Greg Miyanaga Transcript

GREG MIYANAGA: I'm gonna tell you about my experiences with Landscapes of Injustice, which was a project I worked on. Landscapes was a seven year project that had a $5 million grant from SSHRC. It ran from 2014 to 2021. It centred on the University of Victoria and it was led by a professor named Jordan Stanger-Ross.

And this project was massive. It involved multiple universities, museums, and cultural organizations. The Landscapes project focused on dispossession, the forced sale of Japanese Canadians during the 1940s.

Just a quick recap: during World War II, 22000 men, women and children were forcibly removed from their homes because they were of Japanese descent, and most of them were born in Canada or naturalized citizens. Japanese homes and belongings were supposed to be kept in safekeeping, but were eventually sold to the government, by the government, for a fraction of the price.

So the Landscapes project was organized into these different clusters. I was part of the teacher resources, and I got to work alongside provincial records, historical GIS maps, oral history, legal history, community records, and land title. There was also some community groups and museums that were involved as well. And the teacher group really benefited from all these resources we had. 

We had access to GIS maps, legal cases, documents and photographs. It just went on and on. It was pretty fantastic. So the mission of the teacher resources was to create lessons about the dispossession of Japanese Canadians. And there's part of the website where we posted lessons. I chaired the elementary group, and there's also a secondary group, led by Mike Perry-Whittingham. And we've shared all these lessons across Canada for free.

So how do you teach such a complex issue to young students? Well, we start with the big ideas. My target age for elementary was around grade five because the history of BC — or the curriculum of BC — really fit this history. And the goal is conceptual understanding. We begin with the thinking and the conversations. We ask them questions like: what is home? What is loss? What is community? We try to give students a sense of the issues and build empathy and critical thinking skills along the way.

We use three different kinds of engagement in elementary. First there's the hands-on. We get students to make and do things. We make learning real. We use minds-on. We get them to use their critical thinking skills, and we stimulate their curiosity. And then of course, we use the hearts-on which we've been talking about all afternoon.

We get students to engage emotionally because, especially these young children, they filter everything through an emotional lens. We get students to develop historical empathy by asking them things like, you know, how does this affect you? How would you react in this kind of situation? And then we kind of expand beyond that to, you know, how is this fair, not just for you or for me, but for everybody. So how do we teach this?

What if our students made a low-tech simulated community of a Japanese Canadian neighbourhood? So here's the hands-on part. We tell students that they're going to learn about an immigrant community by creating one on a large classroom bulletin board. We start by giving each student a property card like this. And this information came from Landscapes research. So each student is assigned an address with the name of the family who owned the building, and then the, or pardon me, the business and then the kind of business that was down below.

And then students make these card or paper copies like this. So here's the address. Here's what the building looks like above and below. And then on the inside, we get them to create actually an empty building. Later we get them to populate them with people and their belongings. So they have their people and their belongings, and the people and their belongings are pinned into these buildings, or used a sticky tag because they have to be able to move around because they can interact in the community. And because the work the students put into their community, their people, and their belongings, they become very, very attached to their work. And then students post these properties onto this big community bulletin board.

And the order of the buildings is based on the actual address. And the avatars can be moved around and possessions can be bought and sold and traded. And then after a while these events would occur: Pearl Harbor, and then the Evacuation Order. This is an actual evacuation order for my area, actually. Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, I would call Port Coquitlam, all these places are just like minutes away from here.

So the evacuation order to remove all the people of Japanese descent would be issued, and they would have to move. So the students are told this at the end of the day or at the end of the period, and then when they come in the next day, their avatars would go from the Powell Street bulletin board to an internment camp bulletin board. So they can see on the picture there's an internment camp, and then in some of the shacks are the avatars that they had in the Powell Street simulation. 

So they are there for a bit, and then as their incarceration continued their possessions would also start to disappear from the Powell Street Display. And so through their avatars, they're learning what interment and dispossession was like for these Japanese Canadians. How did they react? Well, they weren't happy. They were very angry,they're sad and they're really confused. They thought, “Canada is a safe, fair place to be. How can my people, how can my home be sold? How can my possession be removed, all without my permission?” And so this is how the students are gaining this historical empathy, and they will act on their thinking if they're emotionally invested and emotionally engaged like this.

But it's not just the simulation. We also have eight supporting lessons that run concurrently to this activity. And they're based on these lessons that I wrote in the early 2000s. These support lessons help students unpack the history and experience of internment and dispossession. And I'll just talk to you briefly about a couple of the lessons so you get a sense of them. There's some that happened before internment, some that happened during internment, and there's some that happen after internment, like the redress lesson.

So one of the first lessons we show when students are being forcibly moved, we use this idea of picture detectives. We used pictures back in the 2000s lessons that I created because there is so little written about Japanese Canadians, especially at the grade four or five level. But it turned out to be a really effective way to use critical thinking skills and introducing primary sources and looking for evidence. So in this picture, there's a family being sent, actually, not to internment, but they're being shipped back to Japan after internment was over.

And in this picture, it shows the — actually it's at the livestock barns at Hastings Park, which is now the PNE. So we get students to look at this like “what do you think is going on?” And then the how part is, how do you know, what evidence do you see, where is this, when do you think this is happening, and why do you think this is happening? Again, this is like 15 minutes away from here. This is a picture in a place called Annieville, which is in Surrey, where they confiscated all the Japanese Canadian fishing boats.

So we try to give students a sense of the history. So as the students are being moved out of their Powell Street residences, we assign the suitcase activity, and we assign teams of students a random character like a young boy and an old woman. And they have to work together to figure out what they think those avatars would bring to internment. A place you don't know what it's like, you don't know how long you're going for, you don't know about the weather. Japanese Canadians were only allowed to bring a certain amount and so what would you bring if you were being sent away? And so this one team thought a man would bring pictures of his family. A 15-year-old girl would bring warm clothes. An older woman would bring shoes, a water bottle, and something to read.

And then once they get to the camps and the internment shacks, we try to give students a sense of what living conditions were like. We show them pictures and then once they [audio cuts out] stove in the middle and then ship black shacks in places like New Denver, we get the students to create floor plans of how they fit enough belongings for 12 people in one shack. It's a 12 by 20 foot shack. Some teachers have taped off their floor and had students actually bring in their artifacts and put people in there to see how this all fits together.

You can see this one where the student made a bed for three people  on one side and a bed for another three people. And then in the middle was the family fun rug because he explained that it sounds like it's pretty bleak [so] families need to have fun. And then there's a table down there, which is very practical for eating and doing your homework and playing games. Again, a very young way of looking at history.

This next lesson was the letters of protest lesson that focuses on dispossession specifically. We really needed a lesson to help students unpack this idea about the loss of property and possessions and how Japanese Canadians reacted historically. So we gave them some letters of protests that Japanese Canadians actually wrote demanding for the government more compensation for the property that was sold, and their buildings and their businesses. And so we give students a viewing guide and we ask them what kind of person wrote this letter, what are their concerns, what do they want the government to do and, how is the letter written?

And the students always say that they can't believe how polite the Japanese Canadians were in their tone of writing these letters. And so, of course, the next step is to have students write their own letters based on their avatars. And so there's this one: “I have gotten $155 for all my possessions. I'm not an idiot. You promised our properties would be untouched.”

And then they had this whole backstory of “my friend Mary-Anne Crocker sent me a letter saying that some of my possessions have been looted.” So they really immersed themselves in this idea of what it's like to be  a dispossessed Japanese Canadian. So that's just a taste of some of the lessons that happened with the supporting lessons.

This slide shows some webs that a grade four or five class created about some of the feelings that Japanese Canadians that were interned and dispossessed must have felt. And then on the other side it shows what they thought Japanese — what they thought the government should do to apologize to Japanese Canadians.

And these webs show how deeply students were impacted by what they learned. So going back to the Landscapes just for a second, Landscapes has so many great resources, not just these teaching resources, but other ones too. So these teaching resources are both for elementary and secondary. The secondary lessons are very, very comprehensive. They show the lessons of course, GIS maps, there's amazing videos of people we interviewed, and there's some audio interviews, and some interviews with survivors. They're pretty amazing.

These lessons are being used across Canada by hundreds of classrooms. The reason why I know this is because we ran a field school for two weeks where we had teachers from across Canada come and learn how to teach this history. Some of them came as far as Halifax and Quebec and Ontario, and we had three from Winnipeg.

The next lesson — the next field school is coming up in 2025. The other rich outputs are this amazing museum exhibit called Broken Promises. There's also a narrative website that kind of collates all these different clusters and what they found out. One of our most powerful outputs is this archival database where you can type in people's names and you can find out — you can get their case files. Lots of Japanese Canadians have gone in there and found out all sorts of things about their family and what happened during World War II. I found my own grandfather's files there; it was pretty eye-opening.

And just ending with a couple of student voices. So this is an amazing picture. I love this picture. It's the girl from one of the one of the classes. She's a grade four or five — I think she's a grade five student. She was so attached to her learning that she talked her parents into driving down to Powell Street and having a picture taken of her in front of her building, the one that she learned about in class. And this didn't just happen once, this happened like four or five times. And to end, I'd like to end with the voice of the students. So here's Ilana Ross's class reading their letters to protest. Ilana teaches in Ontario.

VIDEO: [Students speaking] Dear Government, Greetings, my name is Isa Akeda and I'm a 31-year-old, married and pregnant Japanese Canadian. [New speaker] My name is Tomoro Akido. [New speaker] My name is Isawaki Fujiro. [New speaker] Greetings. My name is Mukai Osumatsu. I am 40 years old. I fish and I have a wife and two kids. I own a boat, a house, fishing gear, a car and a fish market.

[New Speaker] My husband and I own a sewing machine store on Powell Street. I do not appreciate the way that the Japanese are being treated. I'm concerned about your decision to intern all Japanese, Canadian or not. [New speaker] We could only bring a certain amount of things and I had things that I couldn't bring that were important to me.

[New speaker] I recently received a notice saying that my property is on sale and I've gotten $155 for all of my possessions, which have been auctioned off. I'm not an idiot. Of course, I did not get a fair amount of money. [New speaker] That you had promised me and every other Japanese Canadian that we would have our properties untouched, but now they're being sold. You did not keep your promise to us.

[New speaker] Now my family has nothing to come back to. My children will never grow up in the house they were born. [New speaker] You promised our properties would be untouched. That means you have broken that promise. When you will release us from the internment camp, if that ever happens, we'll have no home to go back to. [New speaker] from Muka Otonatsu. [New speaker] Isa Akeda. [New Speaker] Isawaki Fujiro.