Every institution begins somewhere. The Gallery of Human Migration was not built by people who study migration from the outside. It was built from inside it—by two people whose lives are migration, who found each other through the movement of it, who returned to Canada together to build a home and an institution out of everything they had both carried across decades and borders.
Rocco Maragna was an architect studying the history of buildings—how structures carry memory, how cities hold the shape of the hands that built them, how you can read the story of human movement in stone and wood and glass—when he saw it. Not just in the architecture. In everything.
Every craft. Every migratory wave. Every surname carried across an ocean. Every recipe written down in a language someone was afraid to lose. Migration was not a chapter in the human story. It was the story itself—so woven into the fabric of civilization that it had become invisible, like the air we breathe or the ground beneath our feet.
In 1997, the quincentennial of John Cabot’s landing on the shores of Canada became the moment of founding—not because Cabot’s arrival was the beginning of migration here, but because it opened a question that deserved a permanent home: what does it mean that we are all, in some direction, from somewhere else?
The Gallery of Human Migration was registered as a Canadian charity in 2003. It has been weaving ever since.
The other thread arrived from a different direction.
Nancy Perin was a sociologist, a cultural activist, and a woman who had spent a lifetime living between worlds—born in Canada to Italian parents and shaped by forty-nine years in Italy. She worked in communities navigating change. In organizations where people needed not just leadership but genuine witness—she coached, facilitated, and built. And she learned that the most effective tool in every room was always the same: a story told with enough courage and enough specificity that it gave the people in that room permission to recognize themselves.
She was called back to Canada through the particular serendipity that only migration makes possible. As a child, she had watched thread being woven at her great-grandmother’s house—the movement of hands, the threads sinking into fabric. She did not know then that she was watching the image that would one day hold the work of her life. That work is the Gallery.
When we forget that we belong to one human family, we forget that migration is not just a movement of bodies, but of stories, identities, and dreams reshaping themselves. It is the unfolding of who we are, together, becoming. ~ Nancy Perin, Executive Director
The Gallery is not a building. It is not an archive. It is not an advocacy organization.
It is a living cultural institution — the only one of its kind in Canada — dedicated to migration as a universal, continuous, and formative human experience.
We exist in the digital space because that is where the world’s stories now move. Our website is the Gallery. The Gallery is our website.This is not a limitation. It is a reflection of our deepest conviction: migration has no fixed address.
Canada has long told itself it is a mosaic—each piece in its place, fixed, finished, defined by the borders that separate it from the piece beside it. A mosaic is diversity without transformation. Coexistence without contact. It shows you where people landed. It cannot show you how they moved, what they carried, what they left behind, or who they became in the crossing.
We are something else. We are a tapestry. Still being woven. Alive. Built from threads that pull against each other—threads of courage and grief, of arrival and departure, of the chosen journey and the forced removal. No thread tells the whole story alone. The pattern only appears when all of them are held together.
And the tapestry is never finished. Because humanity is never finished. The weaving is not what happened before we got here. It is happening now. The arrows in our logo have come to rest—but they are still arrows. They could move again. That is the point. That has always been the point.
Migration is never one person’s story.
It belongs to those who move — who carry courage and grief and transformation in equal measure, who leave a version of themselves at every border they cross, who arrive changed and keep changing.
It belongs to those who stay—whose names rarely appear in history books, who hold the weight of departure, who watch a life continue without them in it, who wait in a silence that has no translation in the language of the place they remain.
And it belongs to those who receive—who are altered, quietly and permanently, by every arrival. Who carry the responsibility and the gift of welcome. Who are themselves, in almost every case, the descendants of someone who once arrived.
The Gallery holds all three. Every story in our collection touches all three. Because no migration story is complete without honouring every direction in which it moves.
But the Gallery holds something harder than the beautiful threads.
Migration is also the story of Africville—a thriving Black Canadian community demolished in the name of urban renewal, which was a bureaucratic word for racism. It is the story of 22,000 Japanese Canadians interned during the Second World War—stripped of homes, businesses, and dignity, classified as enemy aliens not for anything they had done, but for where they had come from. It is the story of Italian, German, and other communities whose belonging was withdrawn the moment fear made them convenient targets. It is the story of the Lost Villages of the St. Lawrence Seaway—families watching their homes disappear under water in the name of progress.
These are not the stories of people who chose to move. They are the stories of people who were moved by the power of the state acting in the name of security, in the name of progress, and in the name of a belonging that was never offered equally to everyone.
The Gallery does not celebrate migration by looking away from this. It celebrates migration because it has looked honestly at all of it—the chosen and the forced, the welcomed and the interned, the arrivals that built this country and the communities that were erased in the building of it. That honesty is not a qualification of the celebration. It is what makes the celebration credible.
Migration is more than movement. It’s a journey through identity, memory, and belonging. Our mission is to return the story of migration to the people who live it—and to the people who, without knowing it, are already part of it. ~Rocco Maragna, Founder
Every tapestry has a beginning. On this land, the first threads were laid thousands of years before the word Canada existed. The ancestors of today’s First Nations peoples were the first to arrive here—to learn this land’s rivers and seasons, to build languages and civilizations in relationship with a place that had never known human hands before theirs. They did not find a home. They became one. Over millennia, they became the ground itself.
And then they lived what no receiving people should ever be made to live.
The arrival of European colonizers brought not movement and belonging, but severing. Peoples torn from land they had tended for thousands of years. Communities forced to move who had not chosen to go. A culture systematically silenced—most deliberately through the residential school system, which sought to erase in children what centuries of living had built.
This is not migration. This is its opposite. And the Gallery holds that distinction without softening it.
The First Nations of this land are the Gallery’s oldest teachers—in what it means to arrive somewhere new, to build a world, and to tend a relationship with place across generations. Their presence is not a chapter in a larger narrative. It is the foundation the narrative stands on.
This is not a principle we state and move past. It is one we act on.
In 2011, our founder Rocco Maragna began a sustained correspondence with the Vatican Museums—meeting with curators, directors, and diplomatic representatives in Rome and Ottawa over many years—advocating for the return of sacred Indigenous artifacts held in underground archives far from the ground they came from. The proposal was shelved. The advocacy continued. The conviction never changed: that justice requires not only an apology but also the material return of what was taken.
In October 2025, the Vatican announced the return of those sacred objects—an Inuvialuit kayak, a Haida Gwaii face mask, beaded moccasins, birch-bark etchings, and an ivory and sealskin dog sled—to the Indigenous communities from whom they were taken nearly a century ago.
We celebrate this not as participants, but as witnesses who spent fourteen years hoping to see it.
The Huron-Wendat First Nation honoured the Gallery with the Eagle Feather in recognition of this commitment. We carry that honour with the gravity it deserves.
In this, as in all things, we follow the lead of those who were here first.
To hold the infinite combinations of human movement, the Gallery works through four guiding themes. We call them the Four Bs: Beckoning, Beginning, Becoming, Belonging.
They are not stages in a sequence. They are recurring movements—felt by those who leave, and those who stay, and those who receive. Every story in the Gallery’s collection lives somewhere in this framework. And every person who encounters it will find, if they look, that their own life does too. Each story is a time capsule. Migration is among the oldest of human experiences. It is so deeply woven into our history that it often passes unnoticed, like the air we breathe or the path beneath our feet. And yet, behind each journey lies a decision, a rupture, a hope, a moment in time that deserves to be heard.
Without these stories, we leave behind only fragments for strangers to interpret. Ruins, census forms, a surname on a ship’s manifest. What they can’t recover is the soul of the journey—the why, the how, the cost, and the joy.
This is why we must write, speak, and record. Not for glory. Not for history books. But because each story of migration is a light in a constellation. When we fail to tell it, a star goes dark.
The pull before the departure. A feeling more than a decision—something calling from a direction you cannot yet name. A letter. A rumour. A war. An opening. Beckoning lives in the one about to move. And in the one who, still at home, begins to feel the shape of an absence forming.
The act of leaving. The rupture. The first morning in an unfamiliar place where nothing — not the light, the language, the silence — is the same. Beginning holds disorientation and wonder in equal measure. It is the hardest thread to pull through the loom. And the one that changes colour most dramatically as it moves.
The slow, non-linear work of transformation. You find one day that you are using a word you did not know two years ago. That you dream in two languages. That you cook the old recipe with ingredients from the new place. Becoming is not the erasure of where you came from. It is the living conversation between what you were and what you are still turning into.
Not arrival. Not papers or anthems or finally passing as local. Belonging is quieter than all of that. It is the morning; you wake, and the place feels, without announcement, like yours. It does not mean you have forgotten where you left from. It means you have found the place inside yourself where both can live.
The Gallery works through storytelling, artistic collaboration, literary recognition, expert reflection, and sustained community engagement.
Our Stories Collection is the living core—a growing record of personal migration experiences contributed by people from every continent, every generation, and every direction of movement. It is not an archive. Archives close. This collection is open, and it grows with every story added, every thread woven in.
Our Migration Literary Award honours writing that holds the full complexity of migration: the courage and the cost, the rupture and the becoming. Writing that does not look away.
Our artistic collaborationsbring visual, literary, and critical voices into conversation with the Gallery’s four guiding themes—each one a different kind of thread in the same weave.
Our expert contributors—historians, practitioners, filmmakers, and scholars—offer the depth and context that individual stories alone cannot carry. The Gallery does not only collect personal testimony. It holds the intellectual conversation that gives those stories their full historical weight.
We are supported by individual donors, foundation grants, and corporate partners who understand that the slow, durable work of cultural memory and narrative change is among the most important investments a society can make. We collaborate with non-profit and community organizations, all levels of government, and individuals who share the conviction that migration is humanity’s oldest and most continuous story—and that it deserves to be told with the full care and complexity it has always been owed.
You are already in this story.
Whether you moved, or waited, or welcomed—whether migration lives in your passport or your surname or the language your grandmother stopped speaking to protect you—your thread is part of this collection.
The Gallery exists so that no story goes unrecorded. So that no movement passes without witness. So that the collection keeps growing—richer, truer, more whole—with every voice that joins it.
Migration histories do not end with policy, with papers, with the closing of a camp, or with the demolition of a neighbourhood. They live on in families, in memory, in the enduring question of who feels entitled to belong—and in the quiet persistence of those who refused to let fear be the last word.
Your story belongs here. Not because it is exceptional—but because it is true.
And because this collection is incomplete without it.
Our Vision.
A peaceful world where migration is understood as the oldest human act—not as a crisis or anomaly, but as the continuous, creative, and formative force that makes us, together, who we are. Still becoming.
Countless journeys. One humanity.
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Your story of migration, the one inherited, lived, and witnessed across generations, has a place here. The Tapestry, the 2026 edition of the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award, is an international recognition and publication initiative honouring personal and ancestral stories. Every selected voice is honoured equally. No rankings, no podium. Submissions open March 31 and close August 31, 2026.
