I’m doing research on the Japanese-American exclusion and incarceration and the history of immigrant labor in California. I’m the child of two former union stewards, and I have a deep commitment to working people and to community involvement.

My interests center on how ordinary Japanese-Americans had an impact on the Supreme Court’s decision to award more than $1 billion as redress to Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated during World War II.

I'm especially interested in Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, a woman who had been in Manzanar as a young woman and gave birth to her first child there. In the 1980s, she was able to unearth major documents and prove that the prosecution had lied to the Supreme Court during the war when it found the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese-Americans to be constitutional. I'm also interested in Fred Koematsu, a former draftsman, who was convicted for violating the exclusion orders during World War II. He was the first person in history to have a Supreme Court decision set aside, using documents found by, among others, Herzig-Yoshinaga.

Both of these individuals speak to my central concerns, demonstrating that “ordinary folks” can make a difference and hopefully inspire our students who tend to come from backgrounds similar to Herzig-Yoshinaga and Korematsu. Cal State Fullerton has a superb archive of materials on the World War II Japanese-American experience. We are privileged also to have Arthur Hansen, professor of history, who is one of the foremost scholars in this field.

I wanted to see if I could trace the effects of the Japanese American exclusion and incarceration upon a specific group of non-Japanese Americans, anthropologists who worked for the War Relocation Authority. These trained observers saw the result of a “relocation” and of government-decreed “forced assimilation” at close range. I wondered if they had talked about that experience, and if that affected their thinking about the “termination” carried out upon Native Americans by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Termination” was the bureaucratic description of govern- ment policies that recapitulated in many ways the government's actions affecting Japanese-Americans during World War II. Termination sought to alienate undigenous peoples from their lands, and to scatter them so widely that they could not survive as cultural groups.