Many thanks to AKCHO: The Association of King County Historical Organizations for honoring our book with the Virginia Marie Folkins Award for Outstanding Historical Publication. It’s our first juried award and it’s especially meaningful as the Folkens Award recognizes works that demonstrate “outstanding original research.”
It’s quite a list of much-revered local and regional organizations. I didn’t realize it at the time, but having the chance to work with King County Executives Gary Locke, Ron Sims, and Dow Constantine in Seattle and see up close how government can and does work helped me understand in developing this story how a diferent government betrayed us in WW2.
We couldn’t have finished the book without the project management of Cassie Chinn of the Wing Luke Museum and publisher Bruce Rutledge of Chin Music Press.
The AKCHO Awards Celebration will be held virtually on Tuesday, May 24th at 5:30 pm.
February was certainly a month dominated by speaking engagements around the Day of Remembrance and the 80th anniversary of the signing of EO 9066. My schedule for this spring and summer is lining up to be a season of professional development workshops to train the trainers, both educators and lawyers.
In collaboration with the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, we just completed a virtual teacher training on We Hereby Refuse for educators in southeast Florida, organized by Toshimi Abe-Janiga of the Riviera Beach Preparatory & Achievement Academy for the Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.
What’s great about our upcoming events is that they’re all currently planned to be live and in-person. Hope you can join us somewhere along the way:
SACRAMENTO, CA
Saturday, April 9, 2022, 12:00-1:30 pm
Pacific Sociological Association conference
Sheraton Grand Sacramento Hotel
“Reconstructing and Reframing the Collective Narrative of Japanese American Incarceration”
Featured speaker in-person for the Presidential Session, using We Hereby Refuse to speak to the conference theme of “Telling Our Stories: Collective Memory and Narratives of Race, Gender, and Community Identity.“ A key question for conferees is how we use memory as agency in disrupting power and systematic inequality, and as a tool for change and action. UPDATE: Friends and colleagues are invited to come join the audience without registering for the conference. The invitation comes from PSA president Dr. Wendy Ng of CSU East Bay, who says, “If you get me names, I can admit them for a one-day viewing for your presentation as non-sociologists and community members.” A donation at the door is welcomed but not required. Hope to see you there.
TACOMA, WA
Thursday, May 26, 9:00 am-1:00 pm
Washington State History Museum
Joint Base Lewis-McChord Judge Advocates General workshop
A special workshop presentation on We Hereby Refuse and Conscience and the Constitution for Army attorneys in the Legal Assistance Office at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, with retired Seattle University professor and noted coram nobis attorney Lorraine Bannai and Fred Borch, archive historian for the JAG office.
PORTLAND, OR Saturday, June 4, 2022, 10:15 am 2022 NCORE Conference
Oregon Convention Center
“Teaching Japanese American Resistance Through the Graphic Novel”
Presenting an in-person session and book signing on We Hereby Refuse to the annual meeting of the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE), a program of the University of Oklahoma billed as “the leading national forum on issues of race and ethnicity in higher education.”
I’ll speak in-person to educators drawn from across the nation at a pair of week-long NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Virtual Workshops on his film Conscience and the Constitution and the graphic novel We Hereby Refuse. We will examine mass resistance in all the camps to the government’s administration of a loyalty questionnaire, and the organized resistance at Heart Mountain to compulsory military conscription from inside camp. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and hosted by the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation.
For updates to these and other public appearances, stay in touch via our upcoming Events page.
As the month for the annual Day of Remembrance, February is always the busiest time of year for speaking requests. This year being the 80th anniversary of EO 9066, A friend counted 33 DOR events nationwide. I have nine on the books myself, a personal record, including four on February 19th. Continue reading National Day of Remembrance tops February events→
Our graphic novel We Hereby Refuse weaves together the stories of three Nisei who refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. On Sept. 18 we got to meet three of their children and hear what they think about the book.
It’s quite a list of much-revered local and regional organizations. I didn’t realize it at the time, but having the chance to work with King County Executives Gary Locke, Ron Sims, and Dow Constantine in Seattle and see up close how government can and does work helped me understand in developing this story how a diferent government betrayed us in WW2.
