People uprooted from Skeena River / Skeena (210)

The Skeena River (colloquially Skeena) is the second-longest in BC and an important transportation route. Capable of sustaining a large variety of fish and wildlife, it attracted the Hudsonʼs Bay Company and non-Indigenous settlers who established trading posts including Port Simpson (1834) and Port Essington (1871). By the 1890s, many canneries and fishing operations lined the river, each forming a self-contained, segregated community that thrived during the fishing season.

Although Japanese Canadians worked in most of these canneries, the notable employers were Inverness, North Pacific, and Sunnyside along the Inverness Passage (Skeena River slough). The Inverness Cannery, built in 1876, was the first salmon cannery north of the Fraser River. North Pacific was built in 1889, and Sunnyside in 1916. Japanese Canadian women played central roles during the fishing season by working in canneries, maintaining households, and tending gardens. Japanese Canadian fishermen also handled engine work, boatbuilding, carpentry, and net repair alongside other duties.

In 1929, Jun Kisawa successfully challenged the restrictions preventing Japanese Canadians from using motorized boats on the Skeena River. The earliest known Japanese photographer in Canada, R. Z. Tashiro lived and worked on the Skeena River from 1891 to 1900, documenting working-class Japanese fishing communities in the area before relocating to Powell Street, Vancouver.