BROKEN PROMISES: EXHIBITION TELLS STORIES OF THE VICTIMS
Jordan Stanger-ross, Leah Best, Nicholas Blomley, Sherri Kajiwara, Audrey Kobayashi address racism in their extensive research.
For the past seven years, the Landscapes of Injustice research project has grappled with a disturbing history of racism: the dispossession of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s. When 22,000 Japanese Canadians were uprooted from their homes in coastal B.C. in 1942, officials promised to protect their property for the duration of the war. Everything would be returned to its owners, they said, once the internment ended. Instead, officials stood idle as neighbours ransacked and looted. Then, the government decided to sell everything that remained, without the consent of owners. After the war ended, 4,000 Japanese Canadians were exiled to Japan, with the remainder pressured to disperse across Canada.
This injustice caused multi-generational trauma. Other British Columbian families profited from the acquisition of houses, farms, businesses and family heirlooms that belonged to Japanese Canadians. The effects of both benefit and loss are still felt today.
Such explicit racism no longer receives public support in Canada. Gone are the days when our elected officials could openly advocate banishing an entire ethnic group on the basis that they are not “an assimilable race,” as Ian Mackenzie, a cabinet minister, claimed of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s. Nonetheless, racism endures. How is racial inequality perpetuated even as overtly racist attitudes wane? What does it mean to describe racism as systemic? Part of the answer lies in history.
The dispossession of Japanese Canadians was part of the unapologetic racism of state policy and private action that endured for much of the country's past. Canada's 1867 Constitution identified “Indians” as an area of administrative control. Immigration laws banned people deemed “unsuited to the climate.” Public employment was restricted to “white labour.” Covenants prohibited the sale of property to persons of the “Semitic, Negro or coloured race.” Voting rights were denied to Asian Canadians, whom our first prime minister deemed “abhorrent to the Aryan race.” Bars and movie theatres cast out Black customers with impunity. The country's last residential school closed in 1996.
Inequalities built in generations of racism do not quickly disappear. We are heirs to landscapes of injustice. What, then, is to be done today?
Structures of racism are diverse and enduring, so our renunciation of racism must also be multi-faceted and sustained. Canadians have pushed explicit racism to the margins of public life. Our governments were right to acknowledge wrongdoing and to offer apologies. We must uphold their commitment not to repeat past wrongs. Our country needed processes of truth and reconciliation. Now it falls upon us to enact the recommendations that they produced.
We must confront systemic racism, as well as naked expressions of racial animus. Canadians who found success without facing the obstacle of racism must learn from those whom it disadvantaged. For many, there is listening to be done.
Members of Landscapes of Injustice share a conviction that, as with the history of racism more broadly, the dispossession of Japanese Canadians requires many responses. In 1988, after years of Japanese-canadian activism, the federal government acknowledged wrongdoing. Community organizations continue to hold other jurisdictions (especially the City of Vancouver and the Province of British Columbia) to account for their roles. Japanese-canadian artists of many stripes — among them novelists, filmmakers, sculptors, and muralists — give creative and powerful voice to their history. Activists and scholars are mobilizing the history of the forced uprooting of Japanese Canadians to combat the ongoing displacement of marginalized Vancouverites.
Landscapes of Injustice has contributed by working in partnership and across differences to grapple with the legacies of the dispossession. Some of us are Japanese Canadian, many are not. Some lived through the dispossession and vividly remember its pain. Others came to this topic in answer to an advertisement for a summer job. We are scholars who delve into archives and we are grandparents, passing stories on to a new generation. We are an evolving collective of some 70 people, including students, academics, teachers, museum professionals, archivists, librarians and community leaders. Racism endures in part because of its unresolved legacies, so we commit to unearthing and understanding them.
The work has not been easy. Questions abound about who has the right to tell this story. The pain of the dispossession is still felt. Its direct beneficiaries can still be identified. There are good reasons for this history of betrayal to be closely guarded. Members of our group had to learn to trust that our collective efforts would amplify each voice rather than pitting them in competition. And it was not for everyone. But those of us who persisted in this approach are convinced that partnership across difference is essential to the cause of anti-racism.
The history that Landscapes of Injustice has investigated over the past seven years is Canadian history. The responsibility to unearth and discuss the miscarriage of justice in the 1940s does not lie only with its victims. By pooling our skills and experiences, we were able to excavate the massive records of the federal government, learning who made the decision to dispossess and why. We were able to trace the transactions of hundreds of parcels of real estate to learn who benefited, and by how much. We unlocked the Japanese language records of lives lived before the dispossession.
We heard the testimony of more than 100 Japanese Canadians, as well as bystanders, witnesses, and perpetrators. We wrote books, created teaching resources for elementary and secondary schools, built websites, and, on Sept. 26, opened an exhibition titled Broken Promises at the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby. In April, the exhibition will move to Toronto and then to other cities across Canada, before a finale in 2022 at the Royal B.C. Museum.
Working together, our collective told a story that none of us could have hoped to tell alone. In the process, we came to see one another. The results of this work, we hope, are a resource for a more just Canadian future.
Jordan Stanger-ross (Uvic), Leah Best (Royal B.C. Museum), Nicholas Blomley (SFU), Sherri Kajiwara (Nikkei National Museum) and Audrey Kobayashi (Queen's) are the executive of Landscapes of Injustice. The research collective's book, Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians, was published by Mcgill-queen's Press this year.