Catherine Clement is an awarding-winning community historian, author and curator. Her work focuses on excavating the lesser-known and forgotten stories of the Chinese Canadian experience. While her surname is French, Catherine’s mother was Chinese.
Catherine’s historical projects have involved significant crowdsourcing of stories and material that help uncover the experiences of ordinary people in extraordinary times.
In 2023, Catherine created and curated the national project The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. Designed to commemorate the 100th-anniversary of this dark but largely unknown period in Canadian history, her landmark exhibition opened on July 1, 2023 in the new Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver. The exhibition displayed the largest collection of early Chinese head tax and related identity/surveillance documents ever shown publicly. These documents, as well as the lost stories, were gathered from hundreds of families across Canada.
Catherine then repurposed this crowdsourced material to establish The Paper Trail Collection, the most comprehensive community archive in Canada of Chinese head tax and related documents. The online collection is housed at the University of British Columbia Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.
The Paper Trail project has won numerous history and heritage awards. And in 2024, it was short-listed for a Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Community Programming.
Catherine is currently working on The Paper Trail book which will be published by Plumleaf Press in June 2025.
Prior to The Paper Trail project, Catherine was best known for her 10-year search uncovering the hidden works of Yucho Chow, Vancouver’s first and most prolific Chinese photographer. She uncovered his photographs one family at a time, one story at a time. Her research revealed that Chow not only documented the lives of early Chinese, but he was the favourite photographer of the marginalized and non-white communities. That project resulted in an exhibition of crowd-sourced materials in 2019, a book in 2020, and a comprehensive community archive of over 600 private photos taken by Yucho Chow. Catherine’s book Chinatown Through a Wide Lens: The Hidden Photographs of Yucho Chow was awarded the prestigious 2020 B.C. Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing and the 2020 Vancouver Book Award.
In 2017, Catherine created the Chinatown History Windows project which brought history to the streets and covered over empty storefront windows. Catherine also has written articles for British Columbia History magazine, PhotoEd magazine and history websites. She also has produced short documentary films and has curated exhibitions on Chinese Canadian military history.
Catherine has been the recipient of numerous historical awards. In 2021, she was bestowed with an Honorary Doctorate from Simon Fraser University. And in 2016 she received the Governor General’s Sovereign Medal for Volunteers.
Catherine makes her home on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.
