The saga of Mewa Singh

Mewa Singh was executed by the Province of British Columbia in January of 1915. He had murdered an Immigration officer, William Hopkinson, who had formerly worked in British India as a police officer. Hopkinson had been conducting surveillance within the small but significant population of South Asians who lived in Vancouver at that time, and his activities were directly linked to the denial of entry to passengers of the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying 376 subjects of the British Crown in British India, who had come to start a new life in Vancouver.

The story of the Komagata Maru and the experience of South Asians in Vancouver in this period express an uncomfortable but unavoidable truth about the experiences of non-European people in Canada: a history of exclusion and prejudice. That history was also marked by hope and new beginnings, for those (like so many Europeans) who were able to start new lives in the resource-rich region. It was also marked by the tremendous loss for the members of the First Nations of what is now Canada, whose lives were unalterably changed by European expansion into what is now western Canada. 

— Anne Murphy