Review: Rhonda L. Hinther and Jim Mochoruk, eds. Civilian Internment in Canada: Histories and Legacies

Prisoners of war are interned.So are refugees by many countries.These same countries may even intern their own citizens.Canada during World War I and II did all three.The most notorious of these events in our country was perhaps the internment and forced relocation of Japanese Canadians from 1942 to 1945.That story is covered in four essays: an overview in chapter 9 by Aya Fujiwara, a deconstructionist essay about Japanese Canadian "quietism" by Mikhail Bjorge in chapter 10, a personal account in chapter 11 by Grace Eiko Thomson, and a consideration of that internment as a human rights violation -which it certainly was -in chapter 20 by Art Miki whose grandparents came to Canada at the end of the nineteenth century and whose parents were born in Canada.Art Miki was removed from kindergarten and, with his parents and grandparents, transported from B.C. to Manitoba to work as "forced laborers" on a sugar beet farm.As with all internments, the story does not end with their release from incarceration.It took three more years after WWII to get the voting rights of Japanese Canadians restored and another year to lift all restrictions allowing them freedom of movement in Canada.That did not help the 4,000 members of the community that had been sent back to Japan after the war.It took four more decades for the Government of Canada on 22 September 1988 to apologize for that gross miscarriage of justice and to agree to individual redress of $21,000 for each of the 60,000 members of the community whose rights had been so egregiously violated.This exercise in token compensation was $1,000 more than the Reagan government a month earlier had awarded the Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated in that country, a symbolic admission that the Canadian mistreatment of its own citizens was even more severe than the American one.The process took place accompanied by the increased political consciousness of the Japanese Canadian community and overcoming of a Japanese cultural propensity to ritually insist on "shikataga nai," "it can't be helped.They proved to their own community, and to all other Canadians, especially others who had suffered much longer and much worse, indigenous peoples, that such calamities can be helped.Errors of the past can be admitted, given both formal and material recognition and memorialized for the education of future Canadians.Japanese Canadians were not the only Canadian citizens interned.Serbian Canadians were interned during WWI (chapter 7).So were Canadian Ukrainians in both wars.In chapter 4, Kasandra Luciuk offers a revisionist narrative of how the community

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