During the 1940s, Canada displaced and dispossessed thousands of Japanese Canadians on racial grounds. They lost their homes, farms, and businesses, as well as personal, family, and communal possessions. This lesson plan uses the internment and dispossession of Japanese Canadians as a way to help students learn about the world by seeking answers to big questions about fairness, community, home and belonging.

In this series of lessons, students explore the impact of internment on the lives of Japanese Canadians through the lens of Japanese Canadian high school graduates. Students examine school yearbooks from 1941 through 1943, select a graduate to research, and then explore the impacts of forced removal, internment, loss of homes and businesses, resettlement, and expulsion.

This lesson illuminates some of the ways in which Japanese Canadians resisted systemic racism in the form of incarceration, internment, uprooting, loss of home and property, and numerous other injustices, during and after World War II. The lesson package provides background information to prepare teachers before discussing with students the Canadian government’s incarceration of Japanese Canadians.

Obaasan’s Boots explores the impact the experience has had on later generations and is full of social emotional learning as the children deal with the mysterious silences that surround their family’s past, the strong disagreements between family members, family separation, lost language, and the trauma they’ve inherited. This middle-grade novel is suitable for readers who are interested in learning more about Nikkei internment in North America, Canadian history and WWII, anti-Asian racism, intergenerational relationships, and family stories.

What compels immigrants to lay down their lives for an adopted country? This lesson introduces students to the concept of maltreatment and unequal rights, and provides them with an understanding of the importance of the franchise and the variety of factors that influenced first-generation Japanese Canadians, leading to more than 200 of them enlisting in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War I.

Full Moon Lagoon is a middle-grade novel by Monica Nawrocki, set on Cortes Island on British Columbia’s west coast . A rich narrative that intertwines elements of adventure, time travel, and historical significance sees the three young protagonists transported back in time and finding themselves responsible for warning a Japanese Canadian family about the challenges they will face after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.