Densho

This week is #CivicLearningWeek, an annual celebration dedicated to promoting civic education and its importance in preparing people for their roles as informed and engaged participants in our self-governing society. Civic education isn’t just about the past — it’s about understanding how history shapes our present and future. The incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII provides a critical lens for examining civil rights, government accountability, and the resilience of democracy. But the story doesn’t end with Executive Order 9066. Legal challenges, grassroots activism, and the redress movement remind us that civic engagement can drive meaningful change. Here are some key ways to bring this history into civic education this week and beyond: https://lnkd.in/gCQsddhd

Densho Education and Public Programs Manager Courtney W. began her career as a middle school English Language Arts teacher in the Rio Grande Valley and later taught English as a Second Language in San Antonio ISD. Through this classroom experience, she gained firsthand knowledge of the challenges many educators face when teaching marginalized — and often restricted or sanitized — histories like Japanese American WWII incarceration. Courtney reflects on the power of education to help students navigate moments of heightened fear and exclusion, and the importance of teaching an honest, accurate history of our country’s past in order to better understand our present: “For me, it’s really important to not just teach this episode of history in a vacuum, like oh, it just happened, and then we moved on.… It’s so important for students to see the intertwined histories — not just the oppression, but also the resistance and the solidarity and the coalition building, because those models are also an essential part of this ongoing story.”?

Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience’s new exhibit, Ten Thousand Things, will be on display starting TODAY, March 7th! From artifacts of everyday life to priceless family heirlooms, objects are time capsules for our memories.? Each item, however mundane, has the potential to become imbued with the stories of people, places, and events that hold special significance. Extending Shin Yu Pai’s award-winning Ten Thousand Things podcast show into physical space, the exhibition presents a curated collection of objects that inspired stories in the podcast, as well as new objects representing Asian American narratives not previously covered. Densho Archivist Micah Merryman served on the Community Advisory Committee, a group of community members gathered by the museum to provide ideas, feedback, and approval for all the elements that go into an exhibit. Micah shared, “Working as a group with varied perspectives, backgrounds, and ideas, we were able to help Shin Yu hone her vision and create the version of Ten Thousand Things on display at the Wing Luke right now. It was an honor and a privilege to work on the CAC with everyone and I am grateful I was able to serve as a representative of Densho!” Check out the exhibit >> https://lnkd.in/g6PUnSDZ?

Join Densho for a free professional development webinar for educators exploring how to teach about Japanese American incarceration during World War II in elementary settings. Learn from featured panelists Brian Niiya, Densho's Content Director, and Dr. Noreen Naseem Rodriguez, Assistant Professor at Michigan State University and co-author of Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms. Dr. Noreen Naseem Rodríguez engages critical race frameworks to explore how racial and cultural experiences impact the pedagogy and curricular enactment of Asian American and Latine pre- and in-service teachers. She also studies how educators teach so-called difficult histories to young learners through children’s literature and primary sources. Her current project examines the implementation of Asian American Studies in K-12 classrooms in California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, and Texas. ?? Date: April 2, 2025 ? Time: 3:30–4:30 PM PT | 6:30–7:30 PM ET? ?? Register here: https://lnkd.in/gJ4aNmUC

Join Densho and Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association for a Community Scanning Day on Saturday, March 30th to digitize your family’s cherished photos and artifacts from the pre-WWII and Exclusion periods. After BIJAEMA’s Commemoration of the 83rd Anniversary of the Day of Forced Removal event in the morning, Densho’s trained archives staff will be available on-site to scan portions of family collections. ?? Date: Sunday, March 30, 2025 ? Time: ~2:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. (begins immediately after Legacy Family Luncheon) ?? More info: https://lnkd.in/ggyFAbDp

Join Densho and the Localized History Project for a virtual workshop exploring the histories and stories of young Japanese Americans impacted by wartime incarceration. This professional development workshop for educators will share histories of schooling and resistance during Japanese American incarceration, the enduring legacies of this history in New York State, and how Densho utilizes oral histories to preserve, share and pass on this history. ?? Date: Monday, March 24, 2025 ? Time: 3:00–4:30 PM PT | 7:00–7:30 PM ET ?? Registration: https://lnkd.in/gCPRri3A?

Welcome Densho’s Staff Writer and Project Coordinator, Jennifer Noji (she/her)! Jennifer Noji is a Yonsei who was born in Norway, grew up in New Jersey, and currently lives in Los Angeles, California. As the granddaughter of Gila River and Minidoka concentration camp survivors, she has dedicated much of her academic, professional, and personal life to learning and teaching about the WWII incarceration and other historical injustices. Jennifer holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Communications from Rutgers University, an M.A. from UCLA, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her research explores how literature reckons with US legacies of racial and colonial violence, and she teaches undergraduate courses on forced incarceration, displacement, critical race theory, and human rights, among other topics. She has published articles on memory and political violence in various academic journals and volumes. In addition to her academic work, Jennifer has years of experience working in communications and fundraising, both with non-profits and community organizations. At Densho she works in strategic communications, helping with our development, marketing, and education work, and she manages the Digital Collection of Japanese American Incarceration Films project.

We reflect today on the signing of Executive Order 9066 in 1942, which led to the forced removal and incarceration of over 125,000 Japanese Americans. As we honor the memory of those who endured this injustice on this Day of Remembrance, we recognize that the work of preserving and sharing history has never been more urgent. At Densho, we believe that stewarding the past is essential work. Archives like ours are more than collections of the past. Archives are living tools for education, resistance, and truth-telling. They can also be dynamic forces that shape how history is remembered and understood in the present. The choices of whose stories are included or excluded in archives significantly influence collective memory, shaping not only our understanding of historical events but also our perceptions of identity and community. Memory is not something that exists on its own; it requires action. It only lives through the stories we tell, the archives we protect, the commemorations we hold, and the histories we choose to pass down. That belief is at the core of what we do at Densho. It is embedded in our organization’s name — den (伝), meaning to convey or transmit, combined with sho (承), to receive or inherit. Now more than ever, we must protect our shared memory. The histories we share are warnings, sources of hope, and lessons about what it means to be American. This history serves as a reminder of the consequences of injustice but also of the strength and resilience of those who endured and resisted. This legacy does not live in the past, it will be what drives us forward. History is shaped by what we choose to remember. https://lnkd.in/g3ACiHvD

Thank you so much to our friends at the Puyallup Valley JACL for hosting the Day of Remembrance 2025 at the Washington State Fairgrounds this past weekend. This event was a powerful reminder of the impact the incarceration experience has had on our families, our community, and our country. In addition to hearing from survivors, community members, and allies, this event was a special opportunity to view the permanent historic exhibit on the original confinement site, including the memorial wall that lists the names of over 7,500 people imprisoned on the fairgrounds when it was used as the Puyallup Assembly Center in 1942.?

Join us in welcoming Cameron Johnson, Technical Project Manager, to the Densho team! Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cameron Johnson received a B.A. in Rhetoric and Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley and then went to work in cultural heritage resource management with the National Park Service. It is in his position at the NPS’ Minidoka National Historic Site where he gained first hand experience with primary source materials of the Japanese American incarceration story. With a lifelong fascination with technology and history, Cameron is professionally trained as both an archivist and a tech specialist. Having been affiliated with Densho since 2017, he is in the latter stages of a PhD program in Sociocultural Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley where his research focuses on state-based constructions of race and identity through archival records. Specifically, the topic of his dissertation is centered around the vast amount of banned musical compositions aggregated by South Africa’s National Party during their regime of Apartheid. With a deep knowledge of information systems, music making as social practice, and a deep commitment to ethically grounded ethnographic research methodologies, he is now Densho’s Technical Project Manager, a role in which his seemingly disparate passions for technological infrastructure and cultural memory have found a perfect home.