the ’50s. He married a South Asian woman as the decade came to a close, and the two settled first in Britannia Beach, where the senior Lalli worked in the mine, and then in Squamish, where he picked up the mill worker’s tradition.

“My dad wanted us to realize what this country had given us,” says Lalli, who has spent the last several years outside council chambers and inside the guts of his businesses. “So integration was a big thing.”

Along with his brothers and sisters, Lalli grew up in Garibaldi Highlands. Most South Asians were living in Dentville, downtown or Valleycliffe, and they went to different grade schools, leaving Lalli with few friends of his own ancestry, a social trend that would continue until he attended high school downtown.

“I remember before there was a Sikh temple, we went to Sunday School, not just to be a part of the community, but to practice a belief in God,” he says.

The temple was built in the early ’80s. It’s the seat of the Sikh tradition, and it began with 65 families comprising 132 members. There are now 500 families comprising 1,200 members.

“Before we built the temple,” says Lalli, “we used to have our services, initially, in the Chieftain. Then it was the Legion. As we got organized and raised funds, it was the temple. That was a big thing in building the Indo-Canadian identity in this town.”

Avtar Gidda is the temple’s secretary. An intense man with busy, talkative hands, he wastes no time in explaining the three principles of Sikhism. The first calls for devotion to one God, while the second posits universal brotherhood and the third is steeped in the value of hard work and the sharing of its proceeds, whether monetary or cerebral.

“We are very proud of our society because in the period of 58 years, the Sikh society has produced doctors, politicians, engineers, police officers, teachers and other high ranking people to whom we give proper regard,” Gidda says.

The temple doors are open to people of all faiths, even during ceremony, with food and congregation lubricating the effort of integration. Politics, on the other hand, is not much of a concern to its operators. Politicians are welcome to explore the community through consultations with temple directors — and they do, says Gidda, be they of local, provincial or federal persuasion. But Gidda isn’t concerned with Councillor Raj Kahlon’s announcement that he will not seek re-election in November. Political representation, he says, isn’t necessary to the community at this stage in its development.

Lalli holds the same view, although he’s weighing a decision to enter the political arena anew. If he does — and, should his business pursuits secure themselves for the run, he will — Lalli says he’ll campaign separate from his Indo-Canadian identity.

Meanwhile, he works for that same identity under the auspices of the Squamish South Asian Diabetes Prevention Action Team, which received federal dollars to combat diabetes in the community. Testing was done at the temple, and, while the results are awaited, the committee has launched free Punjabi exercise classes, which run at the library every afternoon until July 18, and then throughout all of August. Because many South Asians work in Whistler, hotels have been approached in the hopes of setting up lunch hour nutritional workshops. And the committee is also lobbying senior governments for a Punjabi speaking doctor.

The relative shortage of professionals is something Dhani sees as a problem. Many community members travel to Surrey for such services. On the other hand, a robust contingent of Punjabi speaking professionals could serve to reverse some of the community’s efforts towards integration, especially when it comes to second language skills among elders.

“We’re telling them to learn more English,” says Gidda, who isn’t convinced a Punjabi doctor is necessary. “But they are busy raising their grandchildren because the mother and father are both working. They learn some from the kids. They can’t always attend school.”

What they do attend are community events, like the Canada Day traditions-sharing event that went off at Totem Hall. Members of the aboriginal and Sikh communities showed up in numbers, but mainstream Canadians were absent, something noted by temple member Jack Bir.

“Something I’ve noticed in recent years is you don’t see Canadian people participating in that,” he says. “One of these other Canadians — they should be leading us.”

“But we are leading them,” adds Gidda. “The mainstream of Canada — they do not participate.”

On the other hand, cultural awareness is hard to avoid when the numbers exist in the proportions they do. There are two Indian restaurants in Squamish, one at the foot of the Highlands and one downtown. There’s also innumerable South Asian businesspeople operating in dozens of industries, from construction to banking. The pursuit of those lifestyles is in no small part an effect of the reeling forestry industry.

“It was a blessing in disguise,” says Dhani.

At the same time, dollars earned in the corridor are typically spent within it, often on real estate and not all of it clustered in one sub-community. And, while there are language barriers in certain corners of the community, young people born in Squamish, as well as newer immigrants, are familiar or adept with English.

“Some of our boys are marrying white girls,” says Gidda, “and that’s a good sign for integration.”

Dhani adores the mixture. Multiculturalism is a tenet of Canadiana, though its armour is often assailed in metro centres across the country. Locally, Dhani doesn’t kid himself: In all likelihood, he says, there is racism out there, but it’s not pronounced nearly the way it once was. And, besides, he adds, it exists on both sides of the fence.

“Everyone has their own mind, and you can’t control the way people perceive you. There are bad apples. But you get that in any society. Indians are racist, too. They look at some cultures differently.”

What counts, he continues, is the opportunity to participate in two cultures, an occasion for variety, insight, excitement and entertainment.

“If I want to listen to Indian music, I do,” he says. “If I want to listen to AC/DC, then I do that, too.”