Moving forward : the "save the Kogawa house" campaign and reconciliatory politics in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the symbolic implications of preserving Canadian author Joy Kogawa’s childhood home in the name of “reconciliation.” The house features prominently in Kogawa’s acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel Obasan, based in part on her experience of Japanese Canadian internment during World War II. From 2003 to 2006, the house was poised for demolition until a non-profit land trust secured the house’s protection through a campaign guided by ideals of “hope, healing, and reconciliation.” In the current global climate of redress, the oft-invoked terms “reconciliation” and “healing” are increasingly evacuated of meaning, and are consequently dismissed simply as empty rhetoric. I sought to determine how these terms operated in the context of the Kogawa House. In order to assess the site’s capacity to engage reconciliatory ideals, I consulted and analyzed fundraising materials published by campaign organizers, letters of support from the public, and relevant media reports. I argue first that the real-world history of internment converged conceptually with Obasan’s fictionalized telling of these events so that the house and Kogawa herself became cognitive metonyms for the larger injustice. As a result, collective/national healing and reconciliation could be metonymically enacted through more familiar modes of interpersonal reconciliation. For example, Kogawa’s long-awaited “homecoming,” a deeply meaningful moment for the author herself, could become a gesture of symbolic restitution for all Japanese Canadians’ lost property. The second argument central to this thesis is that the historically dark period of Japanese Canadian internment, and its legacies, was made more intelligible and coherent for various stakeholders through the overlapping narratives constructed around saving the Kogawa House. I contend that what was at stake in this heritage preservation project was not only post-war relations between Japanese Canadians and the nation that betrayed them, but also the dominant Canadian narrative of multiculturalism—that Canada is a country that embraces diversity and upholds human rights. This reconciliatory project maintained the coherence of this vital Canadian myth. I conclude by claiming the Kogawa House as a successful model for community-based projects aimed at sustainable reconciliation, where ongoing engagement with past injustices is vital to deterrence and non-repetition of future ones.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".