Alex Hamade submission Teri Hamade comes down the main hall of her Winnipeg home. She holds out a cracked square of paper. It's a photograph of a little girl in a dress, standing next to a wall built of wooden planks.
“Do you know who that is?” she asks. “That's me in Lemon Creek. They made that camp just for us.”
Hamade’s family were among the 22,000 Japanese-Canadians sent to internment camps like Lemon Creek during the Second World War. The internment came in reaction to the December 1941 Pearl Harbor attacks in Hawaii, in which the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise strike against the United States.
Hamade was born in Port Alberni, British Columbia in 1938. She lived the first few years of her life in Ucluelet.
“We were all born here. We're Canadians, eh?” she says, “But they thought we were communicating with the enemy, you see.”
In 1942, the Canadian government was granted the power to intern all those of Japanese ancestry. All possessions were seized and later auctioned off.
“They took my dad’s boat,” she says. “All the boats they took over, they didn’t give money for.
He had just bought a new house on a cliff. Do you know how much that would be worth now? At least half-a-mill.”
After their property was taken, the Hamade family was moved to the Hastings Park racetrack, which had been converted into barracks. There, they were housed in the horse stalls.
“All we had were bunk beds and we had to hang blankets to get privacy,” Hamade recalls. “All the girls and women, who were under age 12, were in one of the barracks. All the men and boys were in another. We were there in March of '42. About six months later, they put us on a train and sent us to the interior of B.C. in Slocan. After that, we were in Lemon Creek.”
The Hamades spent almost four years in Lemon Creek before they were finally released. The Canadian government ruled that all those interned were to move west of the Canadian Rockies. So, in July 1946, the Hamade family took a train to Winnipeg.
“The reason why we came to Winnipeg was because my dad's sister came to Winnipeg,” Hamade says. “He followed her here. There was no use going to a fishing town. All my dad had was a thousand dollars.”
Though the war had ended, its effects didn’t disappear. Hamade had a difficult time adjusting to her new home.
“When we came to Winnipeg and we started going to school, they pushed me back a year,” she
says. “Our schooling in Lemon Creek was like nothing.”
The racial attitudes didn’t disappear either. Hamade faced bullying upon her arrival in Winnipeg, and throughout the remainder of her childhood.
“When we went to school, kids used to pick on me, wash my face in the snow, call me ‘chinkachinka-chinaman,’” she says. “But that’s all what I expected. What I didn't, was when I was in the church, and whenever the boys had to pick a girl partner, they never picked me. That hurt. Getting my face washed in the snow didn't bother me. That did.”
In 1988, the Canadian government issued an official apology, and distributed $21,000 compensation to each individual affected. But by then Hamade’s father, Risuke, had died. The family received none of his compensation.
For the past 65 years, Hamade has lived in Winnipeg. She has had a successful career as an accountant, and hasn’t fully retired. To her, the memories of the war and its effects are a thing of the past.