Irene Kelleher lived all her life in the shadow of her inheritance. Her
local community in British Columbia's Fraser Valley all too often
treated her as if she was invisible. The combination of white and
Indigenous descent that Irene embodied was beyond the bounds of
acceptability by a dominant white society. To be mixed was to not
belong.
Attracted to the future British Columbia by a gold rush beginning in
1858, Irene's white grandfathers had families with Indigenous women.
Theirs was not an uncommon story. Some of the earliest newcomers to do
so were in the employ of the fur trading Hudson's Bay Company at Fort
Langley. And yet, more than one hundred and fifty years later, the
descendants of these early pioneers are still waiting for their stories
to be heard.
Through meticulous research, family records and a personal connection to
Irene, Governor General award-winning historian Jean Barman explores
this aspect of British Columbia's history and the deeply rooted
prejudice faced by families who helped to build Canada. Invisible
Generations evokes the Catholic residential school that Irene's parents
and so many other "mixed blood" children attended. Among Irene's family
and friends we meet Josephine, who was separated as a child from her
beloved upwardly mobile politician father. When her presence in his
socially charged household became untenable, Josephine was dispatched to
the same Fraser Valley boarding school. "The transition from genteel
Victoria to St. Mary's Mission was horrendous," she wrote. Yet
individuals and families survived as best they could, building good
lives for themselves and those around them. Irene was determined to be a
schoolteacher and taught across the farthest reaches of the province,
including Doukhobor children at a time when the community was vehemently
opposed to their offspring attending school.
Stories like that of Irene and of her family and friends have been
largely forgotten, but in Invisible Generations Barman brings this
important conversation into focus, shedding light on a common history
across British Columbia and Canada. It is, in Irene's words, "time to
tell the story."
