Catherine Clement

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 hinese. In 2023, Catherine created and curated the national public history 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, 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, and her book, The Paper Trail to 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act is now available.