WHY IS THERE YELLOW PAPER ON THE LIGHTS AND MEMORIALS.

Hello.
hi.
Were not gonna be talking about that title. You’ll get it later.

here’s me with my groups finished memorial and our timeline!
welcome back to another blog post! This one is in fact late, because I decided to procrastinate. This post is about our exhibition project, ology of apology. The goal of this project was to create a memorial that would help with the apology of past wrongs. We also did a lot of learning about different memorials, their design, the planning, and what goes into a memorial.

Now of course to build a memorial you must know what you are building a memorial for. We were split into random groups and tasked with building both a memorial and an individual component about the immigration, discrimination and apology. My group was focused on Japanese internment. By pure chance I was given the topic that I had a huge interest in a few years back, which gave me some extra knowledge. Despite my pre- existing knowledge about Japanese internment, I learned many new things. More about the initial timeline and the individual discrimination Japanese Canadians faced.

our memorial went through a lot of planning phases, but we evidently ended up with a design I think we were all satisfied with. The plan was to have the memorial be an accurate representation of that Hastings park would have looked like when thousands of Japanese Canadians were kept there. It would be placed underground with a glass part you could walk on, because we wanted it to represent Hastings park’s underground history. The only thing to acknowledge the Hastings park holding camp as of right now is a tiny plaque, and we wanted to make something bigger.

this project really let my crafty side show, but because I was so focused on getting everything done, I took barely any photos of the making of the memorial and only have a few photos of the actual exhibition.

for my individual component I decided to make a timeline of Japanese discrimination and internment, and I think it was very effective with conveying the devastating effects of Japanese internment. Around 90% of the people who came to our station didn’t know about the history of Hastings park. We were told “ oh I knew about Japanese internment but I didn’t know that they were also kept at the PNE”. I think we were effective in being able to create a plan for an effective memorial that would bring light to a lesser known history.

Though a lot was successful, I found myself stressing a lot throughout the building of the memorial. It was one of those projects which I take too much on and don’t accept help from others. I think that I could have let others help with the work, and it would have made it a lot easier to get things done.