“Haq and History: Journeys Across BC” Returns Home – Exhibit Opening at the Sikh Heritage Museum

On Sunday, June 21, 2026, SASI hosted the opening celebration of the exhibit, “Haq and History: Journeys Across BC “at the Sikh Heritage Museum, the National Historic Site Gur Sikh Temple, Abbotsford. Guests began arriving early, moving slowly through the panels and ready to begin an afternoon dedicated to looking back in order to look forward.

Haq and History began in community rooms out of years of regional consultation, visits to seven regions across the province, conversations with elders and descendants who had waited decades to see their histories told accurately. The bilingual English-Punjabi exhibit eventually started its travels in 2022 as part of the South Asian Canadian Legacy Project (SACLP). Through over 120 years of photographs, oral histories, archival materials, and community records, Haq and History traces South Asian migration, labour, and settlement across British Columbia and asks, at its core, who gets to belong in the history of this province. Each host site integrates local stories into the exhibit, grounding the broader narrative in the specific memories of the community hosting it. Since 2022, Haq and History has travelled to Surrey, Duncan, Golden, Port Moody, Burnaby, and Chilliwack, before arriving back in Abbotsford, the city it now calls home for the second time.

To open the program, Dr. Garry Fehr, Acting Director of SASI, started with a land acknowledgement before welcoming Mr. Bagi Brar of the Khalsa Diwan Society (KDS), a longtime partner of SASI across this project and many others. Mr. Brar thanked attendees for showing up to see the result of years of work come to life.

The afternoon’s speakers each traced a different thread of how the exhibit came to exist. Mo Dhaliwal, digital entrepreneur and longtime friend of SASI, spoke to the gap in representation that this exhibit was built to close. He reflected on “Haq” (Right) as a demand asserting the right to tell one’s own story and returned to the concept of “Waqt” (Time), the sense that this work could not wait, and that recognition is inseparable from timing.

Dr. Tzu-i Chung, Curator of Public Programs and Engagement at the Museum of Anthropology and one of the exhibit’s co-curator at the Royal BC Museum, traced the exhibit’s decade-and-a-half journey across the province. She expressed her plans to work alongside Indigenous artists and other South Asian communities for a new iteration of the exhibit anticipated at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in 2029.

Finally, Dr. Satwinder Bains, Research Associate at UFV and SASI’s Founding Director, traced the project’s roots back to conversations that began as early as 2002. She thanked KDS for the space to share this history, recognized the SASI team and the many individuals and host sites whose contributions made the exhibit possible, and underscored that this was a team effort larger than any one person. She noted that this ongoing work is built, as she put it, to sow seeds for generations still to come.

The afternoon closed with hot chai and snacks, and an interactive board where attendees added their own families’ immigration stories to the exhibit’s growing record, a fitting close to a celebration centered on whose stories get told, and when.

“Haq and History: Journeys Across BC” is open daily, free of cost, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Sikh heritage Museum and will remain on display through June 2027.