In the wilderness of British Columbia's Fraser Canyon, the graves of early Chinese miners and railway labourers have been slowly decaying, all but abandoned for the better part of a century.
Lest they disappear or be forgotten completely, Vancouver activist Bill Chu has been revisiting some of these neglected burial grounds, hoping to garner public recognition for the role Chinese migrants had in developing the western Canadian frontier.
'Our involvement in this province is not what the politicians refer to as just contributions as immigrants,' Mr Chu said. 'That has been a huge understatement about who we were as a people.'
Instead, he said, the Chinese were among the province's earliest pioneers.
Chinese migrants have been working and living in the region since 1858, during the Fraser River gold rush, and long before British Columbia joined the Canadian Confederation in 1871. Thousands more came to work as cheap labourers between 1880 and 1885 to construct the most treacherous segments of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a vital network uniting British Columbia with the rest of the country.
In 1881, at the height of Chinese migration to Canada's westernmost province, the government census showed 4,350, or one in five non-Aboriginal people, were Chinese. That ratio plunged when the Canadian government imposed a head tax to restrict Chinese immigration once the railroad was completed in 1885. Now as British Columbia celebrates the 150th anniversary of its establishment as a British crown colony, the Chinese should be given a more prominent place in the province's history, Mr Chu said.
Mr Chu, founder of the grass-roots activist group Canadians for Reconciliation, and Vancouver archaeologist Laura Pasacreta located two Chinese grave sites and an old Chinese mining site during a search through Fraser Canyon last month.