Sunday, May 31th; 2pm PT/5pm ET

FREE// If you can, please support our memory activism collective by a tax-deductible donation to >> vanportmosaic.org/donate

As he was searching through photos at the National Archives in 1984, Pulitzer-Prize and Emmy-nominated photojournalist Paul Jr. Kitagaki found a photo taken by famed documentary photographer Dorothea Lange of his grandparents and father preparing to board a bus in Oakland, Calif., enroute to a World War II incarceration camp.

Moved by his personal family history Kitagaki developed "Gambatte! Legacy of an Enduring Spirit" to document and illuminate a dark episode in our country's history: the relocation and internment of more than 120,000 ethnic Japanese in 10 incarceration "camps" as a result of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 in 1942.

Through slow and painstaking research, Kitagaki has spent the last 15 years locating the families who lived through the internment camps, documenting their stories of survival and inner strength to overcome injustice, racism, and wartime hysteria.

Learn more at:
www.kitagakiphoto.com/

Paul will talk about this on-going memory activism project and will share photos and videos, part of his traveling exhibit and the newly-published and already sold-out book: Behind Barbed Wire.
After the presentation he will engage in conversation about the legacy of this history today with Andrew DeVigal/ University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication’s Agora Journalism Center Director.

Photo/Left: Seven-year-olds Helene Nakamoto Mihara and Mary Ann Yahiro were photographed by Lange as they recited the Pledge of Allegiance outside their elementary school in San Francisco in 1942. Both were sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah. Yahiro was separated from her mother, who died in another camp.

Photo/Right: Helene Nakamoto Mihara and Mary Ann Yahiro's portrait by Paul Kitagaki

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This event is part of the VIRTUAL VANPORT MOSAIC FESTIVAL - an online series of memory activism opportunities curated by Story Midwife Laura Lo Forti.