Miners Memorial Weekend (Days 19 thru 21)

Over the past three days we  have had the honor of joining the Miners Memorial Weekend, a three day event that is the culmination of many months work done by the volunteers and staff at the Cumberland Museum and Archives of Cumberland, British Columbia.


The Miner's Memorial Weekend is meant to honor the history of Cumberland a small town on Vancouver Island, that lies off the western coast of Vancouver, BC. We were surprised to find that many towns upon the island were coal mining boom towns from the 1880s to the mid and late 1920s.

Though no coal has been actively mined in the Cumberland community since the 1960s, many towns people have embraced their heritage and chosen to honor the miners who suffered and died in the coal mines in the Comox Valley. Not only do they focus upon the European roots of the community, but they also pay tremendous respects to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, men who like the various immigrants to the Appalachian coalfields, were abused and paid much less than their European counterparts.

Perhaps the largest focal point of the Miner's Memorial Weekend is to resurrect and honor the memory of Ginger Goodwin, a labor organizer who began mining coal in Yorkshire before traversing the United States and ending up in Cumberland, BC. Ever the hero of workers rights, he fought the companies and the economic systems that would turn hard working families into the slaves of an industry.

Like many labor organizers, his work grated against the profit minded companies who eventually hatched a plot to have him killed as a deserter of the Canadian Army during conscription (the draft) for World War I. Goodwin held strong convictions against the war and swore he'd never pull the trigger on another poor worker who had been sent by the rich to die on the fields of battle.

On July 26th, 1918 a company hired police officer shot and killed Goodwin at his cabin in the woods above Comox Lake. His body was later brought to the Cumberland Cemetery where it was met by over 500 coal miners who had come to honor him. The murder resulted in the first general strike that spread across the island and reached onto the mainland.

In the town of Cumberland, the truth about coal is being preserved and I could not help but reflect upon the many historical similarities between Appalachia and Vancouver Island, and also the many contemporary differences.

The largest difference is the way in which the coal industry of Appalachia has taken our heritage and transformed it their will. No longer do the people of Appalachia hold memorials to honor the tens of thousands of coal miners who have perished in the darkness of the mines. They  instead celebrate coal, or "black gold" at large festivals. They focus little on the lives of the workers, and instead co-opt their honor by focusing on the coal they produced. No evidence of this transition has been more conspicuous than the large bronze plaque at the Hurricane Creek Miners Memorial near Hyden, Kentucky that proclaims, "Miners Memorial In Memory of Those Who Gave Their Lives for Black Gold." The hundreds of thousands of miners throughout the world who have died mining coal did not give their lives "for Black Gold," they did so to earn a wage to provide for their families and were instead killed by the drive for tremendous profits their families would never see.

As much as people and places may appear different, we are all very much the same. Connections exist everywhere.