Accession Number | |||
Date | 2019 | ||
Media | digital recording | Audio | mp3 √ |
duration | 49 |
344_Jordan-Stanger-Ross_Landscapes-of-Injustice_2019.mp3
otter.ai
12.02.2024
no
Outline
Unknown Speaker 0:00
You may put it at the front and they'll say
Speaker 1 0:14
oh yeah this is from the archives and I'm gonna send it to me is it okay to record this recording the second sneak it into
Unknown Speaker 0:32
labor
Unknown Speaker 0:40
some of our buyers see a picture of Mary on the cover it's good
Speaker 2 1:17
know that's that's an answer that's out there that needs to be seen a couple of years these ones are all genuine explanation
Unknown Speaker 1:37
is that this guy's responding to him and
Unknown Speaker 1:51
share them online they're really powerful letters
Unknown Speaker 2:10
just came around earlier for you
Speaker 2 2:29
afternoon everyone, go ahead and we're going to see exactly how we can have a soft start. But um So welcome, everybody, and thank you for the opportunity to present here at slipstream Island. And for coming out on a sunny day like this. I'm Jordan Sanger outside Associate Professor of History at the University of Victoria. And I'm the Product Director of landscapes of injustice, which is a seven year research project. Here's one of our banners, a seven year research project to research and tell the dispossession, the history of the dispossession of property of genuine. So within a larger history of the tournament, our project has focused specifically on the dispossession of property. So I thank the Library, certainly for hosting us and Brian for how to set up and we're going to give you several presentations, and then had an opportunity for some some conversation is about this massive transfer of wealth, right. And this was actually happening on a mass scale. Everything that Japanese hated and weren't permitted to or able to take with them to sites of internment was first vandalized much of it and stolen as Caitlin my color will talk about forcibly sold by the federal government. And that of course, fishing vessels. I know there's a fair bit of knowledge in the audience here. But for folks who don't know this history already, but our program has one of his first acts of war in the Pacific seas over 1300 fishing vessels in the US to sell them in 1942 1942. The government also seized and sold the automobiles of Japanese Canadians, sock and trade of their stores and stores and real estate within which they are house. Almost 2000 parcels of real property were put on the market. Open Market and many of them including here, almost all of them on Saltspring Island sold to the director of the Veterans Land Act for settlement of soldiers after the Second World War. Our project landscapes of injustice is a fair The large Partnership Project which means we've been we received funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada to work with other people. So those of us at the university warehouse in the history department, and the Center for Asia Pacific initiative, but we got the funding because we're working with all these other folks as far east as the cane Museum of Immigration, which will show the exhibit that you're going to hear from a little bit about today. universities across the country, the National Association of Japanese Canadians, as the leading political branch in the Japanese paid community is the organization of the Japanese gaming community is a partner project and you can actually see if it'll be inherited organization of Japanese Canadians on the project as well in the world we see museum which will also show our exhibit hopefully. At least one person here is in the room this our Community Council, our project is committed to community engagement. So we have those organizations adjustments K researchers within the project, but also an external advisory board, including Tosh as well, who included advise the project and act as a sounding board for us and ensure that the project is responsive to the interests of the community. Students are lifeblood of this large project. We've been able since 2014, to offer over 150 Student fellowships on the project. But students are amazing. They've become very engaged in the research, I keep a family who will speak to you today as the research coordinator on the project or formerly a student working on a project that it's I think, wonderfully exciting for both the researchers and the Community Council and all the organizations involved to work with all these students who become very knowledgeable about and passionate about in the topic. There's a much wider research community beyond the folks who you'll hear from today. Various types of expertise, legal history, curatorial expertise, and nuclear nationalism will be the lead curator, the museum exhibit you hear about as teachers, Greg Mia Naga. In the middle is a teacher developing materials for elementary school aged children on the basis of our research. And we also have a colleague of his who works in secondary school. So we have a big number of 70 people at any given time working on the project, including the students. We do academic stuff like this 2017 book witness to loss which looked at a Japanese Canadian who participated in a forced sale of Japanese cane on property. So this book kind of tries to grapple with why was he involved? And how do we understand his experience. And we also have somewhat non traditional output like these outputs of fifth graders who are doing a lesson on dispossession where they first create these possessions in connection with historical materials and then go through a series of lessons about the dispossession. Our work is based on a shared conviction across the research project that this Israel Canadian should know, the history of the violation of human and civil rights at a time of perceived insecurity. Both measures taken in the name of national defense that make no one safer about the enduring harms of mass displacement and the loss of home and the resilience of people running injustice, which is the story that feels sometimes unfortunately relevant today. So today, we'll go I think I'm still on time pretty much this, I've been given five minutes for this to get global interaction for me. Then me again, talking about the economic impacts of the dispossession. I'll have two more presentations that we're gonna hear from Mary, one of our committee council members, as I mentioned, many of you know that we have some q&a. Now we have what we call a formal discussion, which really is different from q&a because of our cookies. So about the front part of the hang in that line. That's been part of our proceedings. So the economic impacts of dispossession reconsidered This is a somewhat overly complex presentation on vote to give. I wouldn't advise a student to do it, but I'm going to move quickly because it's a little overly complex. But I think that the the arguments are new, their research base, and I think they're important. So this is going to focus on real estate. Caitlyn is going to talk in a second one's going to focus on other forms of property, mice focusing on real estate, and it's based on land title research. A lot of folks on Capitol land title research in the room so this is based on a big title search enterprise of landscapes and justice were recreated a Land Title database with hundreds of transactions in it and all that will be publicly available soon for wider perusal. But right now I'm trying to analyze material and to ask about the economic impacts and this was actually, before I do that it's worth I think, asking whether that's a useful thing to do. All of our research has conveyed to us that property, and personal meaning deep personal meaning meaning familiar meaning communal meanings that went beyond anything that we can calculate in dollars and cents. So there is a reduction, there's a kind of reductionist aspect to focusing on the economic losses. But I think it's it's well warranted to do so as long as we don't forget all that other stuff in our project works on those other kinds of losses as well. But from the 1940s Onward, Japanese Canadians argued that they had had serious economic losses as a result of the dispossession of the property, they protested those economic losses. They calculated economic losses during redress. So I think that by historians really haven't done that much careful work around economic loss. And I think it behooves us to follow the community's interest in that question. So I think we should do that work well, that we can talk about it further q&a. But if we are going to do that work, then how should we measure? What is it that we're measuring when we're measuring economic losses, and that's going to be the focus of my talk two approaches to measuring economic losses.
Speaker 2 11:20
So two approaches. The first ism is is something that's commonly asked me when I get presentations around this topic, I get a lot of questions about market value. Did Japanese Canadians receive fair prices at the time of sale? That's the most common question that I receive about kind of the economic aspects of the dispossession. And certainly Japanese Canadians have questioned that a question of, for example, in the post war, inquiry and burden commission inquiry into their economic losses where the property sold at fair market value. But we're not going to talk about that. But I'm also going to talk about a second way of approaching the question of economic losses that I actually think is more important, which historians might call it counterfactual. Or it's basic questions about things that that might have been or alternative paths, things that didn't happen. And in fact, the web, the National Association of Japanese Canadians was negotiating with the Canadian federal government in the 1980s, and commissioned a report from an accounting company, the Price Waterhouse firm, being engaged in a kind of a counterfactual analysis, they asked, not what whether they perceive a fair price at the time of sale, but rather, what would the property have been worth in 1949. That is, if it hadn't been sold when it was. And instead, when the internment era finally ended, Japanese Canadians were able to return to their properties, what might it have been worth, then it's a kind of a counterfactual reasoning. But it can be based in evidence, because we can look at the value of the property is 1949. So it's not we don't have to kind of imagine the values values are there. But the notion that Japanese canes would have preserved but now they pick 1949, because that was when the internment ended in April 1949. Most of the terminal was post war, right. That's one of the very shameful aspects of this history that continued after the Second World War. But but so that was the kind of negotiating point with the with the federal government. But looking back historically, we can broaden that question, what economic impacts would have followed if Japanese Canadians were never forced to sell because of course, they would have had to sell in 1949. That's useful for negotiating but from an historical perspective, we can say, what if they aren't in the 50s 60s 70s? What would that have meant for Japanese Canadians and their families? So So in thinking about this question, being grounded in sources that convey the experiences of people as well and their families, not only land title documents, so for example, the fella here with the cane in the back row closest to me, Senator, we're coming, who Mary helped me to identify in this photograph, although not a relative of the more common family had a farm here 27 acre farm on Salt Spring Island, and his son in the very front there Peter. Both of them are interned at Griffin Lake, road camp building highways and the BC interior. Cemetery was about 58, I think in 1942, and his son almost 30. So we might imagine that center was close to perhaps hand and farm to his to his son Peter. Instead, their property was seized at sort of 1944 it was placed in the, as many of you will know in the UK. Yes. Thank you in the care of a crook, who was responsible for first renting to someone actually didn't pay rent. And that was the agent for the custodian here on the island. And it was sold to the director of the Veterans Land Act for just over $1,000 9044 or $17,000. Today, in 20 $18, half of that money is going to Taro gig to a son who had transferred to his son's account. And then he left the country, he returned to Japan, where he was born in 1946, as part of the exile of Japanese Canadians. So what are we asking him when we ask market value questions about a transaction like that? And I've tried to kind of schematize that, in a sense where asking was sort of 10 or more kabhi disadvantage against some other free market seller? Didn't he? Was he forced to sell for less than someone a free person would have freely chosen to sell for? Or connected with that question, we can ask did the buyer from the custodian or the Veterans Land Act? Did they derive some special benefit by buying low through this for sale, a benefit that wasn't shared by safe buyers on the free market? And we might see someone who bought in an advantageous position, do things like flip the property right away, right, buy something that you know is worth more than what you paid for it, they might celebrate way, or they might at least make big profits when they do sales? Unusual profits, unusual by comparison, again, with that free market fire. So this is kind of a logic, I think of a market question we compare soon a terrible or commies losses, or estimate as losses as against the sub free market seller or the gains of this fire against some free market buying. Right. And I think that approach does make sense. I'm going to criticize it later. But I think it does make sense and I think most of us will own some things would care if they were forcibly sold at a reasonable price, or if they were forcibly sold for pennies on the dollar selling your stuff for pennies on the dollar and then crediting you with those funds feels like a particularly blatant form of theft. I think that bird Commission, which has been rightfully criticized for its narrow terms of referencing the post war period took up this question of market value where the thought is sold for market value at the time of Sell Sale. And for reasons that would be familiar. I think some of you may have attended Brian's presentation that may have covered some aspects of the commission. And Caitlin some a lot of research on the bird commission, people who have research that bird commission, give us good reason to distrust the bird Commission. It wasn't a good faith effort to deliver justice to Japanese Canadians certainly. And so not trusting the Burke commission. I decided to test its conclusions in two major areas its conclusions about fair market value and the power Street and Maple Ridge, so the largest Japanese Canadian neighborhood prewar in Vancouver surrounding Powell Street, and the first and one of the largest lower mainland farming communities and Maple Ridge, Hany area outside of outside Vancouver now suburban Vancouver, right. So I looked at the 32 for sale, fighting sodium and upholstery neighborhood, and compare them through statistical analysis to 200 free market sales in the same period. And I looked at 54 sales in the Maple Ridge area for sales, Japanese Canadian owned properties and compare them with 33 market sales. I can talk a little bit about why the numbers are the way they are if you're interested in such things in the q&a. I was surprised by finding that Meyer search didn't get any basis for distributing the bird commission conclusions. Right. It's not what I anticipated when I started the research. That's what the analysis suggests. So controlling for prior value of the property. So when a certain prior change fails and also subsequent exchange goes after the for sales. There is no clear advantage to buyers from buying from the custodians enable that lower that second layer buyer from the Missoni did not flip their properties right away in the past, for example, that they held on to it as long as normal own buyers are free market buyers. Buyers from the custodian did not make windfall profits by comparison with market buyers and Palestrina neighborhood. Japanese Canadians forced to sell the house Street Neighborhood did not suffer economic disadvantage by comparison with other sellers at the same time. But just that's a very narrow claim. I'm gonna return to it by comparison with other sellers at the same time. I'm gonna come back to whether that's the right question to ask afterwards. It may go rich have some a different story and the burden commission told a different story of Maple Ridge ball so they knew that sales to the director of the veterans land back had been crooked. That had been an internal sale within the federal government they knew before they started that they were due value. So it was with regards to these sales to the director of Veterans Land Act that they undertook some rigorous research and they did about eight different approaches to try and estimate what the or seven or eight different approaches tried to estimate what the sale value should have been. So like them, my research suggests that there was a clear advantage of buying for the custodian or kind of through the VLA, for buyers who received those property. But buyers in the custodian or the VLA did not flip the property, they can tend to hold on to properties just like other folks, buyers from the custodian did not make windfall profits compared to other buyers. Japanese Canadians forced to sell and Maple Ridge did suffer economic disadvantage. So they were sold for less than they should have been by comparison with other sellers. And it made rigidly the bird commission which gave an 80% award to claim it's in that area. And the bird Commission's have said whatever the property sold for, we're gonna have 8% as compensatory payment. In my analysis that would seem to deal with the devaluation. That's that's approximately the devaluation that will be estimated on the basis of my research, again, not what I expected to find.
Speaker 2 21:21
And also not I don't think what what Japanese Canadians meant when they said their property sold too low. We'd rather see a poster here of hundreds of letters of protest, no Japanese Canadian said, my property sold too low because prevailing exchange rates in the area were this that and yeah, that's not the kind of argument they made. They said my property sold too low, because that's not what I would have sold it for. I built this farmer and for example, I intended to give it to my son. So they made something different that prevailing market trends. Sometimes we thought of that as not able to be quantified, that emotional investment and so on, but actually that other loss, a loss of choice, a loss of autonomy can be quantified. And that's what I've tried to do in the second half of this piece. So this is that counterfactual examination. What are we asking? When we asked about counterfactuals, it's a different act a more simple kind of a thing. We're asking what it's unitary, more commonly lose, not by comparison with some other free market buyer, but rather by comparison with the person who bought the property at a discount from the person who wrongfully got his property, or asking, What did what did Peter Moore coming knocking here instead that buyers children inherited, so we're not comparing people to other exchanges on the market? Here's the bird commission that we're rather we're gauging losses against the gains of the people who actually purchase their property, where the gains that they should have had, they still have the property. So in this case, we look at a farm like this and in terms of our comps farm, which he for which he received just over $1,000, or $20,000.20 key terms. And when you consider what might have been worth by the time his son probably would have been contemplating retirement itself by the time his son was in his 60s, by 1976, a generation later, a lot of it subdivided into 33 different bots that used to exchange many times, even if Peter had retained only this little lot here, that would have been worth $250,000 to him, at that time, the entire property exchange for about $1,000,000.20 $18 in 1976. Right, and many of you familiar I'm not going to talk about it here, but familiar with the Osaki property here on Saltspring Island, where an even larger number of subdivisions, even larger profits are made. Here's another example of Maple Ridge. So another one of our study areas taking this alternative approach. So if you focus on these two lots here, cause O'Connell purchased them in 1931, where they are lot 65 and 56. They were seized in 1942 transferred to the right director but compliant, that same type of story, the director of Veterans Land Act, assembled them into a single bot, and then began selling them there first subdivided into these lights that you see here. And then ultimately into these which were sold off in the 1960s in the 19 in the 1960s. And I haven't got all the values on this property, but it'll give you a similar story, right? The owner of this farm are caught on in 1942 was sitting on a goldmine, right, hey, we've had really advantageous ly invest in tax cuts have worked hard for those purchases. And if this kind of subdivision was going to happen in the post war that was should have been their choice and to their economic benefit, that much more than discrepancies in the market at the time of sale is a serious economic hardship imposed by the dispossession And here you can see it drawn together into this actual includes 1000s of transactions. Here in the poultry area, we're back in Vancouver and here, Japanese Canadians were forced to sell for 164. At a time of properties were selling for $164 per square meter. And you could just see the price increases. So what if they don't adhere? Well, they would have doubled their value if they don't adhere, and so on. And Maple Ridge, a similar story Japanese Canadians are forced to sell here for $1.97 per square meter. And here you can see the massive rise in value over the generation subsequently. And here on Saltspring Island is represented a little bit differently as a multiple of the custodian sales. Here's the custodian sales. That's why you can see that by the 1960s. The properties were selling for 63 times the value per per acreage, essentially, on Salisbury, Maryland. And this isn't that surprising to people. We know the history of real estate in British Columbia. But it's worth specifying, I think, and identifying those folks who've benefited from these gains, and really knowing in concrete terms with Japanese Canadians loss over time, in the forsale, their property.
Speaker 3 26:16
Analysis, guess what they called Sunset drive for 3000 acres. We're all the rich people. And I think he only got planned out of $350.
Speaker 2 26:26
Yeah, so I know, Brian has worked on this. And I did an analysis of 72 acres. So about 10% of the farm. And so in on those seven, two acres, so on about 10% they make about a million dollars in transactions by the 1970s 20 10%. Yeah. huge part of that.
Speaker 3 26:54
family lived in poverty. And when I think of Gavin law, and I feel, but it's not Gavin's fault, right? It was the government that allowed him to do what he did. Yeah,
Speaker 2 27:06
well, it's a mix. I think of people making choices. And Canada's will work on that. And also the government policy that made it possible.
Speaker 3 27:14
Yeah, you're right, he could have made a choice. And when we went to the ferry, diver on my mother, don't worry, Kimmy, there won't be a chopstick missing from your house. But he didn't say the whole damn thing will be missing.
Speaker 2 27:32
So just to summarize that, rather than then this phrase that you'll hear a lot fire sales or sales for less than market value. I've been focusing on this historical analysis or an analysis of legacies that recognize current legacies of benefit and loss right property that the children and grandchildren inherited a wealth that Japanese Canadians should have been able to pass within their families, and instead pass within other families. We see that long term impact, I think, through this kind of analysis. And I think we understand that if the economic harms expressed by Japanese games from the 1940s to the present and focusing on this kind of analysis. So thank you. I don't Caitlin's gonna jump up next, and then we'll take questions at the app. Yeah. Do you have a car company to get to? So this is Caitlin Finley, you're gonna pull up your Power BI. He's a research coordinator on landscapes of Justice Project. And she previously completed her MA history ads, if you're vegan, she's really an expert on the bird commission. So remarkable question about the bird. Any question about the Great Commission, she can also talk about that.
Unknown Speaker 28:47
So thank you for having me. When I found out we were going to come to Salt Spring, I was pretty excited. A lot of the time I spent in the archives, reading about these places, and to go there to see what it's like and to meet people there. It's really nice. So thank you. And like Jordan said, I was previously a master's student, studying under Jordan with landscapes of injustice. And now, I've continued on as the research coordinator. And what that means is that, as I did my master's work, I became really familiar with these government records and our whole holdings. So now I can offer support to our outreach clusters is what we call them like the museum exhibit cluster. And I've taken a more nuts and bolts approach to this presentation in a subtle way to advertise our digital archives, which will be available in 2021. So, but at the core, I'm answering what happened to Japanese Canadians personal belongings, and then stored and said, there has been working and he's seen more work about real estate about farms and Fraser Valley about homes here on Saltspring. But we realized that we really didn't understand as fully what happened to the dishes on people's shelves or what happened to their very beds, or their toys, or their farm equipment, and all those other things that make up someone's life. So over the past year, I've been working with geographer Nick Longley to write that story. And I really think that it's because of the volume of material that landscapes has digitized, that we're able to start to answer this question. And I won't go into the details. But the answers to this question are really does dispersed throughout individuals case files. So you might think about the land title office, there's a building with that information where Jordan can send researchers to, you know, it's a lot of work, but to find that specific information, whereas this story of personal belongings, it just, it's recorded in the individual case files of Japanese Canadian, so spread out over 1500 case files. And as these were digitized, and I started reading through them, I started to see how expensive the stories of vandalism and theft and government negligence and mismanagement were. So I'll start with this image because I think it inserts us into the moment maybe a starting point for when Japanese Canadians leave behind their personal belongings because of the four step routing. So this is from March 18 1942. And the caption below says, moving time for Japanese, British Columbia's Japanese are on the move, but they don't know where they're going. Nobody knows. On Powell Street where this picture was taken today, baggage of hundreds of families and single men heading for road camps, clog the hallways of rooming houses and overflowed the sidewalks. The step of baggage here is for delivery to Hastings park into friends homes. Transfer men work from sunup to sundown moving this stuff for the immobilization of Japanese vehicles has complicated the moving problem. And I think here us is maybe what to me is a moment of separation of people from their things when the government becomes responsible for their belongings. And that's maybe where our story starts. And then so today I'm gonna look at one of these case files that I've mentioned instead of 15,000. And this is the Cagney family in Steve sin. And then this is my subtle advertising. So I'm drawing from custodian case files, bird commission files that Jordan has mentioned, and Brian has worked with, and then general, bureaucratic memos and reports of which there's a lot and then I'll wrap up by reflecting on what we've found. So the techie boat works in stevenston, some of you might be familiar with it. It was established by Cinemax to a tidy in 1805. By by 1942, they had built over 30 fishing vessels. And I think around 1940, sooner metsu had transferred ownership of the plant and the buildings to his two eldest sons, Kira Rue and the sale. And so here's an image of their their hold, like real estate holdings. So they had, I believe it's two parcels of property that they're both factory with on their plant, in addition to their home and outbuildings, in addition to homes of other people to so you see here, the homes of the other sheet of family and this is Zuki family. So so this is what, like the foundations that their lives in, in steepster. And I'm going to jump really quickly now to order in council, PC 1665 When all of Japanese Canadians belongings become the responsibility of the federal government. So with this order, everything that Japanese Canadians are leaving behind becomes vested in the federal government. And so in Vancouver, I didn't bureaucratic administration pops up to try and handle that responsibility. So they rent rooms on the fifth floor of the World Bank building in Vancouver. It's under the direction of climate person, a young, fairly inexperienced bureaucrat on And Japanese Canadians are told to to record everything that they own to the custodian. So they're given forms templates to fill out so that the the many workers in this building can oversee and be responsible for their property. And I'll just say here that already the Tige family had sustained losses as a result of this the internment policies. So after ordering council 1665, actually two of their fishing vessels are sold by the fishing vessel disposal committee. And so they're living through that experience, which particularly affects Houston, where the entire community is based on the fishing industry. So I'm Kira taggie, who has much of his family's property in his name, follows the government's instructions. And he goes to a registration office like this one in Hastings park, there was one in the Fraser Valley, there was one in Powell Street. So he went to the one on Powell Street, and he filled out the details of his holdings. And you can see he inserted extra additional sheets to tell the government what he owned, because he wanted it taken care of. And then, so that's may 13. And then on May 20. Cairo who I'm following mainly, he is uprooted to solicita BC, where he lived through the internment years. I didn't know where that was. So I've pointed, it's a bit east of Kamloops. They're further north than where most of the internment camps are hearing the Spokane Valley. And like all other Japanese Canadians, he leaves behind everything except for what he can pack in his 150 pound luggage. So here now we're at a place where the government has taken responsibility for all of a Taggies belongings. And what happens is that the government, the federal officials find themself in a circumstance with rampant vandalism and theft. So here's a quote describing what happened in CSUN, there was continual housebreaking at Steve soon during the Japanese evacuation in the historical terms. So that was a housebreaking that door and window frames were carried away. That's from 44. And then this is actually from fall 42. This is talking about the Fraser Valley.
Unknown Speaker 38:03
Regarding the homes and chattels of Japanese houses have been the houses that have been vacant since Hillary separation have in the majority of cases been broken into doors have been smashed, windows broken in many cases, when ransacking the houses, it appears to be just the loving destruction, which has made the thieves go through the buildings. And I think that these reports from federal officials are an important research finding to document the vandalism and theft of former neighbors that occurred not just in CSUN, and the Fraser Valley, but throughout Vancouver, and in like, more rural parts of British Columbia. And I won't share all the quotes with you, but there's a substantial amount which is I find shocking to read through to hear the repeated and sustained vandalism against Japanese Canadians belongings. Yeah. When we first
Speaker 3 39:05
came home, like going to garage sale with a novel, we stopped going to the garage sale on salt forgotten, because when we went to the garage sale, we noticed, I think mama farms are putting up her house. Yeah, and then other people can tell they want to belong to Japanese Canadian. So there was vandalism going into the houses stealing Trump. So I don't want people here on soft rayon to think that people here were supportive. They were just bad to see like everywhere else.
Unknown Speaker 39:43
Yeah, yeah. And I didn't mention this earlier. But um, I think this story that I'm telling is more new. But what is known is that auctions eventually, this attempt at protected protection sort of spirals out of control and the government sale is part of a solution to the problem of chattels. So then you have former neighbors, not illegally stealing things, but buying things at auctions, the belongings of former neighbors. So what did in the summer of 1942, federal officials, their job was still to protect Japanese Canadians belongings. And so what did they do? They started moving people's things to storage, which then became sites of further vandalism and theft. They hired some Watchmen. And so you have a series of Watchmen across the province. And they started reporting these incidences of vandalism and theft to the police. And I'll return to how effective this was shortly. But going back to taggie. So after. So, in 1943, after this summer and fall of 40, who the federal government shifted policy direction explicitly to force the sale. So I think in response to this shift in policy, which was covered in the new Canadian, a tiny wrote to the office of a custodian, and said, he said, I would like my remaining material that's in my home to be shipped to me. The federal government had said that it would ship Japanese Canadians their belongings. So shortly, a couple of days, Oh, yeah. And he writes that he's stored it stored certain belongings in a secret compartment. So I like the story of the Tigers, because he's working with the government in some ways, but he's chosen to keep certain objects out of the government, government's hands. And what he has in here are ceremonial costumes. He has his shipbuilding tools, and certain religious texts. So he writes to the government, he says, this is where they are, please send them to me, I don't want them so then he gets a response. And I think that's the first time that he learns that his home has been ransacked. And this actually isn't a report from a taggie. From the government to attack II. It's, it's an internal report. And it's a situation that officials found themselves in repeatedly that they are requested to deliver a Japanese training in their belongings, and then they can't find it, and then they decide what to do. And they have an internal protocol to try and downplay responsibility to try and blame it on the thieves if they've if they've lost it. So that at this point, even though the ransacking I think happened in August 42. This is when they tell the Tige that it has all been pilfered in the words that they use. So this is just to go back. These are the reports from when it actually happened. And they chose not to tell the owner. And so going back, this is bigger than I thought it would be. So going back to what the office of the custodian did in response to these incidents, incidents of vandalism and theft. They tried to use inventories to take account to know what Japanese Canadians owned. They were supposed to protect it. They were supposed to know what they were protecting. But they found that they these always failed them. Japanese Canadians wanted when they were in internment camps, maybe wanted something that the officials didn't anticipate being so important to them. And there's this continued discrepancy where the inventories are totally failing the government and and then so then they storage houses How did those work out they became subject of further vandalism and theft. And it it put the government in a situation where they were losing Japanese Canadians belongings, it's easier to tell whose dishes or who's when it's in their home. But when you've moved them all to a storage site, then you lose that association. I think they're hiring of in my opinion, and from what I've seen, the hiring of Watchmen was largely disingenuous. Very few watchmen were were hired. And it and then when they caught perpetrators, they declined to pursue pursue convictions. And I would like to understand this further, but the police, they reported the cases of vandalism and theft to the police. And for whatever reason, the police say they can do nothing about it. And I'm not sure how to how to read that in the historical record. Yeah.
Speaker 3 45:33
Well, the previous three was the Canadian government. So at the individual people were installed per barrel. It was wide open for them to do that. Because all our land here, just take exalt ground, and all of it was stolen. Yeah. But as a Canadian government allows. Yeah. So I tried just listening to you well, on this.
Unknown Speaker 45:56
Well, I'll so I'll go to my final slide, because I think that what you're saying, makes a lot of sense that the government created a climate with those policies of permissiveness, by not pursuing convictions. They created a circumstance for vandals could run free where they couldn't, didn't have to fear, conviction. And so, in my closing notes, I will just sort of nail home what this kind of documentation of the vandal, a bit vandalism and theft allows us to see. It allows us to see the dispossession as a longer process than simply a policy decision. It allows us to see the complicity of 1000s of British Columbians across the province. It also allows us to see the continued disregard of Japanese Canadians rights as owners, by their former neighbors by the federal officials. And so I think that answers some questions about what happened to the property that Japanese Canadians left behind. So so thank you for listening.
Speaker 2 47:20
I'm here from Jasmine rails news, a postdoctoral fellow in a museum exhibit cluster blank search for justice without getting like the you can actually see him in the world museum museum exhibit to show some of this.
Unknown Speaker 47:54
Hello, good afternoon. Thank you so much for attending today's talk. Last one mentioned, my role as a curatorial postdoctoral fellow with the landscapes of injustice project is really to translate the past four years of the intensive research of my colleagues and to public facing. So I am curating a museum exhibit. And as Jordan mentioned, there's also teacher resources, American narrative website, and our cover websites as well. So a lot of my my research is really into how can we effectively communicate difficult histories, substantial losses to specific communities, and authentically allowing them to tell their stories, while also making this history accessible to a national audience. As Doug mentioned, our museum exhibit is already confirmed to travel across the country. I'm delighted to share that we already have several major museums confirmed. So our exhibit will be opening at the Nikkei National Museum and 2020 it will travel across the country to Pier 21 and museum civilization. It will also travel to Toronto, and then we'll finish at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria and 2022. I'm also in the process of having several discussions about doing a smaller modular exhibit. So that this can be we can have a smaller traveler that would be able to go to regional spaces and might not be able to host a museum exhibit at the scale. I'll say the stage when we did exhibit the we're about halfway through our content development, but there's quite a long lead time in terms of translating this. So what does that really mean? Well, my day to day really involves