UBC Chinese Canadian Stories Project

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Elder Larry Grant Featured by UBC Chinese Canadian Stories Project

By Sarah Ling on April 27, 2012

Elder Larry Grant, our Elder-in-Residence at the First Nations House of Learning, is well-known and much appreciated for welcoming students, faculty, staff, and guests to the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Musqueam, hən’q’əmin’əm’-speaking people. His words of welcome and teaching not only on the UBC campus, but across the Lower Mainland, bring us back to the times when his Musqueam ancestors qiyəplenəxʷ and xʷəlciməltxʷ, welcomed the first visitors to Coast Salish territory.

They teach us to recognize and respect the Musqueam people, their language, history, culture and self-governance.

They embody the importance of right relationships.

During the early 1900s, Larry’s father, Hong Tim Hing, was one of many market gardeners from Guangdong, China who were hospitably welcomed to live and farm within the Musqueam community despite divisive and restrictive social conditions legislated by the Canadian government through the Indian Reserve system. Important relationships were formed between these farmers and families of the Musqueam Nation.

In the following two videos produced by Chinese Canadian Stories, a UBC initiative dedicated to collecting, digitizing, and sharing Chinese Canadian history, Larry shares an array of experiences being of mixed Chinese and Musqueam ancestry.

“Not quite belonging makes you strive or quit, so we didn’t quit.” –- Elder Larry Grant


aboriginal.ubc.ca/2012/04/27/elder-larry-grant-featured-by-ubc-chinese-canadian-stories-project/

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Part 2