My Alberta: Little Italy

I was driving through Edmonton's historic Little Italy when I stopped and looked down the street.

Nothing spectacular was happening.

Cars were moving through the lights. Others were parked along the curb. Apartments and storefronts lined the road. Trees had grown up around buildings that had been here longer than some of the people passing through them.

And hanging above it all was one simple word.

Ciao.

I took the picture.

This is also My Alberta.

What We Picture When We Picture Alberta

Ask someone outside this province what Alberta looks like and you'll probably get some familiar answers.

The Rocky Mountains.

Prairie stretching toward the horizon.

Cattle.

Wheat.

Oil.

Pickup trucks.

Maybe Calgary's skyline or the Legislature in Edmonton.

Those things are Alberta.

But Alberta is also a street like this one.

A neighbourhood built partly through the lives of people who came here from somewhere else.

People who arrived carrying languages that weren't English. Foods their new neighbours may never have tasted. Different traditions. Different music. Different ways of gathering around a table.

They didn't stop being Italian when they arrived here.

They became Albertan too.

And over generations, something interesting happened.

Their story became our story.

Before Any of This

There is something important that has to be said whenever we talk about people arriving and building Alberta.

Nobody arrived on empty land.

Long before anyone called this place Edmonton, Indigenous peoples lived, travelled, hunted, traded, gathered, raised families and formed nations across these lands.

That history doesn't begin with European settlement.

And acknowledging the generations of immigrants who helped build modern Alberta shouldn't require us to erase what came before them.

Both histories belong in the story.

One tells us whose land this was and remains connected to.

The other tells us how the Alberta we recognize today continued to change.

The Newcomer Eventually Becomes the Neighbour

Italian families came here and built lives.

They worked.

They opened businesses.

They built institutions.

They raised children.

They gathered around tables.

They celebrated births and weddings.

They buried parents and grandparents.

They watched children grow up speaking English while still hearing Italian around the family table.

Those children had children of their own.

Eventually the newcomer wasn't really a newcomer anymore.

The neighbourhood became part of Edmonton.

The food became familiar.

The surnames became familiar.

The traditions became part of the city's traditions.

And eventually Edmonton put an arch across the street that says Ciao.

We celebrate it now.

I think that's worth thinking about.

Because every generation seems capable of forgetting that many of the people we consider unquestionably Canadian today were once treated as outsiders.

There was a time when being Italian could make someone the foreigner.

Just as other people arriving in Alberta today are sometimes treated as foreigners.

Different language.

Different clothing.

Different religion.

Different food.

Different customs.

Different name.

And perhaps fifty years from now their grandchildren will walk these same streets and nobody will question whether they belong here either.

Alberta Has Never Been One Thing

Modern Alberta wasn't built by one culture.

Indigenous nations were here first.

Then came settlers and immigrants from Britain, France, Ukraine, Italy, Germany, Poland and elsewhere.

Chinese workers and families became part of Western Canada's history despite extraordinary discrimination.

More recently, people have come from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and almost everywhere else imaginable.

Some families have been here for centuries.

Others arrived this year.

They're all living beside one another now.

That's Alberta.

Not always comfortably.

Not always peacefully.

Certainly not always fairly.

Our history includes racism, exclusion, dispossession and attempts to destroy cultures rather than live alongside them.

We shouldn't romanticize that.

But neither should we miss what ordinary people have managed to build despite it.

Neighbourhoods.

Families.

Friendships.

Businesses.

Communities.

Home.

What Does Belonging Actually Mean?

Standing there looking at Little Italy made me think about that word.

Belonging.

When does someone belong?

After ten years?

After fifty?

After three generations?

When they speak English without an accent?

When their children are born here?

When their grandchildren are born here?

Or could belonging begin much sooner than that?

Maybe belonging doesn't require surrendering everything that came before.

Maybe that's exactly what places like Little Italy teach us.

People can carry pieces of an old home into a new one.

Food.

Language.

Stories.

Traditions.

Names.

Memory.

And those things don't necessarily weaken the place they arrive in.

Sometimes they become part of it.

The boundaries of us get a little wider.

The Alberta Being Built Right Now

That's what I find myself wondering about most.

Which communities being built in Edmonton today will someday be considered historic?

Which restaurant serving unfamiliar food today will become an Edmonton institution?

Which child translating English for their parents today will someday tell their grandchildren about how their family came to Alberta?

Which traditions that seem foreign to somebody today will simply be considered Canadian a few generations from now?

We tend to imagine history as something that already happened.

It isn't.

We're standing inside it.

The Alberta of 2075 is being built around us right now.

In apartment buildings.

In restaurants.

In schools.

In workplaces.

In places of worship.

In neighbourhoods where someone is unpacking boxes tonight after arriving from somewhere thousands of kilometres away.

They don't know yet what their family's story in Alberta will become.

Neither do we.

My Alberta

That's why I took this picture.

Not because something extraordinary was happening.

Because nothing extraordinary was happening.

It was just Edmonton.

Traffic moving through an old neighbourhood beneath an arch that says Ciao.

And perhaps that's the extraordinary part.

Something that once represented people arriving from somewhere else has become so completely woven into the city that we barely stop to think about it.

That's how communities are built.

That's how places change.

That's how strangers become neighbours.

That's how somebody else's history eventually becomes part of ours.

My Alberta isn't frozen at some imaginary moment in the past.

It remembers the people who were here first.

It remembers those who came afterward.

And hopefully it leaves room for the people arriving next.

Because they are not standing outside Alberta's story.

They're already becoming part of it.

This is also My Alberta.