First gurdwara in North America opens, Vancouver

Who: The Khalsa Diwan Society of Vancouver, first established on 22 July 1906 and registered on 13 March 1909, with Bhai Sewa Singh as its president. Most early Indian migrants to Canada were Punjabi men, about four in five of them Sikhs and many of them former soldiers, who came to British Columbia to work in places such as the lumber mills.

What: The Sikh community raised the money itself and built a gurdwara at 1866 West 2nd Avenue, in Kitsilano, Vancouver. It was designed by William Henry Archer and formally inaugurated on 19 January 1908. It ran a langar kitchen and a shelter for the homeless, and the historian Verne Dusenbery described it as a religious, social, political and cultural centre for South Asian immigrants. It raised funds for famine relief in India and, in 1914, supported the Komagata Maru passengers who were refused entry to Canada. It is commonly called the first gurdwara in Canada and North America, but that is not settled: Wikipedia's article on Sikhism in Canada says settlers at Golden, British Columbia, built one in 1905 that burned down in 1926. The Gur Sikh Temple at Abbotsford, built in 1911, is described as the oldest remaining Sikh temple in the western hemisphere.

Where: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The Society sold the building in 1970 to help pay for the new gurdwara on Ross Street, designed by Arthur Erickson. A plaque was unveiled at the old site in 2012.

Why it mattered: It gave the settlers a permanent institution of their own. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism credits the Society with starting gurdwaras at New Westminster, Abbotsford, Victoria, Nanaimo and other places, and with helping Indian immigrants win the vote in 1947 and, in 1951, an agreement that annulled the 1908 "continuous voyage" legislation. Activists of the Hindustan Association ran a Swadesh Sevak Home in Vancouver. The Ghadar Party grew out of an association that Punjabi migrants of the Pacific coast formed at Portland, Oregon, in 1912; its programme was passed at a meeting in Astoria, Oregon, on 30 May 1913, and California's legislature describes a second conference at Sacramento on 31 December 1913 as forming the party. In 2014 the Government of Canada noted the $1.4 million it had given the Society for a Komagata Maru monument and museum. Decades later, in nearby Surrey, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara (serving the sangat since 1973), was shot dead in its parking lot on 18 June 2023.