Summary The indigenous population has inhabited what is today called British Columbia for a few thousand years. It has only been the last two and half centuries that other ethnic groups began migrating to the area for whatever reason, most in search of a better life than from where they came. When the British starting migrating there in the mid-nineteenth century, there was already a significant Chinese population in addition to the existing indigenous population. The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR), which was largely built on the backs and lives (in that many did not survive the dangerous work) of the Chinese, opened up British Columbia to migration from the rest of Canada, which meant primarily white people of British ancestry. The established geopolitical system being British allowed for the enactment of policies and legislation which not only discriminated against the existing indigenous and Chinese populations, but made it difficult for people of color in general to migrate to what was now British Columbia - not only the Chinese (although much legislation was directed specifically at limiting Chinese migration), but other east Asians, primarily Japanese, south Asians, and to a lesser extent blacks migrating from the United States. Stories of the Japanese internment during WWII, the persecution of the Doukhobors, an already globally marginalized ethnic group, in the 1940s, and American contentious objectors - also referred to as draft dodgers - of the 1960s and 1970s are also told as part of the migration aspect of British Columbia's history.

• Documentary