WHAT’S INSIGHT
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Broken Promises
The Dispossession of Japanese Canadians By Leah Best, Head of Knowledge
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Can Canada offer a just home for all? This question is posed by the upcoming exhibition Broken Promises: The Dispossession of Japanese Canadians. It feels as relevant to today’s events as to the events of Canada’s second internment era, in the 1940s. The exhibition is one of several legacies of the Landscapes of Injustice project: a seven-year, multi-million-dollar research and communityengagement effort to investigate and document the forced dispossession of Japanese Canadians. Led by the University of Victoria and funded in large part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the project is supported by the Nikkei National Museum, the Royal BC Museum, Simon Fraser University and 11 other organizations across Canada. The project brings together those with lived and intergenerational experience of the dispossession, academics, museum professionals, educators and archivists to expose new details and new remembrances of a deeply racist period in Canadian history. (continued on the next page)
Japanese Canadian Redress Rally, Parliament Hill, Ottawa, ON. Photograph courtesy of the Nikkei National Museum, 2010-32-124
FA LL 2020
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