Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has removed a disputed First Nations folk tale from this year's commemoration of the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, abandoning claims that the Musqueam First Nation helped feed starving South Asian immigrants aboard the ship, reports Blacklock’s Reporter.The annual observance on Friday marked the anniversary of the vessel's May 23, 1914 arrival in Vancouver, with the PMO stating the fate of its passengers "is a stark reminder of how in moments of our history Canada fell short of the values we hold dear.""We cannot rewrite the past," the PMO said in a statement on Friday.The steamer carrying 376 Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims was forbidden from landing in Vancouver under race-based immigration laws. Two successive prime ministers publicly apologized for the blockade in 2015 and 2016.This year's observance omitted all reference to disputed claims that Musqueam First Nation paddlers delivered food to starving passengers as the freighter spent two months at anchor in the harbour. The folk tale inspired a 4,000-square-foot mural on a federal building in Vancouver.Cabinet previously praised the story as demonstrating "the kindness of spirit demonstrated by the nearby indigenous peoples." CBC News in 2019 reported on "the generosity of local indigenous peoples in providing food and water to the passengers.".The claim was contradicted by all historical records. "There was a rush to accept the claim as if it had been verified by historians, when in fact there is no supporting research and no verification," Professor Ali Kazimi of York University said in an earlier interview. "My deep concern is the rush to accept this claim and make it part of the historical record."Professor Kazimi was the 2019 recipient of a Governor General's Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award for works including a 2004 film Continuous Journey that documented the Komagata Maru story. "I am deeply troubled by this," he said."The harm is if this is accepted as fact, and it is now on a mural on the side of a building four storeys high, that means the rest of the record is incredibly flawed," said Kazimi. "I have asked the Government of Canada for verification. It's peculiar that I should be the one doing due diligence. I would expect that federal cabinet ministers, before they made it part of the public record, would have verified it."The Komagata Maru anecdote was not the only folk tale to be published as fact by the Government of Canada. The Department of Heritage in 2020 acknowledged it made up a claim that Black settlement in Nunavut dated back 400 years.The misinformation was contained in the department's Annual Report on the Operation of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act tabled in Parliament by Culture Minister Steven Guilbeault. "Unknown to many Iqaluit residents and most Canadians, people of African descent have been present in the Canadian territory since the early 1600s," said the report.The department acknowledged there was no Black settlement in Nunavut since the early 1600s. Census takers as late as 1931 could not find a single Black person in what was then the Northwest Territories.
