In what felt like a Saturday Night Live parody, the ABC Vancouver party released an Instagram re-election campaign video on September 23. In the video, incumbent mayor Ken Sim confronts an “Evict Ken Sim” pin-back button while emotionally charged music plays in the background. He uses his family’s history to further his agenda — painting a picture of his family’s experiences with poverty, evictions, and even houselessness.
Sim explains it is “pretty hard” for his family to see people call him out for “scapegoating the poor and homeless.” Why is it so difficult for them? By scapegoating people who struggle like his family did, the mayor would be betraying his very origins as a racialized working class Vancouverite. “That was us,” Sim says.
Ask members of the racialized working class in the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations whether or not they have much in common with the mayor. I’m fairly certain the consensus will be “not much.” I bet on it the CAD equivalent of Sim’s investments in cryptocurrency.
As an Indigenous scholar, activist, and archivist who has extensively documented the complexities of Asian-Indigenous relations — let me explain why Sim is waxing poetic about his history on the margins of this city.
Sim’s “ideal” future for Vancouver continues to worsen the very structural conditions he defines as essential to understanding his history.
Whether it is planning to relocate Indigenous Peoples to “their homes,” evicting low-income tenants in the Downtown Eastside while freezing social housing development, or replacing essential public infrastructure with a Vancouver Police Department training academy — Sim’s “ideal” future for Vancouver continues to worsen the very structural conditions he defines as essential to understanding his history.
In adding plebiscite questions surrounding substance use and involuntary care to this year’s ballot, Sim challenges future leaders to “go against the will of the people.” If anything, the “Evict Ken Sim” campaign has begun to unite Vancouver’s historically fractured left and actualized the will of the people to make material conditions better for all amid our social and political ruins.
Yet, I haven’t seen the responses to Sim’s campaign acknowledge the erasure of Indigenous Peoples and Nations in the mayor’s conceptualization of this city’s past, present, and future. Sim’s re-election campaign, with his “personal testimony” at its core, revolves around an equivocation of his past struggles to a universal racialized working class of which Indigenous Peoples (not Nations) belong to. The mayor highlights his racialized identity to conceal the proximity to whiteness that his position of power affords him and appear more conscious of Indigenous Peoples’ realities. This is not merely political posturing, it is indicative of what Unangax̂ (pronounced Unangan) scholar Eve Tuck and settler scholar K. Wayne Yang call “settler moves to innocence.” These moves to innocence attempt to reconcile Sim’s settler colonial complicity and rescue Vancouver’s future.
The mayor pretends to believe Vancouver “is worth saving.” Tackling safety and affordability over the next four years will supposedly get us there. Let’s recall Sim’s comments in 2023 for Truth and Reconciliation Day: “Empty rhetoric and words don’t change things for Indigenous People[s]. Words must be met with leadership. Rhetoric must set the stage for action — because it is in action that there is hope.”
No matter how difficult it is to swallow, enacting just and respectful relations to xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ lands and life means relinquishing a settler future.
My message to the mayor goes as follows: Vancouver, just like your image, is not here to be rescued. There is a reason why you use the past tense “was” in defining your relations to peoples and places. You have already determined we are not worth saving, yet our city is.
So much for your vision of walking “shoulder to shoulder” with Indigenous Peoples, as your 2023 statement on Truth and Reconciliation Day claims you wish to.
I am OK with that, because we belong to the land, and so do our futures.
All my relations.
