Seven Oaks Magazine.

On June 19, in the small Vancouver Island town of Cumberland, more than 100 people from across western Canada met to remember the sacrifices of the workers who built communities like this one. Miners’ Memorial Day, originally an initiative of the Sudbury, Ontario local of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelterworkers (Mine-Mill), has become a local hit in Cumberland. Originally founded to commemorate the deaths of four miners killed in a mine accident on June 20, 1984, the ceremony has crossed the country with its intent intact, finding a home in Cumberland the third weekend of every June.

Although it has national significance, as miners died building this country from Cape Breton to Vancouver Island, the ceremony has achieved a very specific relevance in Cumberland. Here working people have met to remember the very specific hardships that Cumberland miners have endured.

Besides suffering through a variety of severe but all-too-common mine accidents in its benighted history, the coalfields of Vancouver Island have also played host to some of B.C.’s most famous activists. People like Joseph Naylor, president of the B.C. Federation of Labour in 1917 and co-founder of the One Big Union in 1919, and Jack Place, socialist member of the provincial parliament for a large portion of the 1900s and 1910s, worked as miners. Even the famous Mother Jones once visited Cumberland during the Great Coal Strike, where she spoke on behalf of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

But the most famous, and the symbol for Miners’ Memorial Day in Cumberland, was Ginger Goodwin, a socialist labour leader who died while dodging the draft in the woods near the town. Buried in the Cumberland cemetery, Goodwin’s rough-hewn gravestone is the site of the annual pilgrimage of these labour myth-keepers, and it is in his honour that much of the event takes place.

The celebration itself is as much a social as it is a structured memorial service. It began this year on a Friday night with a special evening of workers’ songs. Saturday morning began with a pancake breakfast, put on by the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union. The breakfast was only one small example of labour’s involvement, as a huge portion of Canada’s labour movement was represented at the event.

Returning to the theme of Ginger Goodwin, one of the event’s well-attended sessions was delivered by Roger Stonebanks, Vancouver Island journalist and author of Fighting for Dignity: The Ginger Goodwin Story (reviewed here by Seven Oaks). Hosted at the Cumberland Museum and Archives, a major sponsor of the event, Stonebanks delivered a short talk about Goodwin’s life and addressed questions from the audience. He illuminated the important historical details of Goodwin’s life, with a local spin, including an explanation of how he discovered the house in which Goodwin had boarded while living in Cumberland.

All of this was a prelude, however, to the main event: the memorial service itself. Taking place at Goodwin’s graveside, it featured a number of speakers, including descendants of Goodwin, visiting B.C. from Yorkshire in England. After the speakers, wreathes were laid on Goodwin’s grave and on a small stone commemorating the miners whose graves are not marked. Among the wreath layers was the Mine-Mill local that started the ceremony in 1985, and labour representatives from as far away as the San Francisco and District Labor Council.

After the wreath laying, a poignant ceremony was performed, involving members of the audience as well as the presenters. The Campbell River, Courtenay, and District Labour Council provided the attendees with single red roses, and a parchment naming every one of the more than 300 miners killed by accidents in Cumberland. Small markers noted the locations of miners’ graves, and the audience was invited to lay their roses on the graves of the miners individually, to mark their sacrifice just as the larger wreaths had marked Ginger’s. Some of those in attendance proceeded further into Cumberland to the Japanese and Chinese cemetery, where many of the miners who had died in those accidents lay in unmarked graves. The ceremony powerfully connected the people in attendance to those who had passed, and served as an amazingly personal way to end the memorial service.

After the graveside segment was over, the Cumberland Historical Society capped the evening with a bean dinner. After the dinner, this year’s keynote speaker, Betty Griffin, explained to a rapt audience the significance of Goodwin and other activists’ passing. She drew a line from the struggles of patriotes and reformers in lower and upper Canada in 1837, through the lives of Goodwin and his friends, and into the present, emphasising the power of solidarity through all of these struggles. She urged the audience to look to historical examples like Goodwin and the executed patriotes for an indication of the willingness of generation after generation to sacrifice themselves to better the future for their families and their compatriots.

This was the spirit of the nineteenth annual Miners’ Memorial Day, and it promises to be the spirit of events like it in the future. Those in attendance clearly used the event to highlight the enormous amount of work and sacrifice in the past that contributes to their quality of life today. And an oft-repeated sentiment of the day was that the lesson learned was one of constant commitment, even in the face of adversity. After all, as Griffin noted, the future is illuminated by the light of the past, and events like Miners’ Memorial Day offer an important opportunity to praise shining sources like Ginger Goodwin.