Terrain of Memory: A Japanese Canadian Memorial Project by Kirsten Emiko McAllister (review)

Terrain of Memory is an account of the establishment of a memorial center at New Denver, British Columbia (BC), in the isolated Slocan Valley, dedicated to preserving the history of the incarceration of Japanese Canadians during World War II. But it is much more than that. It is the story of the creation of the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre (NIMC), intertwined with an account of the author’s experiences doing fieldwork: her personal reactions, her interactions with her interviewees and mentors, and the crumbling of her assumptions in what she describes as a “‘necessary crisis’ in identity” (18). In addition, she draws parallels to the Canadian government’s historical persecution of other Slocan Valley residents, notably the Doukhobors and the Sinixt Nation.

The book begins with McAllister’s journey into the physical terrain of New Denver, the site of one internment camp, and into the psychological realm of the interpersonal. In the evolving tale of the Centre, she describes her own identity crisis and how it affects her ongoing research, examining her role as a sansei (third-generation Japanese Canadian) and hapa (bicultural with one parent not of Japanese Canadian heritage). Her mother was incarcerated during the war, and McAllister learns that some of the residents in the New Denver community knew her family. This personal connection plants her firmly on both sides of her investigation. She voices the dilemma of reconciling her insider and outsider status with the dictates of her field, sociology.

McAllister’s primary approach is ethnographic. She uses participant observation, supplemented by extensive archival research and enriched by ten interviews with elders, sansei, museum staff, and consultants. Although not conceived as an oral history project, her interviews are archived, with consent from her narrators, at the Japanese Canadian National Museum in Burnaby, BC, and are accessible to the public. She augments the interviews with conversations that she had at committee meetings and during interactions with visitors. Her official duties at the Centre were to help curate donations to the museum and assist a key mentor-cum-informant. McAllister does a fine job of ethno-graphic description and explanation of theoretical concepts that she employs. She discusses how she did fieldwork, how she approached her subjects, what assumptions she brought to the study, and how important it was to make those assumptions conscious.

Oral accounts highlight chapter 4, “Continuity and Change between Generations,” which begins with her experiences working with the elders of the Kyowakai Society, the local organization that initiated the memorial project. What follows is material she collected from two women who were instrumental in the Centre’s founding and one man who added a different perspective. The women describe in detail how the Centre came about and how initial funding required outside (non-Japanese Canadian) consultants. They relate how the consultants created an initial exhibition that did not confront the injustice by the Canadian government. Instead, it focused on presenting a “balance” between the hardships experienced by those incarcerated and the “government’s reasons for interning Japanese Canadians” (169). This was not what the elders intended. Excerpts from the interviews describe how the Kyowakai Society turned the situation around and succeeded in creating a “collective space for people affected by the history of the internment” (228).

Although McAllister had previous experience conducting oral histories with Japanese Canadians, she felt “this conventional format [had] limitations” and viewed it as a constraint on her research (128). Her understanding of the “conventional oral history format” was as an interview that “orders the lives of the interviewee in a chronological narrative, following what are key phases of life,” and that “the narrative produced by this form of interviewing can value decisions that promote self-interest rather than the welfare of the group” (128). McAllister feared that a conventional format would not uncover the information she was looking for. Another perceived constraint was her informants’ agenda. The elders had “well-developed narratives” polished through...