Narain Singh and Maha Kaur Dosanjh were among the first Sikhs to settle in B.C. Their descendants want to keep their story alive.
Narain Singh Dosanjh was only 16 years old when he made the gruelling month-long voyage by sea from India to Vancouver in 1907.
It didn’t take long for Narain to become a foreman. Over the next decades he and four other “pioneer” families at Fraser Mills — a settlement which became Maillardville, now part of Coquitlam — helped hundreds more Sikh families plant deep roots in B.C. “He was on the friendly side. He got used to everybody, got to know the manager and superintendent,” Sarjeet said. “They started hiring foreigners, like Punjabi people, and there were quite a few hundreds of them after that.”
“When they came they had nothing, and they gave us everything,” Gurdev said. “We like to tell our grandkids. We are the only connection to tell them the hardship they went through, the work they did to live.” Satwinder Bains, director of the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, has known the Dosanjh family for close to four decades.
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