About
In 2022, we were privileged to be awarded a 150 Time Immemorial Grant* administered by Heritage BC for “Kuwentong Pamamahay”, a collaboration between Heritage Vancouver Society (HVS), Sliced Mango Collective (SMC), UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) and the UBC Public Humanities Hub (PHH). We publicly launched “Kuwentong Pamamahay” on June 1, 2024, an accessible and resilient digital resource of stories representing an intersectional Filipino Canadian community working through the realities of what it means to make a home in Vancouver.
A basic translation of “Kuwentong Pamamahay” is “Stories of Home-Making”. The project’s oral histories communicate how the Filipino Canadian immigrant experience and search for identity across generations shapes places that have become important to them.
New for 2025 is the completion of a self-guided tour and placeography now on the project website. UBC Arts Amplifier is a new supporter of this project providing us with the resources for this self guided tour and placeography. We are currently working on finishing a short documentary capturing the sharing of stories during a couple of tours and dialogues that the project team ran in the Joyce-Collingwood Skytrain area. This is the area where the project has its beginnings with the food hub and we are tying up the project focusing on that connection to the Transit Oriented Development happening there. Our team has titled this Pauwi or “homeward”.
Why on the Top10
We featured Kuwentong Pamamahay on the Top10 last year and we have listed it again this year in part to draw attention to the Joyce Collingwood area and to the new content we have available. Most importantly, we wanted to communicate the importance of stories.
Especially with everything happening in Vancouver that is focused on broad sweeping top-down regulations, megaprojects and growing big, and touting the merits of a large scale (DTES, Granville Planning, Broadway Plan,Transit Oriented Development), people and their distinct needs and experiences can easily be lost in that vast planning and economic system.
We want to emphasize the need to also put attention on the individuals, and individual stories and an appropriate respect for people on a personal human scale which is something we were often reminded of as part of this project.
Working on the project’s final phase in Joyce-Collingwood, we witnessed how the opportunity to hear and tell stories animates people, and stirs in them an excitement to express what is of value to them and an energy to demand a better system that gives value to their experiences and needs.
We hope that the storytelling done here can be a way for others to see that stories and storytelling widely applies to everyone and how they can be important in navigating change.
The relationship between heritage and stories is not always made prominent, although in recent years, the heritage field has started to more firmly stand behind them. In our experience, when people think of a place, they inevitably tell stories. Stories of experiences and memories tie heritage to identity and it is that feeling of identity that motivates people to be engaged with place.
Additional Resources:
https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/joyce-collingwood-station-precinct-review.aspx
We acknowledge the financial assistance of the Province of British Columbia
